Palmer and Beyond

We made it to Palmer Station!

Although we were only at dock for about twenty-four hours, it gave us enough time to explore the station itself and see how bad our “dock rock” was at this point in the trip.  

At the tail end of our cruise we’re predicted to spend four or five full days at Palmer Station, which will give us time to hike the glacier, explore the backyard, and even relax in the hot tub or sauna. Our ship is the last expedition to Palmer Station until October, so any staff or scientists that are not staying at Palmer until October (which is called “wintering over”) will board the LMG and head back to Punta Arenas with us at the end of May.

Until then, we’re doing around a month (or thirty days give or take) of sailing all the way down the Antarctic Peninsula, crossing the Antarctic circle into Marguerite Bay, then back up the peninsula sampling and performing our experiments along the way.  My team predicts we’ll have fifteen normal sampling days, along with four extra experiments worked in over the next month.

I’m excited to start our scientific work and very excited to start it early, while the ice hasn’t fully formed on the coast and daylight hours are still decently long, around eight hours at our current location. By the end of our trip the ice will have exponentially increased and the daylight hours will dwindle to around four or five hours total each day. So we’ll all be glad to have the longer break on the tail end of this journey, before we pack up, cross back through the Drake Strait, and adjust back to our real lives again.

While we're steaming south to our Station point #1, the first leg of this long sail, enjoy a few pictures of us actually being on land!