Unfortunately, I will no longer be able to access the internet to update the travelogue, so I will be updating through a friend. We have email capabilities through satellite, though it is rather limited since the satellites only see the Antarctic region infrequently. The limit is down in the kilobyte range which will severely limit my picture posting abilities. Nonetheless, I will try to select a few of the most relevant and engaging pictures, reduce their resolution and send them through email to be posted. Fortunately, at some point during the voyage, most events will become repetitive, so the pictures reduction comes with little bearing.
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| Leaving McMurdo |
We shoved off from McMurdo and got underweigh on a beautiful sunny Antarctic day following a blustery stormy day that renewed the snow pack. As we steamed away from the ice pier breaking through large chunks of loose sea ice floating in our path, our magnificent view of McMurdo station situated between the mountains in freshly fallen snow was augmented with occasional orca fins breaking the water's smooth as glass surface while lounging seals lay on nearby pieces. I am nearly in disbelief that I was really present in that almost magical scene. Ever since I've been here, I find myself constantly looking through my pictures in my camera almost to convince myself that it really happened. The orcas were too unpredictable and so quick that I was disappointedly unable to snap a good picture of one that I could share here.
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| Lazy Seal |
From McMurdo, we then proceeded on a two day journey to our first station. This was no leisure time however, as we still had plenty of work and preparations to do. We of course had to attend several safety meetings of different topics covering such unthinkable topics as abandoning ship, man overboard, fire, or just general safety procedures while deploying our instruments as well as informational meetings telling us what we generally needed to know such as meal times, hallway etiquette, and such. During the first safety meeting, we each had to bring our in room life jackets and what they call an immersion suit out for inspection. The immersion suit is a full body thick neoprene suit that is supposedly going to keep you alive something like ten minutes more than you would otherwise survive in the -2 degree Celsius waters. We each had to put on our respective immersion suits to make sure they were in working order. These suits make one look appreciably like the claymation character Gumby, only orange like Gumby's enemies of the series; so some naturally call them "Gumby suits". We then each climbed into the fully enclosed lifeboats to see how to get there, where to position yourself once there, and how to strap yourself in. Some of the general safety issues for the boat include, securing down everything that needs to be, making sure to wear steel toe boots and a float coat (heavy work parka with flotation materials built in) whenever outside on the main deck (this includes the Baltic room when the door is open), and wearing a hard hat whenever on the deck and something is going on overhead (i.e. winch deployment of instruments).
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| Me in a Gumby suit |
There are 4 physical oceanography (PO) graduate students from different schools around the country on board to get oceanographic work experience, and to help out with some of the basic work. There's myself from Texas A&M, Eric from Florida State, Jessie from the University of Washington, and Sam from Scripps Oceanographic Institute of the University of California at San Diego. The boat will operate in 12 hour shifts around the clock so that the expense of the boat (something like $100,000 a day) is maximized. Jessie and myself are on the nightwatch, midnight to noon, while Eric and Sam are on the day watch, noon to midnight. The co-chief scientist Alejandro "Alex" Orsi from Texas A&M is also on the midnight watch, which partly dictated my being on the nightwatch. There are 4 meals a day on board; 4 to accommodate those on the night watch, 7:30-8:30 breakfast, 11:30 to 12:30 lunch, 5:30 to 6:30 dinner, and 11:30 pm to 12:30 am for midnight rations. The food is excellent and is prepared by a Chilean kitchen crew who really know what they are doing. So far we've had excellent selections of fresh vegetables, but those should run out before the end of the cruise, so I am trying to get my fill of veggies.
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| Captain, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Mates |
In addition to all of the safety meetings, we (the PO students) had to basically learn what we were to be doing during the research cruise and go over our steps. Ultimately we will be manning the CTD station (Conductivity Temperature Depth measures Salinity & Temperature vs Depth to identify the structure of the water column; see Intro post) and assisting in sampling the water brought aboard in the bottles. I will give a more specific description in a future post about the specifics of our job on board. But for the two days of transit, we prepared the CTD rosette by making sure all of the o-rings were replaced on the bottles to be sure they would hold the water from the correct depths and not leak or mix with a different water depth and making ready everything to do with the rosette all while going over the procedures for deployment, recovery, and sampling of the rosette. We stopped for a few hours during the transit and made a test cast to make sure everything was working alright. After a few minor adjustments, we were ready to go and continued to head towards our first real station at Cape Adare at the western entry to the Ross Sea.
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| Pushing through the ice |
