April 21 2008
April 21 2008
The first trawl being brought onto deck by the ship MT’s.
The first trawl being brought onto deck by the ship MT’s.
The first trawl being brought onto deck by the ship MT’s.
The CTD (conductivity temperature depth) rosette is lowered into the water.
Recovery of the second trawl, unfortunately with an empty net except for a few mid-water shrimp collected from mid water.
Today’s trawl haul - a mixture of corals, sponges, echinoderms and shellfish.
The little hitchhikers from the second trawl.
Laura Robinson proudly shows off a fossil coral, which is just the thing she came to the Southern Ocean to collect!.
John Swartz holding up an octopus caught up in the trawl, fortunately, the octopus was alive and released back into the ocean.
After the trawl material is brought onto deck, the painstaking process of sieving and picking starts.
It was a science packed day aboard the Palmer today and, with the weather and seas on our side, we took full advantage of ship time. The day started off with the first seafloor trawl from a depth of 300 m. The trawl was really successful, bringing up enough samples of living and fossil corals, sponges and other beasties to keep all the biologists and geochemists very happy (although there is now a slightly sickly smell permeating the labs).
Unfortunately, the second trawl (from about 2000 m) was not so successful, bringing up only a few mid water shrimp. The WHOI Towcam also refused to play along today, and after a couple of attempts, had to be brought back in out of the water for further work.
The CTD cast was another success story. The CTD (conductivity temperature depth) rosette is lowered into the water and allows real time measurements of the water column; then on the way up, bottles can be closed to collect water at different depths. This afternoon, we collected a full depth profile to about 2000 m, collected water at 12 different depths for nutrient and isotope analysis.
In the meantime, here are a few words from Kathy Scanlon, our GIS and mapping expert:
“Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday and I am 10,698 kilometers away. One of my jobs on this voyage is to make maps of the areas where we want to deploy instruments. After we collect data, I add that to my maps so we can study the data more easily. I spend many hours each day looking at maps of the Drake Passage on my computer monitor. Occasionally, I zoom out so I can see the whole world and I become keenly aware that I am very far away from my loved ones. Of course I am not alone in my loneliness everyone on board has left family and friends far away. I think Marcy (a member of the other science team) takes the distance prize, her honey is on an ice breaker in the Arctic while she is down here on an ice breaker near Antarctica!
I often wonder how it has affected my daughters, growing up in a family with parents who each run off to sea for a month or two every year. When they were little, I would leave a small treat (a sticker or a piece of candy) for them to open each night that I would be away when the treats were all gone, Mom would be home. Whenever my husband is at sea, the girls and I have a tradition of making banana splits with lots of fixings instead of dinner one night. When I return from a cruise, I notice the girls are on a first-name basis with the staff at the local Chinese buffet.
I like to think our unorthodox lifestyle has helped to make them the self-sufficient, flexible, and adventurous people they have become. My soon-to-be 19-year-old daughter (I’ll be missing her birthday next month) has been living in Chile as an exchange student since August. My 17-year-old-tomorrow daughter is applying to a similar program for next year.; Would they be different if they had had more conventional parents? I’ll never know. A friend said to me when my first daughter was born, “Babies have no notion what a mother should be like, so whatever type of mother you are will be right.” Tomorrow, I’ll zoom my map in on Cape Cod, say “Happy Birthday, Tam!” and hope he was right.”
All photos by Dann Blackwood unless otherwise stated