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So, what do we do on board? As microbial ecologists our sampling requires that we get water. The normal way to do this is with a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth) rosette that also holds water sampling bottles.
We made a trip farther north to King George Island. This is about 200 miles north of Palmer Station and is home to many research bases. There are Argentinian, Chinese, Polish, Brazilian, Russian, S. Korean, and Chilean bases there (I think there are others too). We spent most of our stop in sight of the Chilean Base Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva. It was opened in 1969 and has an average population of about 80 people. Because of all the bases that are here, there is also a large airstrip.
The initial plan when we left port was that the first 10 days after we arrived in the Palmer Deep area would be spent installing two high frequency radar stations during the day, and looking for krill at night. This worked great for about 2 and half days… then the ice closed in and made it impossible to use the small boats (zodiacs and what we call the “landing craft” or what others call the “tin can.”)
One of the projects on board is interested in looking at the development of the ice algae community as the spring season progresses and in ice of different ages. Our project is also interested in the microbial communities that you find in ice samples. In a nutshell, if you look on the underside of sea ice it often appears to be brown. We see this as the ship breaks through ice and the ice is turned over.
Last Saturday, in a gesture of international relations and good will, the station leader at the UK’s Rothera Station invited us to dinner and to tour the facility. Of course, we accepted and 17 of us went over while an equal number of British scientists and staff came out to visit our ship. I think we got the better deal – we were fed a great meal, got to buy Rothera swag in their store, and visit other essential parts of the station. Rothera is the largest British Antarctic research station
After the installation of the radar station at the Wauermans Islands we headed in to Palmer Station the next morning. Palmer is one of three permanent US research stations in the Antarctic. It is the smallest of the three with a capacity below 40 people. There are two main buildings for scientists at Palmer Station – the Bio building where the labs are, the dining hall, and many of the dorm rooms.
We left Punta Arenas, Chile on November 2 and have now crossed the Drake Passage and have started working in an area known as the Palmer Deep (near Palmer Station, one of the permanent US research bases in Antarctica). As usual, the port call when we set up our equipment and supplies, was pretty frantic. We were able to set up our two primary lab spaces.
We crossed the Drake Passage in pretty good shape. This unique place in the oceans is often thought of as the roughest seas in the world. Here the entire southern ocean is squeezed between the tip of South American and the Antarctic Peninsula and it's known for the formation of very large storms. It’s always a roll of the dice when you come across – the first trips I did we had what we called the “Drake Lake” where it was so calm you could have water skied.
So what’s a day like onboard the ship? For us, it’s always a working day. We collect our first sample with a CTD profile at 5 am, so that means I am up at 4:30. The seawater is usually onboard by 5:45 am. We scramble to collect water from the correct bottles for the depths we want, and then it’s off to process. There are samples/ data to be collected from each water sample which requires a lot of filtering water.
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