May 9 2008
May 9 2008
Geologist Matt Minifie packing up the rock samples to send back to Cardiff University (photo by Dann Blackwood).
Tina van de Flierdt and Taryn Noble weigh one of the wooden boxes full of fossil corals.
Fluke of the southern right whale that swam along side the ship today.
The large, wide back of the southern right whale that befriended the Nathaniel B Palmer!
Today is the last day of work for the geophysicists doing their surveying and dredging and tonight we will head off to our next coral sampling site around Elephant Island. Everybody in the coral team is really excited about the upcoming work and the prospect of seeing the island. We kept ourselves busy over the past two weeks with writing papers and doing a twister competition, but once you are out at sea you really want to collect samples. This is what will hopefully happen from tomorrow onwards. Taryn Noble and I spent most of today getting the laboratory organized for new samples: packing away the samples we collected earlier on during the cruise in nice boxes, which the marine technicians made for us, labeling them, etc. Normally a quite boring job, but Taryn and I felt that it got us back into the “sampling mode”. Thanks to the biologists Daniel Wagner and Rhian Waller, we are getting better and better in pronouncing the names of some of the corals we are collecting. We are ready to get more...
Keep your fingers crossed that the nice weather we had so far holds up and allows successful sampling on Sunday!
Tina van de Flierdt