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Friday, 28 March 2008 23:09
IPY EALÁT Project: How do Indigenous People Adapt to Climate Change in the Arctic ?
Written by International Polar Foundation
A number of research projects during the current International Polar Year are using the traditional knowledge of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic as well as sociological studies of these societies in conjunction with research in the natural sciences on climate variability and change. With climate change rapidly altering the face of the Arctic, it is particularly important to document indigenous knowledge while it is still available. The inherent knowledge of snow and snow conditions that reindeer herding communities have accumulated over the centuries can be of great value to researchers studying snow and ice conditions in these regions.
In the IPY EALÁT project (n°399), researchers are examining reindeer herding societies and how they are coping with climate change wh...
Thursday, 27 March 2008 05:15
FSU IPY Cruise: Meet Co-chief Scientist Thorsten Dittmar
Written by CLIVAR Section I6S
Hello. I’m Thorsten Dittmar (pronounced TOR-sten), Assistant Professor of Oceanography at FSU since 2003 and co-chief scientist on this cruise. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany. I’m a chemical oceanographer. My research focuses on the dynamics of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the ocean. I use molecular methods to resolve environmental questions regarding DOM.
Mugshot: Co-chief Scientist Thorsten Dittmar, photo by grad student JiYoungPaeng
Why DOM?
DOM is important in many aspects. DOM contains several chemical elements essential for the g...
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By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey
Although the majority of the trawling is now completed for the biologists on board, the work has not stopped! There is still plenty of activity in the laboratories and computer rooms to process all of the samples.
Steffi, Dave and Adrian have been spending a lot of time looking down their microscopes sorting the animals that were caught in the Epibenthic sledge (EBS). The animals caught in the EBS typically range in size from 7 mm to 70 cm, although it must be said that some of the largest animals we caught were also captured in the EBS, including a sea cucumber at least 50 cm long!
We are lucky that we have a number of taxonomic experts on board to sort the animals. We have experts on polychaetes (Adri...
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By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey
The last few days we have been searching for suitable coring sitesand coring for the geologists for the BAS CACHE-PEP-G program. This focus of this program is to investigate the last 10, 000 years of Earth history and specifically how the Antarctic climate has interacted with the global climate. The program uses ice cores, lake sediments and marine sediments to build up this picture.
Photo: Corethron criophilum, a diatom.
On this cruise, the geologists are trying to find marine sediments that have built up over the last 10,000 years. Marine sediments are b...
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Thursday, 20 March 2008 23:55
BELARE 2007-2008: Construction of the Princess Elisabeth Station
Written by International Polar Foundation
Over 4.5 months, from November 2007 to March 2008, the BELARE expedition built the Princess Elisabeth Station's outer shell and set up the seven remaining wind turbines at Utsteinen, East Antarctica.
Princess Elisabeth Station: From Tour & Taxis to Utsteinen
After the success it encountered during its pre-assembly and public viewing in Brussels, the elements of the Princess Elisabeth station were dismantled and packed into containers. They were then loaded onto a Russian ice-class cargo ship on November 6, 2007 for their twenty day journey ...
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Submitted March 16, 2008:
By John Mitchell, Voyage Leader
Midday Friday, and all the sampling on Admiralty Seamount was completed. Our survey time has run out and we’re heading home. It’s a 1550 nautical mile steam from the Admiralty Seamount to Wellington, which will take just under 6 days if the weather is kind to us. If not, it could be much longer.
Photo: NIWA’s research ship Tangaroa working in heavy pack ice, Peter Marriott
A summary of what we’ve achieved:
39 sampling sites from the shelf, slope, abyss ...
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Monday, 17 March 2008 19:51
FSU IPY Cruise: Return & St. Paddy's Day Greeting
Written by CLIVAR Section I6S
FSU IPY Cruise: Return & St. Paddy’s Day Greeting
A Celebration
We’ve finished the outbound leg of our cruise; we’ve turned around and we’ll be doing additional sampling, especially in areas that piqued our curiosity on the leg out.
We have some real-world experience under our belts, now. The first leg of our cruise was a gas; it’s taught us we can do, and have now already done, things we didn’t dream we could do.
Challenges
Some of us have had to cope with and adapt to seasickness. We’ve gotten used to a 12-hour shift, called a “watch.” We’ve had to deal with a pitching deck, at times encrusted with ice. We’ve had to sample when our hands had gone numb with cold.
...
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Monday, 17 March 2008 19:26
FSU IPY Cruise: Meet graduate student JiYoung Paeng
Written by CLIVAR Section I6S
FSU IPY Cruise: Meet FSU graduate student JiYoung Paeng
Hello, my name is Jiyoung Paeng, a graduate student in Chemical Oceanography at FSU. I’m from South Korea, and this is my second year at FSU and in the U.S.
JiYoung Paeng at work in her shipboard lab space.
My work aboard this cruise
I focus on identifying the source and fate of dissolved organic matter (DOM) to study the global carbon cycle in the oceanic and terrestrial setting. In the I6S cruise, under the guidance of Dr. Thorsten Dittmar, who is my advisor, I am trying to measure black carbon (lik...
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Monday, 17 March 2008 18:32
Netman of the Antarctic: Duncan Kennedy on the RRS Discovery II
Written by Glenn Stein
As early as 1917, it was recognized that whales were in danger of being hunted to extinction, due in part to the flourishing whaling industry in Antarctic waters. A British Government interdepartmental committee was set up to review the excesses of the industry, but it was not until 1923 that a committee with the required finances and authority was assembled to make "a serious attempt to place the whaling industry on a scientific basis."
The steady decrease in the number of whales could only be avoided by controlling whale catching. But effective control could not be planned for a painfully simple reason: not enough was known about the habits of whales, their distribution and migration, or of their main food — the 4-6 cm. long shrimp known as krill.
D...
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