A first glimpse

January 2 2019

Today we finished crossing the Drake Passage, I got my first glimpse of the Antarctic Peninsula. As we approached Smith Island, I learned firsthand how hard it is for an unskilled photographer to capture the majestic scale of the Antarctic landscape. Up on the bridge, the excitement was palpable as we looked out at the rugged island with its knife-like rocky ridges. Between us and the ship, humpback whales were fluking and blowing, and petrels were skimming the waves and riding the updrafts. Unfortunately, the best I could do was to take a distant picture of a snow-covered blob that’s mostly obscured by the clouds.

Tomorrow we’ll pull into Palmer Station. I’m really looking forward to seeing the field station, but I’ll also have a lot of work to do. I did manage to set up my microscope yesterday (and YES, packed in with it was the crucial missing part that couples it to the camera…a huge source of panic a couple weeks ago), but I have a lot more preparation to do once we get into the station. The ship’s “Aquarium Room” is currently full of fresh food to re-supply the station. Once we offload those supplies tomorrow, I’ll be able to set up in a corner with a rack and some plastic buckets that I will use to incubate copepods (little crustacean animals, an important part of the ‘zooplankton’) during experiments on the ship. I’ll be setting up some other equipment to filter seawater and measure algae in the water that will provide food for the copepods. I’m looking forward to getting this all set up, but these kinds of things always make me feel a little anxious. I’m not very experienced with seagoing research, so I’m still learning the best ways to set things up. I worked hard over the past several months to plan this work, but there will almost certainly be things I haven’t thought of and adjustments that I’ll need to make. It’s a great opportunity to kick off 2019 a little bit out of my comfort zone.