April 8 and 9 - Through the Straits of Magellan into the Atlantic

Ship position on radar as it moves into the Drake Passage

April 9, 1:30 PM --- Moved into the Drake Passage sometime around 10 PM last night. Clear change in motion of the ship as the wave height picks up. Maybe that is why I slept well last night. The ship is conducting a long-term survey of the temperature and salinity profile of the Drake Passage where they drop XBTs (small bomb shaped sensors) down to the bottom of the ocean. This is a minimum 3 person operation and they do this round the clock in four-hour shifts. Just for fun, I volunteered for the 4-8AM shift today. Was up at 3:45 and ready to launch! It was a fun. We launched a XBT every 30 minutes or so for 4 hours  and then saw an episode of Big Bang Theory in between the launches! They have been doing this survey for the last 17 years and have built up a very valuable database for oceanographic research. 

Got done at 8 AM, had a quick breakfast and crashed into my bunk. Got up at noon just in time for lunch! The menu was mostly meat so I ate salad, broccoli and pasta.  Being vegetarian has its advantages!

4 PM: The wave height has not increased much beyond 3-4 meters and while I would love to experience some rough seas, the veterans on the trip are not enthusiastic about that idea. The low wind-speed that is responsible for calm seas has a downside that it does not clear the fog; result is a constantly overcast, gloomy, foggy weather with visibility of about two hundred meters. Not sure if there is much to see out there anyway, but would be nice to glimpse the horizon every once in a while.

Continuing with the Pteropods – why is it important to study these pteropods? The motivation of our study lies at the intersection of global climate change, ocean ecology and biolocomotion. First, the same CO₂ that is warming our planet is also leading to ocean acidification. Pteropods being snails, have shells that are essentially made of calcium, and calcium is highly soluble in acid. So these animals are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification. While other groups have studied the effect of OA on the morphology of these animals, we want to understand the effect of OA on weight distribution of limacina and its relation to their swimming dynamics.

April 8, 2014 ; 8:30 AM; spent our first night at sea. Nice gentle rocking motion did nothing for my sleep. Tossed and turned and then finally got up around 3 AM, wandered the corridors of LMG, did some gratuitous snacking and tried to watch something other than Mission Impossible 4 on the AV system. Could not figure out how to use the remote so was forced to watch (yet again) the high point of MI4: Tom Cruise running through the streets of Dubai. What an awful movie!

Got my phone connected to the LMG Wi-Fi yesterday (yay!) but google+ sucked up my entire 24 hour 20 Mb quota in less than 5 minutes auto-uploading recently taken pictures to the cloud. I don’t %^%%# remember giving Google permission to do that. Google should just change their name to SkyNet and be done with it. Anyway, my quota will be reset at 12:00 GMT which is still 14 hours away. Have gone through my phone and tried to turn off all apps that automatically upload/download stuff.  Amazing how all these apps are constantly rummaging through your personal stuff and uploading bits and pieces without you knowing it.

In the last 12 hours, the ship has been sailing at 10-11 knots and at some point early in the morning we exited the Straits of Magellan and out into the Atlantic Ocean. Our course takes us down the eastern coast of the southern tip of South America (apparently it is Argentinian territory) and out into the Drake Passage. That should happen sometime in the next 12 hours, and the fun will begin at that time. By fun I mean 5+ meter waves and lots of scientific activity. They were looking for volunteers to help with launching of environment sensors and I volunteered for the 4 -8 AM shift.

limacina helicina

OK, back to Pteropods – the particular species that we are interested is Limacina helicina; these are beautiful creatures (see picture below); they are snails that have evolved “wings” that they use to fly through water. For folks who are into biolocomotion, limacina seem to use a “clap-and-fling” type of mechanism to create lift and propulsion, and that is one feature of their locomotion that we are interested in studying. Clap-and-fling is something that is usually associated with flying insects (like wasps) or some birds (pigeons) but to find such a mechanism in a marine organism is wonderfully weird. We are hoping to scoop us these organisms using tow nets and then study then at Palmer Station using 3D PIV tomography and high-speed videogrammetry. One of our team members, Deepak is the expert in 3D tomography and videogrammetry and the GATech team has brought ½ a ton (not exaggerating) of scientific equipment to do this study. These animals are quite delicate and do not survive too long in laboratory conditions. For these polar species, we could never get them back alive to our labs in the US. This is the reason we have to bring all the study equipment to the Antarctic.

The Pteropod Team - left to right  Zane,Jeannette and Deepak

8 PM: Back to life aboard the LMG – for everybody onboard, the “Lounge” is the place to be. It is a 30’x30’ room with a dozen recliners, a conference table, a few hundred books and the most important part, an AV system with over 700 movies! People hang out here in their free time (lots of that!), watch movies, play cards and work on their computers. This is also where the Iridium satellite phone is located and people can make short calls to any number around the world for free. 

LMG lounge

Meals are served in the galley on the lower deck; breakfast from 7:30-8:30, lunch from 11:30 – 12:30 and dinner from 5:30 – 6:30. They also serve "MidRats" short or midnight rations! The food has been quite decent but I can imagine that eating this day after day could become a little boring… and fattening! There is also a lot of junk food, coffee, fruit, milk cereal, bread, etc. available 24 hours and it is not unusual to find somebody in the galley at all odd hours of the day. 

LMG Galley

My hiatus from the internet ends in about 30 minutes! More later.

10:30 PM – Dangit! My date with internet connectivity lasted exactly for 5 minutes. Checked my gmail and then made the mistake of logging onto the blog, which sucked the entire 20Mb! Oh well, I just have to wait another 24 hours to get on the internet again. Not sure if I will be able to upload any of this blog while I am on the LMG.