January 27, 2006
Yesterday and today were long tiring days. Yesterday, after working on data for a good part of the day, we took the Zodiac out to collect some surface water and some of the sea foam that has been everywhere around here. The foam is 4 or 5 inches thick in places and it was easy to collect with a Ziploc bag skimmed across the surface. I got a little surface water along with it. It turns out that this foam water is highly enriched in DMS. You could even smell the DMS as we cruised through little foam patches. This is certainly interesting for our project. The foam probably comes from mucous secreted by the phytoplankton. The waves whip the water up enough to generate foam – its kind of like whipping cream or egg whites.
On our boat trip we took an excursion toward Loudwater Cove, and area none of us had been to before. On our way we saw a group of cormorants called Blue-Eyed Shags on a small rocky island. It looked like some of them were juveniles. We also came across a group of elephant seals on a gravel beach and two of them were sparing with each other. Some of the others were just laying in the water with barely their eyes out of the water. One thing about elephant seals is that they notice us humans and they will keep an eye on you as you go by. The crabeater seals seem to ignore us.
There is a massive glacier surrounding Loudwater cove and it looked really nice. It was cloudy and foggy so we couldn’t see all of it, but I got an interesting photo of the glacier disappearing into the fog.
Today (Friday) was a regular sampling day. It was cloudy, as it has been every day for over a week now. But the winds were light so it was not too bad out there. We saw several groups of Gentoo penguins and some Adelies swimming around. The Gentoo’s come to the surface and often let out a loud honking sound, and then they immediately dive. The Adelies are usually quiet. One of the other Zodiacs that was out the same time as us, reported on the radio that a penguin jumped in their boat. This happened to me last year when I was in the Ross Sea on the other side of Antarctica. It’s the funniest thing. Apparently the penguin today managed to get out of the boat all by himself.
The sampling went smooth but it always seems that George and Maria get their feet wet when they hang their legs over the side to attach and remove the Go-Flo bottles. That makes it cold work. We were all glad to get back to the station. We have been working at a heavy pace so we are all tired. Once we get back to shore we have anywhere from 4 to 8 hours of work to do processing the samples. But we got an interesting result today. The DMS concentrations at both our sampling stations has increased a lot. At Station E it doubled from just three days ago, and that was already high! This is very interesting to us!
