A Hectic Night!

Finally assembling the camera tripod

Hi People. We are back! And the news is good. Even under still shaky conditions we were able to finish our sampling at Station B. After foul-weather standby throughout the day shift, the winds dropped to around 15 knots and the megacore-deploying machine started to work once again.
One, two, three, four, five, six…hurtling over the fantail one after another, like a production line. Dave wisely asked one of our information techs to average the wind speeds for the last few hours to check if there was a drop or increasing trend. Ok, “good news” says Jen. We should act quickly! We have a few hours to act before those low-pressure systems come close to us again and increase the wind speeds. Lets go!! And while Dave orchestrated the megacoring crowd, Craig conducted his symphony of night workers in tuning up Da Tripod, our last programmed mission. The yoyo camera needed to be reconfigured for deployment on the tripod and the mooring array needed substantial setup before its final assembly and ultimate destiny: to lie at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean for 7 months.

Strobe in position and tested: “check!” Camera with all the programmed settings, photo interval times, F-stop, focal distance, shutter speed, pixel resolution: “all checked!” Sea battery charged and well secured: “check!” Acoustic releases tested overboard and pinging like a Levi Strauss violin: “check!” Nice, “… and the time has come” says Craig. “Let’s do it while the seas are still calm and the winds are not so strong…”. At that point a couple of megacores were still left to deploy; however, we could not waste such a good opportunity. It was a great and successful deployment once again! Thanks everyone!!

Artistic picture shot by the Da Tripod camera while still on back deck. It seems to be working just fine!

On that night a group effort developed on back deck; both the day and night shift worked together, relentlessly loading the empty tubes into the megacore and running with our sediment samples back to the wet lab for slicing, preserving, labeling and storing. There were 6 Megacore samples in an 8-hour time interval; not counting the time we spent deploying the camera tripod. The day-shift people were exhausted at some point around 6:00 am. Most of them had been awake for more then 20 hours and a few gave in to exhaustion and went to bed around that time. But all the effort was worth it! The FOODBANCS2 primary goals are accomplished. Everything we do now is a bonus, but the sensation of accomplished work is stamped in our
colleague’s faces and smiles. Rewarding!

Brian commands the megacore adventure. The last one!

So now what!? Now we have a 30-hour steam to our mysterious and new extra station up North. “Station Q”? No one actually knows where and what exactly will happen at station Q in terms of science. With exception of course, of our secretive PI’s, keeping the last mission inside a top-secret sealed envelope. Everyone is guessing and betting about what will be our next act! There is still hope for a quick stop at Deception Island for sightseeing and a quick hike uphill. Maybe before we arrive at “Station Q”, who knows?! We are now peering every minute through our portholes, seeking landmarks: cliffs, bays and even penguins; dark spots in the middle of the whitish and grayish seascape that has surrounded us for the last week. Keep looking people! Ohh look, I think I saw land!!

Signs of land

Stuck at Station B

You often hear people saying: “save the best for last” but it seems that it is not the case for us, unluckily. The calm sea and wind conditions have abandoned us, right before we were about to finish our work. We arrived at station B more then 24 hours ago and still are not able to deploy a single megacore in the water. At a slow pace we have performed a couple of camera (yo-yo) tows, deployed the CTD, and performed several bottom trawls, the last being the only gear that can still function in these sea conditions. Wind speeds are approaching 45 knots and waves are quite often inundating the back deck. It is amazing to look out of the hydro lab’s porthole and see the waves hitting the ship wall and over flooding the starboard deck. Some people are starting to feel seasick and having to invoke pills, patches and sea bands for the first time on the cruise. We still have about 7 megacores to deploy and after that we are pretty much done; we then just have to pack everything and steam north back to Punta Arenas…but not until the wind drops! Oh, and I almost forgot: we still have the superstar Da Tripod 2 the mission to be deployed. Cool!




This morning we even tried to get closer to Palmer station on Anver’s Island to get protection from the main winds and also to make a dream come true for those aboard who never stepped on Antarctic soil. No deal! The winds were too strong and the small inflatable boats (Zodiacs) can carry people only under safe sea conditions (wind speeds lower than 20 knots), which was definitely not the case. Winds were close to 40 knots. So now we are basically floating around station B waiting for sea conditions to get better so we can wrap up our sampling for this winter cruise and go home.





In the meantime we still have some science activity going on inside the ship. People are still finishing dissecting those cute invertebrates, our beloved sea cucumbers, sea urchins, worms, etc, inside the scary and freezing cold room. Brrrrr!! Liz and Pavica are some of our best invertebrate surgeons aboard and quite often have spent almost the entire 12-hour shift inside of that not-so-pleasant environment. After the bottom trawl is brought up to the deck and our avid team carefully sorts the catch, the dissectors slog away in the freezing temperatures of a 4 m2-area cold room with no windows, dissecting animal after animal to collect our samples. Guts, gonads, tentacles, gut contents (mud poop!! yick!!) spread all over the dissection board. Disgusting for some, but a pure taste of happiness and contentment for others!! In any case, the purpose behind this is a noble one: to find out how ocean warming and a reduction in sea ice cover will affect the Antarctic ecosystem. Thank you my dear friendly invertebrates. Rest in peace and Neptune bless your souls! And I really mean it!









Well it appears we are needed urgently on deck now! They are calling up on the radio. Maybe this is the call for a new start. Maybe it is another mega core going over? Nice, lets finish this station!


We will be back soon with news from the back deck. Aloha!!

Squeezing Energy out of our Mustang Suits

Sorry my friends! It has been a while since we last updated our web log. We’d like to thank Roy Arezzo, the high school teacher from New York embarked on this adventure with us, for sharing his posts and experiences with our friends back in Hawaii. His descriptions have helped us to reveal how amazing it is to live aboard a research vessel for a month-long period, far from our normal routines, our families and our friends. Anyway, it was a hectic sampling schedule that prevented us from sitting in front of the computer and sharing what has happened in the past few days. The science work has been overwhelming enough to keep our minds and bodies focused on collecting and processing samples of animals, water and mud!


We fell like an empty potato bag afterour 12-hr shift.


Ufhhhh!! Station AA finished! Only station B left to go. The last 28-hrs were probably the most work intensive of the whole cruise. We could probably make the Guinness Book of World Records for our fast sampling accomplishments, if such a record did indeed exist. It took us only 3 shifts (36 hours) to complete our sampling at station AA (7 megacores, 4 box cores, 1 Kasten core, 2 yo-yo camera tows, 2 CTD’s, 1 Blake trawl, 1 Otter trawl, 1 Plankton net town and several Tucker trawl tows, which were insisting on giving Linda and Dave a hard time). The work has been really well coordinated by the shift team leaders, i.e. our great Pi’s Dave DeMaster and Craig Smith. Dave is the workaholic in our shift (morning shift). If you think there is nothing left to do, Dave is there, either crawling on his knees polishing and preparing a new set of megacore tubes in their shafts to be deployed in a couple of hours or coaxing the box core spade into place for the next shift. He is definitely in love with those inanimate creatures made of stainless steel! Dare you lose one of those precious box core screws, then you will be in trouble! He walks back and forward from the back deck to the forward dry lab (where we can track all gear deployment information from 5 colorful and informative computer screens). “Roger…kasten core is on deck”… “Roger…box core is going over…”… “Back deck calling bridge…the bottom trawl was successful again…over”



Megacore: one of Dave's favorites.




Tucker trawl: it gives Dave a hard time, but even so he loves it!!


What about our chief scientist Craig: what a funny guy! Like Dave, he is deploying and recovering the gear, walking around the main deck keeping people from falling sleep during their shift, and assigning tasks to everyone. He is always making jokes, keeping our group motivated for the hard work. But no jokes around him are allowed when he is on the radio speaking with the bridge or back deck to send equipment over the side of the ship. He is really serious and concentrated at that point. And what about his meticulous way of working with his gear: Funny! Especially with his fancy and expensive digital camera toys! That is amusing to watch, but at the same time we learn a lot from that behavior since we start paying attention to the details that make high-quality science possible in a challenging environment like Antarctica. He always wants to make sure that everything is double-checked, triple –checked or even quadruple-checked before deploying the camera, but all these precautions sometimes are not enough to prevent bad things from happening. That is the way scientific fieldwork goes.



“Angelino, do you really think this strobewill fire? We need to be really sure you know!!”





"Make sure all the nuts and bolts aretightened hard enough. But not too hard, please do not damage my littlechild!!"



Let’s not hide the truth: we are all really tired!! Not surprisingly, our esteemed colleagues are beginning to show their fatigued state of being. Some are also showing the first signs of moodiness, a symptom that they are missing home and the safety and security of firm ground. This is all perfectly normal for people that have been at sea for a while. No disagreements will last more than a couple of hours though. And if they last more than that, we are sure that during our last night in Punta Arenas, the salsa dancing in one of the famous night clubs will break the ice and seal the peace among our ship-board family again.





Little Linda after a madness shift. She stillhas energy to upload the scientific pictures into the public drive of the ship.


We are transiting to our Station B, the last of our scheduled 5 stations. However, since we have been working really hard and have had calm seas, itseems that we are ahead of schedule. There has been some gossip about another sampling station (some extra work…ohhhh NOOO!!!). But it is ok; we are strong Vikings at sea prepared for extra work! Ahahahaha!! Some other version of the gossip however says we might stop somewhere close toeither the Deception Island or Elephant Island for a quick leg stretch and scenic views. Cool!! Since we have not been able to step on Antarctic soil during this winter cruise, everyone is excited about the possibility. Let’s keep our fingers crossed! But if more work comes, lets get it on!!! Aloha!!




Fabio and Linda wonder about being on Antarctic soil again! Hopefully!

Lab Spaces: July 20, 2008

Roy Arezzo
New York Harbor School, Brooklyn, New York

Daily Log 11: Lab Spaces
Sunday, July 20, 2008

The big story on the NBP is the changing ice as we transit north. We are back into the pancake ice, similar to what we saw on our way south, and although we are certainly not heading out of winter by any stretch it did feel warmer today. It is amazing how -1° C could feel just fine with low wind and proper gear. We enlisted the fire hose to clear away Station F mud and ice to start our mud slinging with a fresh deck. Here at Station E the Megacore also agreed with warmer temperatures and we were able to load and unload it outside without taking apart the moving parts and blasting it with the hair dryer.

I am starting to get the layout of the ship, but I am surprised at how many spots I have missed over the past 10 days at sea. Today I realized that Aquarium lab fish tank configuration had changed and the spare tank was missing. It turns out that it was moved and rigged for an experiment that I knew nothing about, in a place I had not been.

There is now an aquarium set up in the dark of the cold room to monitor feeding behavior in our bottom-dwelling animals. Three separate species of “sea cucumber” from our Box core samples are being fed enriched algae labeled with carbon-13. Scientists from North Carolina State University will later test the animal’s gut and tissues and determine where the carbon-13 ends up. We are interested in how much feeding they do and how quickly the algae are converted into body tissue which will help us understand metabolic rates and growth.


Rhian Waller working in her coral samples: 'Nasty' chemicals required.




As for laboratory facilities on this research vessel, scientists occupy about 10 different spaces on any given day. Most of the laboratory spaces are on the main deck along with the galley and access to the back deck.


Almost all the deployment activities happen off the back deck area which is L shaped, and constructed with additional winches and an A frame both at the stern and the starboard side. The Marine Technicians who run the deck operations have a shop/office off of the back deck and as you move forward through the ship the first space for science is called the Aquarium lab.
Since the floor of this space has a grating and is designed to drain we do much of our dirty work in this space and it has a built in trunk-sized chamber that circulates water to store live organisms. We make good use of the Aquarium lab bench-tops to prepare our cores samples for
experimentation and the seawater hoses to wash away the mud from our equipment. To the port and forward of the aquarium lab are the Hydro Lab and the Wet lab. The Hydro lab is where we take water samples to process for nutrients and it houses some of the analysis instruments. The Wet lab is a mixed use space where samples are processes and some of the camera equipment we deploy gets stored and worked on. Forward of the wet lab is the Baltic room which is home to the CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth sensors) water sampler. This room is equipped with a separate winch and a starboard bay door so the CTD can be stored indoors and deployed regularly from a separate space allowing us to do back to back deployments more fluidly.



The Hydro Lab


As you move forward you come to two cold environmental rooms that look like walk-in freezers but have bench tops for lab work. Antarctic samples often have to remain cold (around 0° C) for experimentation. We use one of these spaces for dissection. The bio lab is typical laboratory space with bench tops and fume hoods and across from the bio lab is the aft dry lab which is
where we store a lot of our lab materials. The dry lab has a good assortment of bench tops and counters with cabinets and serves as a good multi-use space. The forward dry lab is essentially a computer room and serves as a command center for the scientists to watch the monitors and
communicate with the bridge. Across the hall is the Electronics Lab which also has computers for general use and office space for the IT folks and the electronics technicians. There is a microscope room on the first deck but we mostly use the microscope mounted in the dry lab to check out our plankton.






Greg, our Electronic technician working in fixing some of our gear.


Freezer: Where our dissector colleagues make complex surgery in the deep-sea creatures.




Dry lab: were we try to work 'clean' with no mud mess.


Since I find myself both in the lab and on deck often, I have started using the mud room near the wet lab to get in and out of gear. When equipment is on its way up to the surface, I often feel like a fireman as I rush into the mud room and jump into my safety wear. I am equipped with steel toe fireman boots and water proof overalls to throw over my regular thermals and work clothes. On top, I wear the standard mustang float coat with reflective markings, fleece coat, a hat, neck gator, water proof gloves and a hard hat. There is the full jumpsuit mustang suit option but I find a bit too warm and difficult to get in and out of so I opt for the two-piece. Proper attire is mandatory on deck.

Calling Houston! First Mission Accomplished!

We wrapped up our sampling operations at our first station around 1:00 am early this morning, and our now leaving station G behind. Everyone is already feeling the intensity of the 12-hour work shifts attacking their backs and joints, and there are still 4 stations ahead of us! We have a short 12-hour steam to the north to reach station F, our next target. (If you are lost with all those letters, please take a look at the map of our cruise track where you will find our stations positioned along the west Antarctic Peninsula – the map is on the webpage of the FOODBANCS project, linked in the top right of the blog page).

All our sampling operations at our first working station were successfully completed in 2.7 days. We have sent down to the sea-bottom mega cores, box cores, kasten cores, Blake and Tucker trawls, and our super bottom yo-yo camera. The most anticipated event of this station, however, was the deployment of the Da Tripod, our time-lapse camera mooring that will stay on the bottom of the Western Antarctic Peninsula shelf for a 8-month period taking a digital picture every 12 hours. Almost everyone was on deck to witness the launching operation. Even some people from the morning shift showed up on deck wearing their pajamas to watch the deployment. Big event!! Everything went perfectly. Now we just wait for the recovery on our next cruise in February-March of 2009.

We are all delighted by the calm seas and the gorgeous sunsets and sunrises we have been witnessing in the last few days. The 5-min breaks between our gear deployments gives us time to grab cameras and act like photographers from National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. The lighting is always perfect for good shots due to the low angles of the sun. Remember, we only have 4.5 hours of sunlight during the whole day! The result is impressing! See below a few of these samples.

The title of one of the last blog postings “PARKED IN THE ICE”, is a literal description of our current state at sea. The ship seems to be docked in the ice while we run around with our samples and experiments.That makes our lives much easier. It is a dream for every oceanographer! No shaking, no bouncing, no seasickness (meaning vomiting overboard after every meal - arrrrguhhhh!!). Well, the only real challenge is the freezing temperature that has been hovering around 12 degrees F (- 11 degrees C), with wind-chill as low as – 9 degrees F (- 23 degrees C), which insists on freezing our nose and fingertips. O well, nothing is perfect. Not to worry, we are tough sailors!

Another highlight of station G was the bottom trawling. The Blake trawl came up full of various creatures straight from the darkness of the deep sea bed, 600 m below the ocean surface. There were a few bottom fishes, octopuses, sea stars, solitary corals, anemones and sea urchins, but the main charismatic organisms were the sea cucumbers (holothurians). Protelpidia and Peniagone are the scientific names given to the main stars of this amazing life forms that burst from the inhospitable deep Antarctic ocean. More than 40 lb (~ 18 Kg) of those animals were collected in a single trawl. You can see in the pictures below that our avid research team was busy sorting the amazing catch for long hours during the night. And we also had time to play around with some of the sea cucumbers in an aquarium filled with sediment and cold seawater, mimicking their natural environment. We were able to see some of their feeding behaviors, ingesting the food particles mixed with the muddy substrate. One of the goals of our project is to track what these animals are eating during different seasons of the year and relating it to the sea- ice duration in the surface ocean. While studying their feeding strategies in low and high sea-ice conditions, we can make predictions on how climate warming will affect the functioning of these benthic ecosystems and how species will respond loss of sea ice.

Keep following us in the next adventures. Station F, our next stop, will be our last chance to be surrounded by the calmness of the sea ice. As we move north, the absence of ice and the not so good weather forecast make us wonder whether our glory days are about to end. Feel free to send questions or messages to one or more of our research team members. We would love to hear from you! Aloha!

Parked in the Ice - July 17, 2008

Folks are working around the clock now and with ice not as consistently thick as first reported we look to be ahead of schedule and should be on our first station site (station G of 5 station on our transect) between 5 and 6 AM. The ice in the south is still thicker than the pancake ice we
rolled through earlier and it is pretty loud against the hull as heard from the galley at meal time. The sound at times resembles a passing train. Despite the noise it is spectacular to witness.




The last thing we saw tonight after 1 AM was PI, Craig Smith and team Brazil working on the bottom camera, referred affectionately to as the Yoyo Camera. The NBP technicians and scientists worked together to create a new frame for the camera set up welded in Punta Arenas and rigged on the ship. It is quite the feat to rig this high tech gear at sea but with a full
machine shop, the experience and skill of the scientists and the crew it seems like we can make anything happen. Despite all the gear and talent much goes wrong and folks spend hours taking apart and refitting the equipment.




The yoyo camera will be pulled near the bottom at each study site to take real time digital images of sea floor. As it moves it will be dropped down and retracted along the bottom, which is where I assume the name came from. There is a trigger that sets off a strobe and the 35mm camera lens when it makes contact with the bottom taking a high resolution digital image of
four square meter area. From the cable we can control how many times it makes contact and distance of the area we photograph. By creating a grid of the images, the data can be used for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the seafloor. In addition to seeing what is on the bottom in order to give us a whole picture about the sediment we pull up in our
coring instuments we can collect data on species diversity, detritus coverage and feeding rates.

Dr. Smith rigs the name frame of the bottom camera

There are 26 deployments of the nine main instruments we sample scheduled for the first two days at our Station G, the furthest point south on the cruise. There are plans to core the bottom, check the water quality, collect images and trawl for plankton and larger organisms. There was much science talk today about order of operations once we are on station but the highlight for all was clear skies and the first sight of Antarctica near Adelaide Island.




Sunset was around 2:30 PM and I was on the bridge and surroundings decks for the entire photo shoot. I was very excited to be witness to 360 degrees of amazing views. If a picture is worth a thousand words I should stop here and let my images say the rest.

BOW: Pancake ice of the bow of the NATHANIEL B. PALMER

STARBOARD: Sunset off the starboard side

STERN: Ice, Broken

PORT: First views of the Antarctic Peninsula under the moon drenched in sunset

Smooth Crossing - July 14, 2008

In the last couple of days we have had a smooth passage through the almost freezing waters of the Southern Ocean. The Drake Passage seems to have spared us from shaking and bouncing around, preventing the inexperienced as well as the experienced sailors from having serious seasickness. We have had a few bad snowstorms in the last couple of nights causing waves to swash on the back deck of Nathaniel Palmer. Fortunately, the NBP is a stable icebreaker, so most of us felt safe in our computer office spaces working to prepare our sampling log sheets. One can actually imagine that if we were in a different boat, many would have had lost the battle against keeping food down. Thanks Dr. Palmer!

Meanwhile, the helicopter deck was not the place for basketball today. However, after dinner a few people were up for the ultimate challenge at the foosball table. Althought there were four Brazilians , it seems that their soccer skills did not transfer to the mini foosballers. That is, except for Paulo Sumida, professor at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, who together with Prof. Craig Smith defeated nearly all their opponents. The remaining Brazilian crowd, Angelo, Fabio and Arthur are engaged in daily training for a revenge match very soon.

Our coordinates now are 62 degrees 04.233’ S and 67 degrees 33.157’ W. The temperature outside is 29.5 degrees F (– 1.4 degrees C ) but the wind chill is 5.4 degrees F (– 14.8 degrees C). We still have one and a half days to reach the southernmost station of our transect, station G, where all the fun starts.We have already been split into two work shifts and people from the nightshift (midnight to noon) have started to acclimate to their new schedule for the next three weeks, sleeping during the day and waking up late at night. We are all excited about getting to work and already psychologically preparing ourselves for freezing our noses and finger tips in the backdeck. Get ready for excitement and adventures coming up soon!! Aloha!

July 12, 2008 - Steaming South

Roy Arezzo
New York Harbor School, Brooklyn, New York
FOODBANCS2, Antarctic Peninsula
NATHANIEL B. PALMER
Daily Log 3: Steaming South
Saturday, July 12, 2008

A slow morning is always welcome. We are still transiting south and there is some down time between prep-work. There are certain amenities aboard to make ship life more at home. In addition to the gym and the galley there is nice lounge on the second deck with a library of videos, cushy recliners, acoustic guitars and board games. The conference room on the third deck has a comfortable work space, lots of books, and computer stations. Our cabins are small but cozy. The bridge has magnificent 360 degree views and is and a welcoming crew. For the ballers in town there is the “helo hanger” which in addition to a basketball rim is equipped with a foosball table next to the chemical storage container. The only thing not stored in the helo hanger is the helicopter since we do not have one aboard. It turns out that any game involving a round ball is generally a bad idea on a moving boat. This does not stop the science team of the NBP. Any chance to get physical with a round ball is met with gusto and tonight the PHD team of Paulo and Craig ate up competition for over 10 matches until Roy and Dan (UH coral reef guy) put a stop to their winning streak with a few close wins.

I have been going out on deck each day for air. As we extend deeper into the Drake Passage the seas have risen. There is much snow, ice and wind out there now and we are not permitted on decks without checking in with the bridge first.

Headed south through the rough waters of the Drake Passage


We are fortunate to have an international crew aboard the NBP. There are scientists from the U.S, U.K, Croatia and Brazil all bringing a wealth of experience to the project. Today I tagged along with team Brazil for a little chemistry. We mixed stock solutions to prepare for experiments aimed at assessing the biomass of organisms we recover from the sea floor. We mostly created alkaline buffers and diluted acids to be used for critter ATP analysis; one way of measuring the total amount of organisms housed in the muddy bottom.

The scientists from Brazil come to us by way of the Oceanographic Institute at the University of Sao Paulo. Dr. Paulo Sumida worked on the first FOODBANCS Project in 1999 – 2001 with Dr. Craig Smith. Paulo grew up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where despite being landlocked 80 kilometers from the coast he dreamed of joining Jacques Cousteau missions to the deep sea. He studied biology in a local university and was granted a scholarship to study marine science abroad at the University of Southampton in England. His advisor, Paul Tyler, a friend of Craig Smith introduced the two of them at a conference. When Paulo was finished with his degree he was invited to University of Hawaii (UH) to do his post-doctorate work on the FOODBANCS Project with Craig Smith. He is a now a professor back in Sao Paulo where his research focuses on deep sea science. His lab continues to collaborate with the research out of Hawaii and some of his students work at both sites.

Arthur Guth has his Masters of Science in biology and works in Paulo’s lab as a biology technician. In addition to being my cabin-mate, he has a great love of marine science. Back in Brazil where he lives with his family he enjoys photography and scuba diving. Arthur has a brilliant camera and has been very generous in sharing his photos. He is helping out with trawls and dissections this cruise and looks forward to studying new organisms since this is first time in Antarctic waters.

Angelo Bernardino is a doctorate student in Paulo’s lab back in Brazil but is currently working at UH as a visiting research scholar on the FOODBANCS2 project through a joint collaboration between the two universities. Angelo has always been interested in diving and spent a lot of time by the water back in Brazil. He became familiar with FOODBANCS when he was permitted to use the images from the first project of the sea floor for his master’s degree thesis. Although his current research is mostly focused on comparing benthic communities of various nutrient inputs, such as sunken wood, kelp and whale falls, his expertise in underwater photography has him leading the team on the time lapse camera system.
Fabio DeLeo, our blog-master, is a graduate student who earned a masters degree in biological oceanography at the University of Sao Paulo where he also became familiar with Craig Smith’s work through Paulo. He grew up spending time on the water with his family and he has a strong interest in fish populations and fisheries science. His thesis work is in benthic communities found in submarine canyons in waters off the continental shelves of New Zealand, Hawaii and California. These canyons range in depth form 300 to 1500 meters and he hypothesizes that in many benthic systems, coastal nutrient inputs to these canyons supply much of the nutrition for fisheries important to humans for food. Fabio will be called upon on many tasks throughout the cruise and he currently is working with Angelo to get the camera ready for the depths.

From Left to Bottom Right: Fabio, Angelo, Arthur and Paulo work on the camera frame

Today the tech team aboard assisted me with downloading some of the video footage I shot of our crew preparing for the voyage. Unfortunately, I am having trouble figuring out their software so anyone familiar with Final Cut software who happens to be around 63o S drop in and give me a hand.

July 11, 2008 - Security Check

Yesterday all the scientists on board had a security briefing. Being in an isolated place such as this research vessel, surrounded only by the blue, near-freezing Southern Ocean, requires special attention of all of us. We need to be prepared if an emergency situation occurs, such as a fire, people falling in the water (‘man overboard’), or in an extreme case, abandoning the ship if it is sinking. Abandoning the ship is the last thing we all would like to see happen. But if deemed necessary, we need to be prepared and trained for it. The chief mate Sebastian explained the importance of the survival suits, which are giant orange rubber suites that make us look like Gumbi. We put them on if we need to leave the ship by jumping into the water . In the pictures you can see our top models Rhian Waller (Univ. of Hawaii) and Brian Pointer (North Carolina State University) struggling to get into the survival suits.


We also had to practice our ‘emergency plan’ for boarding the life boat. This small boat fits 40 people and contains food and water for 4 days. This time span also represents the most likely time interval for being rescued by another vessel; after four days it is much less likely that the boat would be found. Listening to all those statistics make us even more cautious with safety procedures aboard the ship. We must all be very careful with the flammable chemicals, of which there are lots on board.



















LOOSENING THE MUSCLES
After all the security meetings and briefings in the afternoon, people had free time to loosen their minds and bodies. Some of them went to the gym, others went to the Lounge room to watch a movie, and others found some space to play basketball in the empty helicopter hanger. Yes! It is true! We do have space for that on the ship. Craig Smith, Dave Demaster and their
students went for a match on the O3 deck from 8:00 pm until 10:0 pm. Time long enough for an ankles turned a finger jammed but no serious injuries. Take care guys; we need those bodies ready to rock in a few days when real work starts!!


































THE SCIENCE STARTS
Today at 3:00 pm, our first scientific meeting is scheduled in the Conference room. The Principal Investigators Craig Smith and Dave DeMaster will assign people into two 12-hour watches and give them their main tasks during the watch. We will be working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

July 10, 2008 - The Last Day in Port

Today is our last day In port. The ship leaves at noon but everyone is expected to be aboard at 10:00 am. Last night we moved from our hotels to the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer after everyone went shopping for things that we will not likely find on board (candies, chocolates, etc). It was also our last opportunity to check the Internet for news. It will be almost a month without internet connection to the real word. Only limited-email communication will be available. The web blog, you are logged right now is updated by a computer technician at University of Hawaii. We just send our texts and images and she uploads them in the web. Thanks Tara Hicks for doing this for us!!

Yesterday we finished loading the ship and started working on a few last minute tasks such as assembling the float lines for the camera mooring and making a few adjustments to the camera system. We weighed the camera tripod (lowered by the winch) under the water so we could calculate the number of floats we need for the exact buoyancy of the whole mooring line.

Everyone is getting excited about steaming down south. The temperature in Punta Arenas is still below the freezing point ( 28 degrees F, -1 degrees C) and we are all wondering how it will be after a couple of days at sea getting closer to the Antarctic continent.

The other US Antarctic vessel, RV Lawrence Gould, arrived in port from Antarctica a couple of days ago. The scientist and crew aboard had a rough the crossing of the Drake Passage. They had winds blowing at 50 knots and waves higher then 23 feet bouncing the ship around. We hope our crossing of the Drake Passage (named after Sir Francis Drake!) will be a bit smoother!
Keep posted for news of our crossing of the Drake, which some sailors say is the roughest body of water in the world. Aloha!!

GETTING TO WORK

Our workspace: the warehouse on port


Liz and Angelo doing 'the job'

After a long night’s sleep, went down to the warehouse by the docks, where all our gear was shipped from Hawaii months ago. First, we checked to see if everything had arrived, and then we began work assembling the gear for our expedition, in particular the time-lapse camera tripods. These tripods will support digital cameras taking pictures of the seafloor at a depth of 500 m for seven months. The tripods are made of an aluminum frame bolted together will stainless steel bolts. To avoid corrosion during seven months in the ocean, the stainless bolts need to be carefully isolated from the aluminum frame of the tripod with plastic washers and electrical tape. This makes the tripod assembly a very slow, painstaking task. Liz and Angelo are the tripod masters, having spent hours twisting and taping bolts.

UNPACKING AND REPACKING

The Hawaiian outfit


The 'Antarctic explore's outift'


Today was the beginning of our long journey. After 40 hours of traveling, the first researchers from UH Manoa arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile, where the thermometers read 28 o F (– 2o C). The whole city, located in Chilean Patagonia, is covered by a powder of snow. After we unpacked our luggage and moved into our cozy little hostel on shore, we took the first step in transition to Antarctic explorers – we changed our outfits!

You really know you’re going somewhere extreme when you need special clothing to survive. All researchers working in Antarctica are issued a full set of “extreme cold weather” clothing – for the Hawaiian team, this was a dramatic change (see photos). From aloha shirts and board shorts we switched to heavy down parkas, goggles, insulated coveralls and thermal boots. Craig and Fabio posed for a ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot to give you an idea of the change. The heavy clothes will protect us from temperatures below zero F (- 17o C) and wind-chill factors far lower while we work in deck on the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer.