Journal Entries

2004-05

 

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

January 13, 2005:

So much happens in a typical day here that I'm having trouble keeping up with this journal. Today I take the morning off from science to catch up, writing and formatting photos to for the website. I get almost completely caught up, which is great. Around noon, we get a visit from the first of many cruise ships that will be visiting the station this week. It is by far the biggest ship I've ever seen. It makes me think of the star destroyer in Star Wars movies. 780 feet long, 106 feet wide, carrying 1,294 passengers and 600+ crew. The thing takes up half the horizon. Everyone's invited to go aboard, but we have lots of work to do, so Rick goes and the rest of us stay. Apparently they have cocktails, eat sushi and then some folks from the station talk about what they do, and Rick talks a little bit about our research. We give him a hard time when he returns, doing our best to make him feel guilty for leaving us to schmooze with the wealthy folk — it doesn't work very well.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 14, 2005:

At 2:07 am, I wake gradually to a fairly annoying buzzing noise, followed by a loudspeaker voice saying, "Alarm is in the pump house. Alarm is in the pump house." I roll over and notice that my roommate Tad is getting his clothes on.

"What is that, man?" I ask groggily.

Tad replies, "Fire alarm," very calmly. People who have been to Antarctica a lot tend to do everything very calmly. So I jump into my clothes and we head out to the boat house, which is the muster station — that means whenever there's any emergency, that's where everyone's supposed to go — Kerry, the station administrator, starts taking roll, and then Bill comes over the loudspeaker: "Stand down, repeat, stand down. It’s a busted pipe in the pump house." And we all groan and make our way back to our rooms to go back to bed.

It is another perfect day, and we take a trip in the Zodiac to an island called Stepping Stones. I'm the driver today, and it's a long, fun drive. It is the prettiest island yet, with skuas and giant petrels all over the place. In one case we are actually close enough to see salt dripping out of the salt gland on the giant petrel’s beak (the salt gland removes salt from the seawater the giant petrel drinks).

We find some adult Belgica, and since we brought the thermocouple reader — a machine with a wire that tells you the exact temperature of anything it is touching — we are able to measure the temperature of the different places it is crawling around on. The readings knock our socks off. The dark green moss some of these adults are ambling around on is up to 68° F — unbelievably hot for this insect. This is really interesting, because Joe is in the preliminary stages of proving with his Northern blots that Belgica adults upregulate their HSP70 gene in response to heat shock, even though larvae don't. This would make sense, since it's only the adults that crawl around on the surface in the summer, whereas larvae are almost always below rocks, or buried under mud or water.

Also, we notice that there are limpet shells everywhere on this island — limpets are mollusks that live in the water, usually just offshore, clinging very tightly to rocks so as not to be washed away by the strong waves. We sightsee, take pictures, and still can't believe how great it is here.

Meanwhile, back at Palmer, the cruise ship Mesner has come in, full of Japanese tourists. It's not even half as big as the Amsterdam. Palmer Station staff gives tours to small groups of them, accompanied by translators. The tourists are very nice, bowing to us a lot when we meet them.

I climb the glacier by myself at about 10 pm, and watch the sun set at 11:15. Another beautiful one.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 15, 2005:

Some days here feel more like two or three days. Today is definitely one of those. We spend the morning in the lab, taking some readings on various experiments, recording data, and pickin' bugs. There is another cruise ship in the harbor today, the Orion. This one is full of M.I.T., Harvard and Yale alumni. They visit us and are shown around. They seem nice, ask great questions, and are very enthusiastic about what goes on here.

Also, it is I think the third clear, sunny day we've had so far, and the warmest and most beautiful yet. We have dinner on the balcony — someone has brought chipped bar ice from the harbor for our drinks — bar ice is very clear ice that has been compressed in a glacier for thousands of years and then calved into the water, and sometimes it makes little hissing noises as compressed gases escape from it. On the balcony everyone seems especially relaxed, and then I realize it's because most of us are wearing T-shirts. You sure adjust to temperatures fast here — our high today was only 38° F.

After dinner our whole team plus Cara the lab manager take a Zodiac and boat out to the big iceberg we've been seeing out the window. Amazing to be so near such a huge mass of floating ice. We take some pictures then head to Loudwater Cove, with some beautiful glacier views, then to Torgie to see the penguins. First, we come upon two penguin species we hadn't seen before — the gentoo and the chinstrap penguin, hanging out with all the Adélies.

We see nesting Adélies feeding their chicks — what happens is that the mother and father take turns going out and eating krill, and then coming back to regurgitate and feed it to the chicks. In the picture below, you can see the chick about to reach into the parent's mouth to get food. We also see a dead penguin that has literally been turned inside out by a brown skua.

Then back to the iceberg in better light, with the moon overhead. Since it's been fairly warm, there is also a lot of glacial calving happening — it sounds like a thunderstorm as huge pieces of glaciers miles away fall into the sea. We spend a good three hours out, and get lots of pictures.

 

- Luke Sandro

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