Denali Education Center Executive Director Willie Karidis began his 70-day winter expedition to retrace, research and celebrate the steps of pioneering naturalist Charles Sheldon on Tuesday, January 22, 2008. The trip has been a dream of Willie's for over twenty years, since he first read "Wilderness of Denali". That book chronicles Sheldon's experience as he spent the 1907-08 winter in the heart of the Alaska Range along the banks of the Upper Toklat River. It was during that time that he had a vision for a National Park to preserve the unique natural ecosystem he experienced for future generations. Willie is working as a park volunteer (VIP) during his expedition and is being provided support by the National Park Service. Willie planned to camp in the v...

6th February 2008 Last week was a blowout when it came to using the twin otters — until Thursday. Then we split into three teams. Two teams managed to get a seismic site and two GPS sites in on Thursday while Abel, Mitch and I went north on a helicopter to do a tie on Brimstone Peak on Friday night. As a night flight things got a bit colder and we were dodging low clouds all the way up through Victoria Land, passing flights of raised beaches on the way. We landed in a swirl of cloud and snow on the south side of Brimstone, and lugged our gear over to the tie. The tie will mean that old data from a ...

In our previous post we wrote that we’d enter the Agulhas Current, a western boundary current, about 4 hours out of Durban. Here are some interesting facts about western boundary currents, and the Agulhas in particular: They originate from equatorial waters flowing westward in response to easterly winds. Where westerly equatorial flow meets a continental shelf, the equatorial current turns and becomes a western boundary current, earning its name. In the Northern Hemisphere, they veer right, flowing north; in the Southern Hemisphere, they veer left, flowing south. Along the western edges of ocean basins, they move warm water from equatorial latitudes toward the poles. Their warm-water transport mitigates, to some extent, the incoming solar energy difference ...

February 3, 2008: After a couple of days in South Africa, we’re adjusting to our new time zone. All participants are here now, and we’re setting up our shipboard labs. The vessel has 4,000 square feet of lab space shared among several projects. View the ship’s webcam. Our thoughts are focused on our teamwork, and we are practicing our CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) operation, which involves deploying and retrieving a large array of water collection bottles mounted on a room-size framework. The sample bottles are set up to open at a specified depth. We’ll have to be prepared to do this under harsh conditions. A front is...