Written Sunday 23rd December, 2007
By Margot Foster
Conditions are ideal for the work we are doing. There’s very little wind, a bit of high cloud and the patches of sunshine make it almost balmy at around minus 2 degrees.
The scientific program is in full flight. Overnight the last three moorings were sent to the deep. Very early this morning we were heading through the loose pack-ice to CEAMARC 27 – the first station of the project, (the Collaborative East Antarcticta Marine Census). There are 67 points marked on the map covering the sea between Dumont d’Urville and the Mertz glacier. It’s an ambitious plan to fully sample each of those positions in the coming weeks.
The first equipment out was the epibenthic sled. It scoops up the top layer of seabed with anything living in it. Everyone abandoned breakfast to be there when the first mud samples came up. Scientists in dazzling red and orange waterproof overalls and gumboots became an ant army carrying white tubs of mud to be sluiced and sieved and then conveyed into the adjoining wet-lab. Teams inside sorted the catch into phyla to be photographed, tagged and bagged. There were sea spiders bigger than a football, small and large octopus, star-fish and worms. Eight people crowd around the bench for the sorting, while on another side the dissection group is taking their slice of the action for DNA testing. The photographer records each labeled specimen. In a matter of hours the decks are clear for the next round.
We cruised up and down through loose pack ice against a spectacular backdrop of massive tabular ice bergs - glacial ice, hundreds of metres high, which has come off the continent and broken apart into huge islands forming a line across the horizon as they sit grounded against a deep-sea canyon wall.
A CTD water sample was also taken, the box-corer sent down, the beam trawl tested and the Geosciences Australia seabed camera recorded 40 minutes or so of creatures going undisturbed about their business.
I’m grafted onto the CASO team working with the CTD water samples. Tonight I had my second training session, this time in the oceanographic lab drawing off water samples from the frame of 22 cylinders.
There’s thick, high cloud to the west of Commonwealth Bay, and from the bridge I can see snowflakes speckle the crisp air.
Margot Foster is a journalist currently on board the Australian Aurora Australis, an Australian research vessel currently participating in the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML, IPY project 53). She works with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
