Rime of the Modern Mariner

So why are we doing all this in the dark of winter instead of waiting for better light and higher chances of good weather? Asked about this, our chief investigator, Ken Smith, responded as I suspected he might. Time on the icebreaker is at a premium and is often booked years in advance. So our group got a good slot for our 2009 voyage (March/April), but had to take what was left for 2008, which was…winter.

Even though winter is not the optimum time, Smith and his colleagues took the June slot anyway, because they need a field opportunity before 2009 to test and calibrate the new instruments they’ll be using. Also, winter provides an unexpected chance to see how the iceberg ecosystem changes with the seasons.

I have spent the past ten days or so writing up a press release and a fact sheet about our trip, and have learned a good deal in the process. My guess in the previous post concerning the latitudes we’ll be haunting was technically correct, but too broad. We’ll spend most of the voyage between 60 and 62 degrees South latitude, and 30 to 50 degrees West longitude. Here’s an excellent map.

The Weddell Sea is essentially an enormous bay (2000 km across at its widest point). Until recently, its coast was almost entirely hemmed by ice shelves, including the Larsen, Ronne, and Ruser-Larsen shelves. The Larsen Ice Shelf is much diminished, and the Ronne and Ruser-Larsen have experienced very significant breakup in the last decade. As a result, there are more icebergs in the Weddell Sea than anywhere else on the planet, and any effects they may be having on the environment will be easiest to detect there. So we are drawn to this place.

And what else have I learned? That while they are vastly creative and imaginative, scientists are also careful and conservative about the claims they make. I tried to rework a quotation I found belonging to Tim Shaw, a geochemist and one of the principle investigators on this voyage. My intention was to make it easier to understand, and a bit more exciting, without really changing its meaning. Tim’s response? “This is extremely speculative. It will cause a firestorm!” His quotation was much more carefully worded than I realized, and could hardly be changed at all because its meaning was so precise.

Next posts, how the machinations of fate crossed my path with that of a woman who has spent her career in Antarctica, a good deal of it traveling on the Nathaniel B. Palmer. My search for the perfect cold-weather underwear. And a bit about the nearness of a long-time goal: to learn the first form of TaiChi Chuan, and more recently, to learn it before embarking for Antarctica. I use the term “learn” loosely…

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