Pictures of elephant seals on Avian - these were probably easily 1,000-1,500 pound seals... crazy!
Friday, January 23, 2009
Elephant Seals
Pictures of elephant seals on Avian - these were probably easily 1,000-1,500 pound seals... crazy!
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Been a while
Greets all - so it's been quite some time since I last wrote anything. Things here on board the LMG have been quite busy, with work and all that. There is a bunch of stuff going on. Actually, we've been mentioned in the news quite a bit in the past few days... check out the threads here.http://voices.washingtonpost.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/
http://pal.lternet.edu/
Things on my end have been quite hectic, but livable. It's just been kind of busy, but that's kind of what I expected. Let's see - where did I leave off... it was pretty early on in the cruise when I sent my last email, so I'll try and update everything all at once.
We dropped our bird people off at Avian island, an Antarctic Conservation Act protected island earlier last week - they will be staying there for 5 days on their own doing a "penguin and other bird census." However, this year, I was able to get onto the island, as the "shack" that they live in during their time away from the ship was in a state of disrepair. All of us (Raytheon folks) got off the boat and took a zodiac in and a bunch of supplies to repair the shack. As you may recall, Avian island was something that I really complained a lot about last year (the smell!). It is a penguin rookery - mostly Adelie penguins live there and hatch their young, so literally thousands upon thousands of penguins... and the net result is you have thousands and thousands of penguins relieving themselves everywhere. The smell is a bit overwhelming, but we had work to do. As we were cruising in, there were several elephant seals (MASSIVE!!!) there and we ended up seeing 2 leopard seals just hanging out - it must be like some kind of all you can eat buffet for the leopard seals! The picture is of me standing in front of one of the many nesting sites on the island. We spent a lot of time working on the shack and getting it ready, so that was pretty cool. After we finished all of our work, we took a small, quick tour of the immediate surroundings of the shack - very cool - I'll send additional pictures at a later time. After the work at Avian, we shuttled some folks around the island and took them on a quick tour around. I ended up getting to drive my first zodiac at that time - yeah, doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's kind of cool to be running around with a 40 HP motor in a inflatable boat in Antarctica. I ended up getting back to the ship around 8:00 PM that night and when I finally got off shift at midnight, I was totally spent (we started our day at 7:15 AM).
Shortly after leaving Avian, we ended up back on the normal LTER schedule, which makes it feel like groundhog day - every day the same :) However, we have been really lucky this year with some of the krill swarms everywhere - we have literally been treated to humpback whale central. There have been pods upon pods of humpback whales in a feeding frenzy that have been simply surrounding the Gould. We have spent several hours sitting still watching the whales just have a blast eating all the krill they can. We've seen some of them fluke (tails in the air), slap (fins slapping the water), spy hop (coming vertically out of the water), and all sorts of other acrobatics. It's been really cool - I'll get some pictures of the humpbacks out later on.
Not really a whole lot of news otherwise - just busy with work and the normal. Oh - before I forget! I'll be staying at Palmer Station at the end of this cruise! Actually, it's a lot stranger than it seems. With all of the cruise schedules being messed up, they had overbooked the Gould and needed just one extra spot on board for the next trip. Since I'm doing both trips, it just made a lot of sense for me to stay at Palmer Station for the interim and just wait to be picked up by the short boat when it came back down. Really cool for me. I'll be at Palmer for 17 days at the end of this trip - 2 Feb - 19 Feb, which is fine by me! It's just a different atmosphere without the boat being there. Okay - I need to get out of here - drop me a line whenever!
VS
Jan 11 . LTER
Okay - so for those of you who are wondering - I am still alive. Kind of :) Since leaving the house, things have been totally crazy - I left home on Dec. 26th for Punta Arenas, Chile, as usual, but had a LOT of fun in between airports - my flight out of Indianapolis was delayed to Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX, which meant that I missed my flight to Santiago, which entailed me staying overnight in a hotel in Dallas, TX. There was an interesting night :) And by interesting, I mean absolutely not worth mentioning :) Anyhow, I eventually made it down to the ship on the 28th of Dec, which was really great considering we were sailing on the 30th! I basically worked 16 hour days for the 2 days remaining in port trying to get everything done that I needed to, and shortly thereafter went into a "special" shift - I slept 3 hours, then worked for 12, repeat process for 3 days. Eventually, I crashed and slept pretty hard :) There was just a lot of equipment coming on board and a lot of set up and a whole brand new group of scientists - most of whom had not been down to the Antarctic before, and for those that had, they hadn't been down for over 20 years! At this point, 12 days into the cruise, everything is finally set up and working properly :)
So what's happened since we left port? Well, 4 days after leaving PA on the 30th of Dec, we arrived at Palmer Station - as usual. We spent 2 nights there and had a blast, drinking at their bar and having a good time. I played life guard this year - becoming one of the EMT's on board makes me feel a bit more responsible, so I sat there and watched the "new" folk go running out and jumping into the ocean, then come dashing back into the hot tub at Palmer. It was fun when I did that last year, but seeing it second hand makes you appreciate warm clothes a lot more.... and being dry.
This cruise is again, LTER - Long Term Ecological Research project - the same cruise that I did last year, which is kind of cool, though most of the people are new. We'll be in the same area as last year and doing the same science, which is a big deal for them - a lot of CTD's, retrieving the moorings that we deployed last year (round 500 meters of line with all sorts of instruments attached to them - mostly for recording temperature and conductivity - the salt content of the ocean), downloading the data, refurbishing all the instruments and re-deploying the moorings, a lot of net tows to catch krill, and there is a birder aspect of this cruise as well (3 people getting dropped off at Avian Island - a protected penguin rookery - that sounds like the intro to some reality TV show... 3 People getting dropped off to collect penguin poop - which one will win?). All in all, a very full cruise. And one that has been keeping me incredibly crazily busy as of late; hence the huge delay in me writing my "normal" emails to all.
What have we done up to this point? Well, we've done a lot of CTD's as usual, recovered one mooring and refurbished it and redeployed it, we've caught a lot of krill and assorted biological goodies, deployed all sorts of other equipment over the back and have lots of other stuff planned. They've added a good bit of equipment this year, so we have some gliders which are really cool - when they're deployed, they are pretty autonomous - we simply program them (by we, I mean the folks from Rutgers), and a bunch of other fancy gadgets - I'll get some more info on that stuff in a later email.
The picture is of me...in a box, obviously :) Like all good things, this one didn't last, as my coworkers decided that it was a lot more fun to tip said box over with me in it, then roll over me. The box didn't make it... I did (Note the Ravens hat though).
Okay - this is a quick and dirty email, but one that I thought should be sent so everyone did believe that I was still alive and kind of well :) Oh, by the by - temperature here today is 4.8° C outside - nice and balmy actually - it's approx. 45-50° F :) Actually quite warm.
Enjoy!
VS
So what's happened since we left port? Well, 4 days after leaving PA on the 30th of Dec, we arrived at Palmer Station - as usual. We spent 2 nights there and had a blast, drinking at their bar and having a good time. I played life guard this year - becoming one of the EMT's on board makes me feel a bit more responsible, so I sat there and watched the "new" folk go running out and jumping into the ocean, then come dashing back into the hot tub at Palmer. It was fun when I did that last year, but seeing it second hand makes you appreciate warm clothes a lot more.... and being dry.
This cruise is again, LTER - Long Term Ecological Research project - the same cruise that I did last year, which is kind of cool, though most of the people are new. We'll be in the same area as last year and doing the same science, which is a big deal for them - a lot of CTD's, retrieving the moorings that we deployed last year (round 500 meters of line with all sorts of instruments attached to them - mostly for recording temperature and conductivity - the salt content of the ocean), downloading the data, refurbishing all the instruments and re-deploying the moorings, a lot of net tows to catch krill, and there is a birder aspect of this cruise as well (3 people getting dropped off at Avian Island - a protected penguin rookery - that sounds like the intro to some reality TV show... 3 People getting dropped off to collect penguin poop - which one will win?). All in all, a very full cruise. And one that has been keeping me incredibly crazily busy as of late; hence the huge delay in me writing my "normal" emails to all.
What have we done up to this point? Well, we've done a lot of CTD's as usual, recovered one mooring and refurbished it and redeployed it, we've caught a lot of krill and assorted biological goodies, deployed all sorts of other equipment over the back and have lots of other stuff planned. They've added a good bit of equipment this year, so we have some gliders which are really cool - when they're deployed, they are pretty autonomous - we simply program them (by we, I mean the folks from Rutgers), and a bunch of other fancy gadgets - I'll get some more info on that stuff in a later email.
The picture is of me...in a box, obviously :) Like all good things, this one didn't last, as my coworkers decided that it was a lot more fun to tip said box over with me in it, then roll over me. The box didn't make it... I did (Note the Ravens hat though).
Okay - this is a quick and dirty email, but one that I thought should be sent so everyone did believe that I was still alive and kind of well :) Oh, by the by - temperature here today is 4.8° C outside - nice and balmy actually - it's approx. 45-50° F :) Actually quite warm.
Enjoy!
VS
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