January 6, 2006 - Glacier View

 I spent last night on the ship, but moved off after breakfast.   I had to attend a general lab meeting at 10 am and after that I spent the rest of the day meeting with other workers in our Biocomplexity group trying to sort out our sampling strategies for the coming days.  This is not easy because I am coming into a situation where people have already been sampling for nearly three months, but now we may need to change the way we do some things.  We are making progress and tomorrow we will run some tests on water samples we collect near the station. Then on Sunday we will go out in the zodiac to do some more testing at our regular sampling stations.  
 
Today is the last day that the Lawrence M. Gould (the ship) will be here at the station until Feb 3.  It is going out for a cruise to the south of us. It will be out about a month.  To celebrate, the Station Cooks had a barbecue dinner, with both the ship and station people invited. It was great.  I have to say that the food here at the station has been fantastic so far.  They really do a great job.  
 
After dinner Maria and I took a walk along the rocks to look at the water and the glacier.  The glacier dominates the view and the attached photo is essentially what I see from my bedroom.  It is really nice!   And we still haven't seen what it looks like behind the glacier because it has been too foggy. One day soon we will walk up the glacier.  
 
I also attached a photo of the building where I am staying. It is called GWR (Garage, Warehouse & Recreation) building.  The dorm area is on the second floor and my room is on the far left corner.  The far right corner is the bar and lounge.  On the lower floor is the garage and the generator that produces the electricity for the station.  There is a series of wooden stair ways that lead from the BIO building up the hill to GWR.  
 
Further up from GWR is a new building they call TERRA.  It houses all sorts of computer equipment, including a seismic station that measures earthquake activity.  This station picked up the recent large earthquake that happened in the Sandwich Islands not too far from here.  The TERRA building also houses the computer that captures satellite images from the TERRA Satellite, and these show ice distribution in the area as well as chlorophyll in the water.  There is also a sophisticated air sampling devise that is monitoring radioactive elements in the air as a means of checking whether any nuclear bombs have been exploded any where on Earth.  This is part of a global network of sampling stations that enforces the nuclear test ban treaty and it is run buy the United Nations. They would be able to tell within three days whether any nuclear weapons were exploded anywhere on Earth, and they could tell where it happened with the information from the seismic recorder.    I took a picture looking down on Palmer Station from the TERRA building and it gives a great view of the Station, the L. M Gould at her dock and the icebergs right off the station.