Written Tuesday 25th December
A lookout from the bridge is always rewarding. I watched Adelie penguins swimming sportily in circles, popping up and diving down then popping up somewhere else in a dead calm, silver sea. Then a pair of minke whales appeared and I watched their elegant curving and spouting until they passed the ship.
The sun does not set and it’s very beautiful moving in and out of the polynyas and pack ice with the soft white curve of the continent sometimes sighted.
The trawls have all been down now – the benthic sled, the French Beam, the AAD Beam trawl and the box core. Each one is specialised. The AAD Beam trawl has an under water digital stills camera attached. A crowd gathered around the computer when the images came up. The camera films the sea floor in front of the open trawl mouth, which scoops its sample for the scientists to analyse.
These images add another layer to our understanding of life in the deep. They show how the life forms assemble as well as the density of populations. The echinoderms, the fragile feather stars, wave their translucent fronds in delicate fans while the brittle stars seem to climb up anything that keeps them vertical, and fat little stars decorate the sea bed.
There are creatures that puzzle the experts…Betrand is with the French CEAMARC team. He speculates whether the flat dark shape is a gelatinous surround for eggs of some sort …and in the wetlab he shows me a fish in a dish with a number but no name. Betrand says it is imperative that everything be named because ‘if it has no name it does not exist.’
I wonder what it will be called.
Martin reports “A highlight of today's hauls has been the first solitary corals for the trip. The skeletons of these animals are made from aragonite - the form of calcium most susceptible to ocean acidification. The specimens collected today were from 700m and had very delicate, friable shells. It will be interesting to see whether they are found at the deeper sites where, because of the increased water pressure, the aragonitic calcium will have a greater tendency to dissolve.”
We will complete this section of sampling then move closer to the Mertz glacier and continental shelf for the next round. Captain Moodie rates this area the most spectacular he’s seen in Antarctica.
So, almost impossibly, it only gets better.
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).
