It's a Harsh Continent


It’s a marvel how quickly the weather changes down here.


Yesterday we had a perfect cotton candy skied sunrise and calm little swells brushing up against the ship, it felt nothing short of a winter paradise. And if I’d imagined the distant white shoreline being covered in sand rather than caked in a thick layer of snow I could have made myself believe I were back in the Gulf of Mexico.



Today is another story entirely; with 40 knot winds, ten+ foot swells, floating ice of varying sizes beating against the hull of the ship, and a constant swirl of big fluffy snowflakes.

Today I’m reminded why the tagline for this gorgeous place is; “it’s a harsh continent.”


Currently we’re steaming back to Palmer Station to pick up some replacement equipment we couldn’t find or repair on board for our CTD/Rosette. This will put us maybe a day or two behind our sampling schedule, not accounting for the weather. 

Luckily, we began the morning sampling off the deck of the ship using a five-dollar bucket, on this thirty thousand dollar a day boat. 

The irony in this is as thick as the snow piling up on deck.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I spy something white.

Image
It’s ice. It’s always ice. We’re currently avoiding a big storm right off the coast of the peninsula, staying tucked away around the island of Adelaide until the storm passes and we can enter into Marguerite Bay. Usually when a ship is headed to Marguerite Bay, they would sail on the outside of these protected waters, avoiding the tight passages and ice that can completely fill up this part of the Peninsula. Due to the storm, we chose to steam our way through the ice, and around all of the snow covered mountainous islands. This change of plan happened to bring us even closer to the wildlife of the seventh continent, passing by crabeater, leopard, and fur seals. Watching Minke and Humpback whales surface only dozens of feet from our bow. And noticing a few lone Adelaide penguins floating on large icebergs, safely out of reach of any of the predators swimming nearby. While the leisure/tourist parts of this cruise have been amazing, giving us indesc...
Read more

PrepWERK

Image
The past few days we've been packing our trunks full of any scientific equipment that we didn’t include on our SIP (Support Information Package) which is just a giant list from NSF where we check the boxes of alllll of the equipment we’ll need to carry out our research on board the cruise. That means every microcentrifuge tube, reagent, pipette, and sharpie we think we’ll need we wrote out in our SIP. We’re packing extras of some super important things like zipties, sharpies, 5mL snapcap tubes, and we're also packing everything we couldn’t request on our SIP like the light boxes and incubation boxes we had to build or special order for this trip. I usually think packing is fun, I'm one of those weird Type A (ENFJ/enneagram 3) personalities. However, when you have to itemize every single thing in each box, including the quantity, manufacturer information, and product number, it becomes a daunting task. So, BLESS that it’s over! And now 87 days before the trip, our g...
Read more