February 4, 2006-Goodbye Palmer Station
I did not make a log entry yesterday because I was too busy getting ready tying things up in the lab and office. This will probably be my last entry from Palmer Station. I will continue to write my log during the journey home, but due to lack of internet access on the ship, I probably will not be able to post those entries to the web site until after I return to Mobile.
We have been busy trying to get through the big back-log of samples that have accumulated over the month. Thanks to the hard work of everyone, it looks like we will get to run them all on the gas chromatograph before we leave. The gas chromatograph, or GC as we call it, is the instrument we use to measure DMS. The one we are working with here comes from my lab on Dauphin Island. It was shipped from my lap in mid September and won’t leave Palmer Station until mid March. Luckily I have two other such instruments back home. One of those just recently returned from Antarctica also- it was on a cruise to the Ross Sea that my students and post-doc participated in. These instruments sure get around.
Yesterday, at around 5 pm, our ride home arrived here at Palmer Station. The Laurence M. Gould (LMG for short) finished her month-long cruise along the Peninsula south of here. This was part of the big Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project that is centered at Palmer Station. They sample regularly around Palmer Station throughout the summer, but once a year they do a 1-month cruise to cover a bigger area out offshore. I know several of the microbial ecologists who were on the cruise so it was good to see them and all the other folks on the cruise who I got to during our trip here from Punta Arenas.
Today (Saturday) was as very busy day for all the ship’s deck-hands and Palmer Station support staff. They had to transfer a great deal of cargo off the ship to the Station and then move different cargo from the Station to the ship. A lot of this is done in military cargo vans (containers) such as you see on the dock here. These vans are lifted by the ship’s crane and placed all over the ship, from the hold to the upper decks. They are then secured to the deck with big chains. In fact, I stayed in a berthing van in the hold of the ship on the way down here from Punta Arenas. There are two berthing vans which hold a total of 9 people. It’s not the best of accommodations, but it was okay.
Our project here at Palmer Station is not finished. Although George, Kerry, Ray and I will leave on the ship tomorrow, Maria will stay behind and continue to sample on a limited scale. She will have some help from a fellow named Austen who has been working on another project here. When the ship comes back to Palmer Station in two weeks, it will bring two more people to work on our project. This will be Rafel Simo from Barcelona Spain, and Aimee Neely, a graduate student from the University of Charleston. They will continue to sample until early March. At that time they will pack everything up and our season at Palmer will end. We will then begin the long process of analyzing the results of our seasonal study of DMS at Palmer Station. What a fantastic place to do this research. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work here.
Although it will be sad to leave Palmer Station, I look forward very much to getting back home and being with my family again. It is hard to be away from them for so long. I miss them all very much.
