What has happened so far?
The flight to Santiago via Atlanta was long and uneventful. was met by Jimmy, our travel agent
who got us rapidly through Immigration and Customs. Met the rest of our team: Jeannette, Deepak and Zane; are all from Georgia Tech. Jeannette Yen is a professor in Biology, Deepak is a postdoc working with her and Zane is an undergraduate majoring in biophysics.
Took the flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas and that is when things
started to get exciting: as we approached Punta Arenas, the landscape changed to
lakes, craggy mountains.. and the massive beautiful glaciers (see below).
April 07, 2014; 5:30 PM - Pteropods -- what are they? (should be Pteropod and not Pterpod in the blog title). These are amazing snails (really!) that swim in the water using beautiful "wings". Being snails, they have shells and these shells (made of calcium) are highly affected by ocean acidification. We are going to Palmer to collect and study the polar species of these animals to understand the effect of OA on their swimming characteristics. More information on the project is at http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1246317.
Heading to our ship ARS Laurence Gould in the next 15 minutes. We have an all PAX security briefing at 6:30 PM and we sail at 8 PM. Route will take us through the Straits of Magellan, out into the Atlantic Ocean, down the coast of Argentina and into and across the Drake Passage to Anvers Island, Antarctica. Total journey time is 6 days. Excited about the journey. Apparently, the Drake Passage has some of the roughest waters in the world. Through this narrow (500 nautical miles) passage the Pacific Ocean flows into the Atlantic Ocean and creates very rough seas. Should be fun as long as I don't get sea sick! You can track the wave height in the drake passage on http://www.passageweather.com/ .. just select the box at the southern tip of south America.
The internet connection on the ship is very spotty and each passenger if limited to 20MB of data per day :( BTW, the position of Laurence Gould can also be tracked at http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/368138000
gotta go!
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