Journal Entries

2004-05

 

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	February 2005	01
Click here to access journal entries by Marianne Kaput or Giancarlo Lopez-Martinez.

 

January 1, 2005 - Drake Passage, bearing south (59° S Latitude):

We (Rick, Dave, Joe, Scott, and I) celebrated the New Year on the bow (the front) of the boat, looking out at the ocean. It was great. We have now passed into the circumpolar current, a current of cold water that moves in a circle around Antarctica. You could feel the temperature get lower as we passed into it. Also, the ocean is a beautiful shade of midnight blue now. We're not sure why that color change happens — probably something to do with different nutrients and small organisms present in the water. We saw whales and icebergs this morning.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 2, 2005 (62° S Latitude):

The food on the ship is really good. Marcus, the cook, is very good at keeping the menu interesting. Here's today's menu:

Lunch: Blackened catfish, Philly steak sandwich on baguette, Mixed vegetables.
Dinner: Clam chowder, Kahlua pork and cabbage, Chicken Alfredo, Pasta primavera.

These are pictures of the galley, or kitchen and dining area. Notice the steel container bolted to the tables so that the condiments don't slide off.

I've seen the most beautiful scenery today. In the morning we saw some distant snow-covered islands and an iceberg every once in a while. By afternoon, they were everywhere — so many icebergs, snow-covered islands with huge mountains of white, in places difficult to see what is part of the island and what's just ice.

I've also learned where icebergs actually come from — many islands have glaciers on them, huge masses of ice — as the weather gets warmer here, the glaciers that are near open water crack, dropping huge chunks of ice into the water that become icebergs. This is called glacial calving. Icebergs already in the water can calve too, cracking loudly into smaller chunks. Below are shots of spots where glaciers have calved.

Some smaller icebergs roll back and forth, sending up spray as waves hit them. Click here for a video of a small one going by the ship.

The shapes are beautiful, carved sheer white faces, gracefully swooping bridges of ice between islands and between icebergs, then eventually high, black rock mountains, fog-covered on top, rising above all the other stuff. This is the most beautiful place I have ever been. I always thought it was a little strange that people take luxury cruises down here, but now I understand. I've been on deck so long today that I can barely feel my fingers.

At about 8, we see more icebergs, and a huge patch of brash ice, the loosely packed chunks, in our way. This is the stuff that at Palmer Station would have prevented us from taking the Zodiacs out to islands and collecting larvae had it not blown out again. There is about two square miles of it, and the pieces look really big. However, since the Gould is an icebreaker, this is not a problem.

See? No problem.

Finally, at about 9, we come to Palmer Station. Here's what it looks like:

Everyone is very glad to have arrived, but there are very high winds, and the ship can't pull into the dock safely. It takes about two hours of trying before we can dock — we have to sleep on the ship tonight, but we go over and visit with people at Palmer for a little while before we go to bed. More tomorrow.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 3, 2005 - Palmer Station, Antarctica (64°46' S Latitude, 64°05' W Longitude). Rainy, winds 30 mph:

We are finally here, and I am having a hard time keeping my balance! When you're on a ship for a long time, you gradually get accustomed to the pitching and rolling of the boat — your body begins to compensate, and pretty soon it's not a problem at all. This is sometimes called getting your sea legs. But when you get off the ship, as I just have, your body is still expecting the ground to be moving under your feet. This causes a very strange feeling — it seems like the ground is moving when it’s not. The people here call it dock rock. I'd like to lose my sea legs now, thank you very much.

We begin the day by getting moved into our rooms at Palmer from the ship. My room is big compared to the berthing van on the ship, and there's plenty of room for all my stuff.

Then we go through a series of orientations. Antarctica is a dangerous place in lots of ways, and so the staff and scientists here have very specific ways of doing pretty much everything — these have been sort of figured out from many years of experience. It's a lot to remember, though.

First Vinny, the guy who keeps the boats running (among other things), gives us our first boating orientation (there will be three of them) and teaches us how to use some survival equipment. The weather changes very quickly here, and so sometimes people boat out to an island and get stuck there for a while, even days, because of high winds or brash ice. For this reason, most of the islands have survival caches on them. These are barrels, well anchored from the wind, containing things like food, water, a stove and a tent. Since it's really windy outside, Vinny takes us outside to practice setting up the tent and lighting the stove — which turns out to be a lot of fun.

Vinny also teaches us that we when we go out in a boat we should always wear a float coat, which is a waterproof, buoyant suit in vivid safety orange that I'm pretty excited about trying on. It has a part that snaps on at the bottom between your legs so that if you fall in, the coat won’t float up over your head. We also need to bring a rubber dry bag containing a change of warm clothes and extra sunglasses and sunscreen. If the boat were to overturn or be punctured, it would be important to have these things — cold, wet clothes really suck the heat out of your body. Vinny is a good teacher, and is very, very patient with us.

Next Kerry, the station administrator, teaches us a bunch of things about how things work at the station — we are shown how to sign up for gash duty once a week. Gash is a naval term (a lot of the slang down here is naval in origin) — it's a combination of the words "garbage" and "trash". The five people that have gash each day do a thorough cleanup of the galley (kitchen) after dinner. There's a big list of the stuff you have to do on gash. Also, every Saturday everyone does housemouse duty, which means you do a housekeeping job that you draw at random from a bowl.

Then the two computer guys tell us about how to use the station's computer network, and I give Chris my laptop so he can set it up to connect wirelessly to the network.

Our next orientation is with Tim, who is in charge of waste management here — this is a very important job. U.S. Antarctic stations leave almost none of their waste in Antarctica. This means that all of Palmer's waste has to be shipped back to Chile in special containers, and it all has to be sorted very carefully. The waste from the science labs requires the most caution, because some of it can be toxic or radioactive — we have to fill out paperwork whenever something like that is disposed of. The toilets are flushed by seawater, just like on the ship. Almost all food waste is put down a really big garbage disposal, which you can see here.

I notice that people here do whatever they can to keep themselves entertained. There are funny nicknames for things, funny signs and computer-printed photos of people on just about every door and wall — people even like to draw things on the backs of their Carhartt coats. The more I think about this, the more it makes sense — when people live at a station like this for a year, it can feel very isolated. During the winter there is almost no daytime at all, and you can't really leave the station because the ocean freezes over. It would be very easy to get depressed here in the winter, and I imagine that keeping a good sense of humor is pretty important to everyone's morale.

This place is amazingly efficient and well-run, and also very well-funded. We get all the lab equipment we need. Some of it we pre-ordered, but some of it we didn't realize we needed — not to worry, they find everything we need, and in one case actually build something for us — more on that ahead. They have supplies for everything you could possibly want to do around here — skiing, snowboarding, hiking up the glacier, camping out. The galley is staffed by two great chefs, and they cook incredibly good food all day — aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner, there are: a leftovers fridge, which also has deli meats and other sandwich fixings; three or four big jars of big, tasty cookies of all kinds, baked daily and smelling great; and some other type of fresh baked good lying around. Today it was soft pretzels, yesterday cinnamon twists. Here are pictures of the galley.

There's a sauna, an outdoor hot tub (right this minute, out my window, I can see a group of people making the most of it), and a bar with a pool table adjoining a lounge area with a HUGE screen TV and wall of DVDs and videos. Again, the people here understand the importance of morale. I can see why a lot of the staff (and researchers, for that matter) seems to basically have fallen in love with it, and do whatever they can to be allowed to keep coming back every year.

 

- Luke Sandro

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