Ringing in the new year

Last night I joined in the LTER New Years Eve tradition of playing bingo. People who were “in the know” brought in a variety of quirky items to serve as prizes. Since I was new to this, I scrounged up some chocolate to donate to the prize kitty. I won the fourth game! My prize package included a kit to build a sled out of chocolate, some mini unicorn lights, and a ping pong ball-shooting penguin. I stayed up until midnight GMT, but barely woke up to acknowledge the local new year.

I went to bed early because I had volunteered for the 4-8 am shift with the XBT project. The water became much rougher around 3 am, so I got a little nervous about getting out of bed and trying to do work. It ended up being okay-ish. Three of us had volunteered for the shift, in addition to our leader from the ship’s technical staff. One of our volunteers was feeling pretty sick from the beginning and went back to sleep. The two of us remaining went through various states of mild to moderate queasiness, but we were able to make It through.

The XBT project is a long-standing project that conducts temperature profiles using the LMG (our ship, the Laurence M. Gould) as a ship of opportunity during crossings of the Drake Passage. Surface water samples are collected for measurements of carbon dioxide, carbon-13 isotopes and nutrient chemistry. Our job was to periodically deploy probes over the side of the ship using a special gun-shaped device. The picture above shows Ph.D. student Patricia Thibodeaux shooting the probe into the water. Once the probe is deployed over the side of the ship, it sends information back to the computer using a thin copper wire. It was interesting to watch the temperature profiles plot as the probe reported back and to see the small variations as we moved across the passage.

After 4 hours, my shift was over, and I decided to try some breakfast. Yeah…not so much. I ate a bit of pineapple and stared at a croissant for a while. Food started to seem like not such a great idea, so I went back to sleep. I woke up just in time for lunch feeling much better. Now that it’s calmed down a bit, it looks like my next goal for today will be to assembly and configure my microscope. Once we start sampling, a big part of my day will be sorting copepods under the microscope and photographing them so I can make detailed measurements and observations.