Rime of the Modern Mariner

[This post written 6/20/08; position: lat -58’09”, long -42’32”; temp -0C; wind chill -12C]

As I was starting to write tonight’s post, we got a group email from Palmer Station wishing us a wonderful Mid-Winter Day. It’s the solstice, and it nearly passed without my noticing! Ever since I got that email, though, it’s all I can think about. Of course, I am not thinking about winter solstice. I am thinking about June 20th, which, for those of us who have lived our lives in the Northern Hemisphere, is the longest day of the year. A day for barbecues and swimming, and after dinner, a leisurely appreciation of the long evening light. Or a walk with friends along a sun-warmed street as the crickets begin to sing. No crickets here, boy howdy. Instead of crickets, we got penguins today, apparently, though I missed them. I need a better warning system. Too often, I am tucked away in my little cabin, sorting through pictures or working on the blogs when the exciting moments strike.

The message from Palmer Station described their traditional Mid-Winter Day festivities, which include a big dinner where everyone dresses up in their Sunday best and toasts the solstice with wine. In the second part of the tradition, the hardiest (or the tipsiest) jump into the ocean at the exact moment of the solstice. No, I am not joking. The water at Palmer is currently -1.5C. I am not-too-secretly glad Captain Mike is having none of this tradition aboard the NBP. I would probably just go rigid and drown.

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to tell you a little bit about Maria Vernet and her team of marine microbiologists. Maria’s specialty is diatoms. These microscopic plants have the peculiar attribute of enclosing themselves in protective structures of silica. They are quite beautiful and otherworldly. As a native of Nevada, I grew up hearing the word “diatom,” and its derivative term, “diatomaceous earth.” Half of the state was once occupied by an enormous inland sea where diatoms were plentiful. All that’s left of them now is their silicate enclosures. So concentrated were they in the waters of that prehistoric lake that we now mine the silica-rich earth where they expired. It is used for all kinds of products, from ant repellant to sheetrock.

They seem to thrive in the waters of Antarctica as well. Each day Maria and her team collect samples of seawater at various depths and various distances from the icebergs, and they are finding plenty in those samples to study. Here are pictures of two of my favorites from Maria’s photo files, probably taken by our talented Argentine observer, Adrian Cefarelli (whose back appears in the picture below). On the left, we have Corethron criophilum, looking like nanobots. On the right, a microscopic version of Grandma’s lace doilies, Asteromphalus sp. The beauty and complexity of the natural world never ceases to amaze me.

This contraption is known as a rosette. It is a frame holding a couple of dozen PVC bottles, each of which can be opened at a different depth to capture a water sample. The entire device is hoisted on a thick cable and lowered into the water through the NBP’s huge “back door.” Your photographer was standing with her back to it when this picture was taken. Left to right, helping to move the samples from the rosette into labeled bottles are Karie Sines, Adrian Cefarelli, and Nicole Middaugh.

In other news of the day, we had another successful ROV deployment, and got to look at beautiful pictures of the striated underwater surfaces of the iceberg and some sealife as well, including long, graceful chains of salps. We passed a small iceberg where penguins were frolicking. (I’ll see if someone else took some pictures!) And we are preparing for tomorrow’s launch of a Lagrangian Sediment Trap (LST), more about which tomorrow.

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