Follow along on an Antarctic Adventure

We are officially in the thick of our sampling! The Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project began sampling along the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) over three decades ago. Since then, scientists have come back year after year to sample at the same locations to track how the ecosystem is responding to climate change – the polar ecosystems are among the most rapidly changing on Earth.

The grid, as it’s called, is comprised of parallel lines, 100 km apart (~62 miles) extending from the coast to offshore, each line about 200 km (~124 miles) long. Along each grid line we have two types of station. One is an underway station where we collect just surface seawater using the underway seawater system on the ship which pumps seawater through a series of pipes into a couple of sinks in the labs.

The other is a CTD station where we collect seawater samples from the surface of the ocean all the way down to the bottom using what’s called a CTD rosette.

The CTD rosette is made up of a carousel of bottles with some sensors attached. It gets lowered into the ocean using a winch with a very long cable. Before sending the package down, we open all the bottles at the top and bottom so that as it moves down through the water the bottles get rinsed out with seawater. While the CTD rosette makes its way down to the bottom of the ocean, the sensors are sending data back to a computer lab on the ship where we gather to decide what depths we want to collect water from. This data includes salinity (how salty the water is), temperature, dissolved oxygen, and fluorescence (how much chlorophyll is in the water).

Once we have decided on the depths and the CTD rosette has reached the bottom, we slowly bring it back up, pausing at each depth to close bottles, trapping the seawater inside. Once the CTD rosette is back on deck, it’s go-time for the scientists! We wait with our sampling supplies in hand as the CTD rosette rolls from the ship deck into a semi-enclosed bay where we do the sampling.

The team I’m working with collects samples to measure seven different parameters, some that we collect as “whole water”, which means right off the bottle, some that we collect as filtered water, which means we remove any particulate material, and some that we collect as whole water off the bottle then bring into our shipboard lab where we filter it and save what gets caught by the filter. The entire process from when the CTD rosette gets wheeled into the sampling bay to when the last sample is done filtering is typically about two and a half hours.

Water samples in a lab aboard the ship.

Since we are a team of four, we split into two shifts, noon to midnight and midnight to noon. So far, I’ve been on the noon to midnight shift, but we will be swapping shifts soon. Other than when the meals are served, it doesn’t really matter when you’re awake down here since it’s close to 24-hours of daylight!

Until the next watch,

Lydia

It’s been a busy week; I have so much to update you on! From where we left off –

We exited the Strait of Magellan on January 11 and made our way south along the coast of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, towards the Drake Passage. It was very calm in the Strait, but the seas picked up as soon as we entered the Atlantic Ocean. When crossing the Drake, you hope to have what people call “the Drake Lake”, which means calm seas. However, the Drake is well known for tough crossings with high winds and big swells – that crossing is called “the Drake Shake”. The first day of our crossing was closer to a Drake Shake I’d say. We had winds over 40 knots (1 knots = 1 nautical mile per hour) and the swells were up to 15 feet. Luckily, my sea sickness medicine kept me feeling okay during this bad weather, so I was able to look out the port holes and see the waves crashing over the back deck. During bad weather like this, the captain secures the decks which means we aren’t allowed to go outside. Lucky for us, the bad weather only lasted a little more than 24 hours and we had calmer seas for the rest of our crossing.

During the crossing we were deploying instruments called XBTs, or Expendable Bathythermographs. To deploy these, we load a tube with the instrument inside into the launcher and then drop the instrument overboard. It’s got a long copper wire which transmits the temperature back to the computer. The depth of each temperature measurement is calculated based on how fast we know the instrument falls through the water. We deployed an XBT each hour through the Drake (as weather permitted) with two scientists taking a 6-hour shift. You can see a photo of me on the back deck holding the launcher while the XBT falls through the water and my lab mate, Danny, watching the temperature plot on the computer screen.

Finally, early on the 15^th, four days after leaving the Strait of Magellan, we arrived at the U.S. Research Base, Palmer Station. The Noosfera, a Ukrainian research vessel, was docked at the station, so we stayed offshore and used small boats to transport some people and supplies to and from station.

We also used this time as an opportunity to do some safety training on small boat operations. There will be some science happening from small boats, so we all learned what supplies to bring with us, how to go down the ladder to the small boat, and how to get back up! We took a boat ride around the area and got to see several humpback whales, a penguin colony, and icebergs which was so cool. After all the transfers were complete, we headed off to our first official station to collect water samples.

More next time on how we collect seawater samples and what we do with them after that!

Until the next watch,

Lydia

Greetings from Punta Arenas, Chile!

My travels began almost a week ago, on Saturday January 3 out of Tallahassee. It was a long journey to Chile involving a four and a half hour delay in the Atlanta airport, and rogue luggage that went through Miami to Santiago, rather than on the plane with me from Atlanta to Santiago.

Finally after about 36 hours of travel I made it to Punta Arenas, on the southern tip of Chile. Although it was 11:30pm when we stumbled out of the airport, it was still twilight because of how far south we are here. This time of year, summer in the southern hemisphere, the sun rises around 5:30am and sets around 10pm – that’s 16 and a half hours of sunlight! It’s convenient for all the work we’ve been doing loading science gear onto our ship, but it has totally messed with my internal clock.

Mobilization began on January 5 which included loading all the science gear on the ship. They have lab spaces for us which include benches, drawers, cabinets, fume hoods (for working with solvents or acids), and chemical storage, but we bring all of our science supplies. We’ll load the last bit of cargo on the ship tonight and then head out through the Strait of Magellan early tomorrow morning. This strait is an important passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans; however, it is very difficult to navigate because it can be quite narrow in spots and there are often high winds and fast currents. We will have a pilot coming onboard tonight who will safely navigate us through the passage, then he will get off the ship before we head south towards Antarctica.

In addition to setting up the labs, we are also having meetings about safety. We all need to know how to respond in the event of an emergency. On the ship we have an alarm. The pattern of the alarm alerts us as to what the emergency is. If it’s three short blasts that means there is a fire or piracy (though we aren’t too concerned about piracy in this part of the world). If it’s seven short blasts followed by a long blast that means man overboard. If it’s one long blast it means abandon ship.

We are also each assigned a life jacket and a survival suit which we may need depending on the emergency. Although going through the safety training is serious because there are real dangers here, it is always fun when everyone is trying on the survival suits. They will keep us warm and floating in the water but are cumbersome on land! We are also assigned extreme cold weather gear from the US Antarctic Program, which includes boots, lots of different types of gloves, hats, and various pants and jackets that we may want for operations out on the deck. Although it is summer down here it is still cold!

While I’m at sea I’ll be posting as often as I can about the science conducted on the ship as well as what it’s like to live on board.

If you have any specific questions, contact me at babcock-adams@magnet.fsu.edu and I will respond as I can. We have internet on the ship, but it is limited (and the farther south we go the spottier the coverage may be).

Until next time,

Lydia