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. ...

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...

By Jan Strugnell This evening the geologists did their first bit of coring of the seabed as part of BAS’s QWAD (Quaternary Western Antarctic Glaciation) project. Geologists with a piece of the core. To determine the consistency of the sea floor they send sound waves from the ship to the seafloor using a piece of kit called TOPAS. The sound waves bounce back to the ship where they are received. Some of these sound waves penetrate the sediment and allow a profile to be built up of the sea floor. This allows the geolo...

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...

Submitted March 12, 2008: By John Mitchell, Voyage Leader One of the many heavily eroded bergs seen in the northern Ross Sea (Photo: John Mitchell). We’ve spent the last two days sampling the Admiralty Seamount which has a large (12 x 5 nautical miles) flat top at about 460 m deep, and very steep flanks dropping to over 3000 m. The sampling has shown the top to be rather sparse biologically, apart from a couple of small areas which have an abundant and diverse fauna. Further sampling of those areas will be done later in the week. Although we are north of the pack-ice and acc...

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...

FSU IPY Cruise: Meet graduate student Jun Dong My name is Jun Dong. I am a Ph.D. candidate in physical oceanography at Florida State University, working under Professor Kevin Speer on Polar Front dynamics in the Southern Ocean. I am very glad that I can join this CLIVARI6S cruise. I work on a team with Prof. Speer and Katy Hill, who is a physical oceanography Ph.D. student from Australia. Our shift is from noon to midnight. Photo caption: Jun is learning a variety of sampling procedures on this cruise. With Professor Bill Landing looking on, Jun draws a water sample for trac...

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...

Photo: Scott Island with Haggit’s Pillar to the left. By John Mitchell By John Mitchell, Voyage Leader After completion of the first abyssal station in the northern part of our survey – at a depth of 3500m – we moved on to our last seamount station next to Scott Island. Scott Island is very small (400m by 200m) and isolated, lying about 310 nautical miles northeast from Cape Adare. Its companion – Haggit’s Pillar – is an impressive 62m high volcanic stack sitting 200m northwest of the island. We are sampling in this area to compare the biodiversity with that of the Balleny...

Download legacy PDF IPY will, we hope, have many legacies, large and small. On the large side we anticipate improved and expanded observational networks, on-going data exchange practices and systems, and continued international polar science collaboration. On the smaller side we might find many informal networks and practical activities, including the IPY web site and other activities coordinated by the IPO, by Project Coordinators of various IPY Projects, and by IPY National Committees. Small legacies may prove useful to the on-going success of the larger legacies. For the most valuable small legacies, IPO hopes to identify willing partners to accept responsibility for their contin...