February 2, 2006
Today is my son Dylan’s twelfth birthday, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY DYLAN!
Today was Thursday and I did my last sampling from the Zodiac. I leave Palmer Station early on Sunday. For the rest of my time here I will be running samples and packing my things. The lab will keep operating with Maria running the show for a while. The ship Laurence M. Gould is scheduled to arrive at the Station on Friday evening. Saturday will be spent transferring cargo to and from the ship and I will move on to the ship that day. The ship will sail for Punta Arenas on Sunday morning. It will take us four days (if all goes well) to get to Punta Arenas.
It was nice and calm for sampling today, although the sky was gray in the morning. There were lots of beautiful icebergs around. In fact, two big bergs were sitting right on our Station B! It’s a good thing we only planned to sample Station E today. At Station E the view was nice and we met up with the two other boats that regularly sample there – the LTER Microbe Group and Phytoplankton Group. Ray was helping out on the Microbe boat.
I can’t say enough about icebergs. There is an endless variety of shapes, sizes, textures and even colors in icebergs that you simply never get tired of looking at them. Throw in the variations in light and clouds and they become even more interesting. I hope everyone gets a chance to see some at some point.
We collected some more foam today – in fact we collected it very close to some of those icebergs. I got a nice picture of Maria holding up the Ziploc bag of foam. That foam was just loaded with DMS and you could smell the DMS as we entered the foam patch. The foam is hard to work with – kind of like soap suds – if you try to touch it, it goes poof. In addition to the bubbles the sea foam it is all stringy and sticky with snotty organic matter. There are some phytoplankton cells in there but it is hard to see them.
I mentioned the other day that after our jump off the dock we went into the hot tub. Cara Sucher, the Lab Manager here took a nice picture of all us jumpers in the tub. Not bad for Antarctica, eh? That was my first time in the hot tub, and it sure was nice.
The other night, Ray and I hiked up to the top of the glacier behind the station. I had gone about half way up before, and over to another point of land, but this time we hiked all the way to the top. It was late evening and the sun had just gone down. Still, there was plenty of light for us and the views were great. You can see the mountains really well from up there. The glacier is fascinating too. There are all sorts of cracks in it and some of these get quite large. The larger ones are called crevasses. You have to be careful around those – you don’t want to fall in! If you did fall in, they actually have a Glacier Search and Rescue squad here at the station. They did a drill last week where someone went down in one of the larger crevasses and they hauled them out on a stretcher. It is good to know that they have training just in case anything bad happens. All the people who work at this Station are amazing – they each have many skills and talents.
