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By Jan Strugnell, British Antarcitc Survey
Today was an exciting day for the biologists as we had our first day of trawling in the Bellingshausen Sea as part of the BAS core BIOPEARL project. We deployed the Agassiz trawl to sample the benthic marine communities and did 2 x 15 minute trawls at 1500 m depth, 3 x 15 minute trawls at 1000 m depth and 3 x 10 minute trawls at 500 m depth.
The spirit of international collaboration does not just extend to the variety of different nations’ scientists on board, but no sooner than a tiny sea spider had been caught, was it photographed and sent to an expert taxonomist in Spain who was then able to confirm its identity to species level back to the ship in the same day. Meanwhile new photos of benthic species had already...
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By Jan Strugnell
Today we set sail for Antarctica at 5pm. Everyone was very excited to finally get going and we all climbed up on the monkey deck as we sailed out from Stanley and started to cross the Drake Passage. There were some seals playing in the water and they were as interested in us as we were in them!
It is pretty windy (about 35 knots) and so the ship is rocking a bit, but not too badly. I've managed to avoid seasickness, but have been quite sleepy (a symptom of sea sickness) and so have been sleeping very well despite the rocking.
Today we have been getting ready for trawling, which will start in a few days time. Everyone is pretty excited to see what we will catch as very little trawling has been done in this area and there wil...
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Now that we have completed sampling the southern stations, the focus of the survey has moved north to the central area adjacent to Iselin Bank, which lies east of Cape Adare.
The original survey plan had an extensive sampling program in this area but this year’s ice conditions has resulted in the need to reassess and redistribute the sampling effort. This redesign is completed using all available satellite ice imagery we can access and interpretations we receive from a commercial company (Enfotec), who specialise in vessel navigation in the Arctic and Antarctic. Some of this data is readily available on the web and some has to be ordered in advance and are charged for. The higher the resolution required, then the higher the cost.
Figures are examples of in...
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Friday, 22 February 2008 18:53
FSU IPY Cruise: Meet graduate student Juliana D'Andrilli
Written by CLIVAR Section I6S
Background
From 1999-2003, I attended Mary Washington College, now known as the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I'm originally from New York. After graduating high school in 1999, I was anxious to get out of the state and try something new. I was spoiled rotten at MWC because they opened up a brand new science center my first fall semester and had state-of-the-art facilities and equipment.
I had four passions in college: music, art, theatre and chemistry. I did my best to satisfy them all through classes and extra-curricular work but ultimately decided to ...
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Friday, 22 February 2008 16:43
The Belgian Princess Elisabeth Station is Born
Written by International Polar Foundation
During the Antarctic summer season 2007-2008, the International Polar Foundation and its partners have pulled through an amazing achievement: the Princess Elisabeth station building can now be seen atop the Utsteinen Nunatak.
After a pre-mounting phase in Brussels last September, the objective of this year's expedition was to transport the station's modules to the construction site and to build the foundations, anchoring points, garages and outer shell of the first "zero emission" Antarctic station.
The team has been working nearly every day since November 2007 to complete these tasks, with a c...
By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey
Today we all joined the RRS James Clark Ross (JCR) at Port Stanley, Falkland Islands, to get ready for our cruise! The JCR is almost 100m long and seems enormous when it is docked at Stanley. The hull is painted bright red and the words ‘James Clark Ross’ are written in large white letters at the front.
The JCR was named after Admiral Sir James Clark Ross, R.N. (1800-1862) who discovered the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. During 1840-43 he also made three voyages to Antarctica in an attempt to reach the South Magnetic Pole, and to undertake a range of scientific studies of the region.
The JCR can hold 80 people, and for our cruise we have 24 sc...
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By Andrea Juan,
Curator, "Polar South, Art in Antarctica" at the Museum of National University of Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina
The light is so intense and bright that it modifies the colors throughout the day, while the horizon line blends into a white plane where the sun bounces and never sets.
A deep and vivid feeling seizes us when, at the end of a long voyage, we step on Antarctic soil, a soil covered with fossils. As sea, rock, and time, Antarctica is today the largest natural freshwater reserve for humankind. Being there is to witness a different world on thi...
Tuesday, 19 February 2008 23:56
FSU IPY Cruise says "Goodbye Agulhas Current; hello Roaring 40s!"
Written by CLIVAR Section I6S
Submitted Feb 17:
Among western boundary currents, the Agulhas flowing south along East Africa is 2nd only to the Gulf Stream in strength. It carries hundreds to thousands of times the water volume of the Mississippi River. Opposing waves generated by storms off Antarctica can be anomalously large. In meeting the thrust of the Agulhas Current, anomalies can be magnified to produce “rogue” waves of enormous proportions.
Any given western boundary current’s volume is appreciably exceeded by that of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), also called the West Wind Drift (WWD). It circles Antarctica west to east and dominates the Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean.The ACC is the granddaddy of surface currents and the only major surface current having the geogra...
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Submitted February 13, 2008:
Now that we are in the open waters of the Inner Ross Sea, the sampling program can start in earnest. In the typical style of all marine surveys, some of the gear gave us problems on the first deployment but once teething problems were sorted everything worked as we wanted.
As expected, the weather has already had an impact. From a relatively calm sea we suddenly expe...
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