![\"Departing](\"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/79\/2019\/06\/Departing_Palmer-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
January 5 2019 (Note: this is #6 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould).<\/em><\/p>\n As we left Palmer Station around 10 am, it felt surprisingly bittersweet. I was energized and excited to start sampling, but as I watched the bowlines detach from shore one by one, I was sad to be leaving. Palmer Station felt like such an amazing little microcosm, and I wish I\u2019d had more time to soak it up. We\u2019ll have a day there on our way back, but I\u2019m guessing that will go by at lightning speed.<\/p>\n That little bit of melancholy soon gave way to much more mundane concerns. Along with about 80% of the scientific party, I was quickly struck by a wave of seasickness. Those hard-earned sea legs were fickle after a couple of days in port! Fortunately, I wasn\u2019t directly involved in today\u2019s mission, so I could take some medicine and sleep the afternoon away. I woke up right at dinner time, feeling a million times better and starving to boot.<\/p>\n While I was konked out, the marine mammalogists and the ornithologists (the \u201cwhalers\u201d and the \u201cbirders,\u201d respectively) got off the ship for several hours of penguin and seal censuses on Hugo Island. A primary motivation for this cruise and the larger program it fits into (LTER: Long-Term Ecological Research Program) is to observe how the Western Antarctic Pensinsula Ecosystem Changes over time. With warming of this geographic area, one anticipated pattern is a progression of sub-antarctic species southward. Part of today\u2019s mission was to check on a recently discovered and newly established colony of fur seals, which are normally found in warmer waters to the north.<\/p>\n Tomorrow we\u2019ll start sampling our first official LTER grid station, including collecting our first zooplankton samples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" January 5 2019 (Note: this is #6 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould). As we left Palmer Station around 10 am, it felt surprisingly bittersweet. I was energized and excited to start sampling, but as I watched the bowlines detach from shore one by one,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":964,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions\/964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}