On 11 June the wonderful endeavour of NBP11-03 came to an end. We arrived back in Punta Arenas, and spend a last day with hard work packing up all our gear, cleaning the labs, and unloading the ship. In the evening we then had the well deserved ‘end-of-cruise-party’. Everybody enjoyed a few drinks after five weeks of abstinence  (yes – the Palmer is a dry ship, with zero alcohol policy).

I would like to finish this blog with the facts list from our official cruise blog site:

 …we travelled approximately 2800 nautical miles… …

the biologists collected 1124 samples, representing 13 phyla, 11475 individuals, 1634 octocorals and 649 solitary scleractinians!!! …

the paleoceanographers collected 14398 solitary fossil corals (592 of which were subsampled on board), 106 kg of fossil stylasterids, 512 sponge samples, 418 live bivalves and 2159 fossil bivalves… …

we recovered 6 sediment cores comprising 333cm of mud… …

4210 km of multibeam bathymetric data were logged… …

723 bowlines were tied … …

we ate 100kg bacon, 330kg beef, 3600 eggs, and drank 500 pints of milk… …

we sent 6 GB of e-mails…. …

… and we posted 35 blogs, and 180 photos on our official cruise blog website … (check out http://antarcticcorals.blogspot.com/)

 It’s been a fantastic cruise – team work, hard work, wonderful people and quite a bit of luck with the weather has meant that we’ve had both a successful and really fun time. Now everybody goes on the long travel back home and start the research on the numerous samples we collected.

Group picture of the science party and the Raytheon staff onboard the cruise NBP11-03.

Bathymetry of Sars Seamount as mapped on our cruise using the shipboard multibeam system.

Sars is a quite sizeable seamount in the middle of the Drake Passage (~59.44S, ~68.08W), but why are we so interested in it? Sars is conveniently located in the middle of the Drake Passage, and hence in a spot where we should see changes in major water mass configurations on glacial-interglacial time scales. Finding old corals (e.g., corals with ages between 25,000 years ago and today) at Sars would enable us to obtain direct insights into the Southern Ocean’s role in natural climate change since the last glacial maximum (~20,000 years ago). It also has been reported in the literature that our favourite aragonitic cold water coral , Desmophyllum dianthus, was found on this seamount, and chief scientist Laura Robinson and myself published a paper on a 16,700 years old D.dianthus from Sars Seamount a couple of years ago (Robinson and van de Flierdt, 2009, Geology).

So it’s not too surprising that we put quite some effort into recovering corals and exploring the deep-sea habitat at Sars.  What we found was an amazingly rich seafloor fauna and a fantastic looking collection of fossil corals. But the most memorable moment on Sars was when one of our deployments brought up a huge number of enormous sponges (see the picture – they are VERY large!). Sponges occur pretty much in all water depth and make their skeletons from glassy needles, called spicules. With Kate Hendry, we even have a researcher onboard who studies these sponges, and she clearly had one of her most happy days at Sars. For the rest of us the mission was to watch out for those nasty spicules. They really become unpleasant once they slip into your gloves or cold weather gear…

Bye bye Sars  – welcome to the Cape Horn!

Kate Hendry with a happy smile in the middle of all the sponges.

High seas in the Drake Passage. Photo credit: Andrew Margolin.

The last five days had everything the title of this blog promises – pretty corals and rocky seas.

A few days ago, we had our first ‘bad’ weather. It was actually not that bad, but 40 to 50 knot winds (75 to 90 km/hr) are enough to stop our science operations, and to start the chairs and containers in the labs to move around. Under these conditions it is simply not safe anymore to work on the deck and hence we all are stuck inside. Sleeping can also be a bit challenging – I had one night, where I woke up a lot because my duvet kept falling off the bed. Luckily people did not really get seasick anymore as by now everybody has ‘grown their sea legs’ – a sailor’s expression for getting used to the motion on a ship.

We could however make good use of the days with a bit less sampling activity to square away all the corals we collected so far. Here a little bit of statistics on our achievements so far: The count up to today is a total of 110 deployments. Most of these are dredges (see picture) to collect corals, but we also did about 30 camera deployments to map and observe the deep-sea habitats down here, four CTDs to collect seawater, and a number of coring activities to collect sediments from the seafloor. The areas visited so far reach from the shelf off Chile, down to the shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula, and a number of locations in the middle of the Drake Passage (mainly seamounts). We found the pretty coral in the picture, Desmophyllum dianthus, at multiple locations, as well as a large variety of other solitary scleractinians – a type of cold water corals that is very well suited for our palaeoclimate work. Together with the samples we obtained from a cruise down here three years ago, we can now cover all mayor water masses in the Drake Passage, and with a bit of luck this will enable us to fully reconstruct the water mass structure down here on glacial-interglacial time scales – a big deal when trying to understand mechanisms of climate change in the past! We also found lots of interesting biology, and there will be many new species to be described from this trip.

The journey, science, and fun continues …

Fossil cold water coral Desmophyllum dianthus. Photo credit: Andrew Margolin.

Today I want to tell you about live on the ship and the people out here. Our science team comprises 19 students and researchers from six different countries (UK, US, France, Spain, Argentina), plus an Argentinean observer. We work in two shifts, from noon to midnight (the day shift), and from midnight to noon (the night shift). I ended up as the ‘watch leader’ on the day shift.  The watch leader is the person that keeps the science team informed on what is going on, makes sure all jobs that are outstanding get done, and that everybody in the team is doing ok.  As on all scientific ships, operations happen all around the clock, every day of the week. Chartering a big vessel for scientific purposes is a very expensive endeavour, and hence there is no such thing as a weekends, or days off. But we try to pace the science operations to make sure we do not overstretch the work capacity of all the lovely people on this ship.

MPC Skip and MT Sandy deploying a Blake Trawl.

Next to the scientists there are a number of people employed by Raytheon who help us get our work done. Raytheon is an organisation that supports all science projects around Antarctica for the National Science Foundation in the US (this is where the funding for this cruise is coming from). We have three MTs on board, marine technicians, who do the actual work of deploying the dredges/coring devices/cameras/CTDs and other things we throw over board to collect corals, mud, pictures, and water.  Furthermore we have a mapping specialist on the ship, who looks after the shipboard system to collect bathymetric data (data on the topography of the seafloor). There are also two MSts (marine science technicians), who help us with processing things in the labs, two IT people, and two ETs (electrical technicians). The MPC (marine project coordinator) overlooks all of them and is the direct interface between the science crew and the Raytheon people.

Of course there are many more wonderful people, like the engineers, who keep the ship going, the mates and the captain, who stir the ship from the bridge, and all the busy hands to keep the ship clean, fix small problems here and there, and last but not least, the galley people.

The galley on a ship is the kitchen, and I have to say a big word of praise here for the wonderful food the two cooks and their helpers have been producing so far. Luckily I am not too much into deserts, because if I would, I could feed myself on it day and night. There always seems to be a new cake or cookies on the counter, and the meals that are served every six hours are delicious.

Deserts from the galley (photo credit: Andrew Margolin).

In the few hours everybody has time off, people can entertain themselves by using the launch with its comfortable leather sofas and a rich movie collection, work out in the gym, or pay a visit to the sauna. Yes, you heard right – there is a sauna on this ship. After some of our long working days out in the cold Southern Ocean winds, people really enjoy the steamy environment. Personally, I rather work out in the gym, take a hot shower, and cuddle up in my bunk (bed) to read a few pages of the crime story I am currently into. While in ‘normal life’ I am very happy with 6-7 hours of sleep, this is not enough on a cruise like this one. After being out here for 2.5 weeks, I already went up to 7-8 hours of sleeping time. From experience I know, that by the end of the cruise I will spend 10 hours of my 12 hours off in bed, where the steady motion of the ship makes me sleep like a baby.

Hello everybody!

We have been out at sea for only a week now and despite spending half of our time with steaming to reach our sample locations, we have already made great progress on the science side.

Our first sampling site was on the shelf and slope area off South America.

Fossil cold water corals of the species Balanophylia.

There we collected hundreds of fossil corals, all the way from 300m to 2000m water depth. This is an enormous success! Of course we will only know how great our catch really is, once we get back to the lab and start dating all these corals. It really is the combination of the right age and the right sample depth that makes fossil corals so precious for palaeoclimate work.

Next to the corals we also collected seawater along one depth profile (surface to 4000m water depth). From these waters we will measure a whole suite of characteristics that will tell us about the chemical environment and water masses the corals grow in today. This is an important parameter to understand for figuring out why cold water corals are found in certain locations and not in others (today and in the past).

We also deployed the camera systems we have onboard (towed camera and drop camera). I have never seen pictures from such camera systems before, and it has been truly fascinating to watch the live feed during the operation and see how cold water corals live in the deep abyss of the Southern Ocean, and have a happy community of organisms around them.

Overall the first of our sampling sites in the northern Drake Passage has been more than successful – it was a homerun! It is amazing to see  what a capable ship’s crew and a group of motivated scientists can get done in a few days. Despite the hard work everybody puts in around the clock, there is always a smile in the room, a joke making the round, or that moment of silliness that will become more and more abundant as the cruise goes on…  We have a wonderful team out here and lots of cool science to be done! 

On Monday, 9 May 2011, 4 pm local time in Chile we left the port of Punta Arenas and set sail for the Southern Ocean. The steaming time to our first site was about 34 hours and this morning we started our actual work.

Co-chiefs Laura Robinson (WHOI) and Rhian Waller (Darling Marine Center/U Maine)

The main purpose of the cruise is to collect deep-sea corals across the major oceanographic fronts found in the Southern Ocean. By combining a biology team, lead by
Co-I Rhian Waller, and a palaeo team, lead by PI Laura Robinson, we will try to tackle questions reaching from current habitats of deep-sea corals, to how their distribution may have been different in the past and why. We will also use the fossil (dead corals) to address outstanding question in palaeoclimate research.

For example, I will mainly use the fossil corals we to reconstruct the structure and distribution of water masses in the Southern Ocean in the past. We currently think that there was a significant change in the way water masses were distributed and ventilated in the Southern Ocean during glacial times, and that this restructuring of the ocean played a major role in glacial-interglacial changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, records directly from the Southern Ocean are sparse, and with the corals we will collect on this cruise we will try to fill this gap.

Box core being deployed off the Palmer in the Southern Ocean

 On top of collecting corals, we are also going to collect a lot of complementary material. We will take images of the seafloor using a towed camera system, we will collect seawater samples to identify the chemistry of water modern corals are growing in, and we will also try to collect a bit of sediment to be able to compare this to the seawater chemistry and coral chemistry. Over the last days we had to familiarise us with the protocols to do all this, and we are glad that operations finally started.

A first report on how we are doing at our first site on the shelf will be coming up later this week or early next week!

4 pm local time in Chile we left the port of Punta Arenas and set sail for the Southern Ocean. Our estimated steaming time to our first site is about 35 hours. At this site we are going to start will all our science activities from sampling water, over coring, to taking pictures, and (of course) sampling

View from the plane from Santiago to Punta Arenas.

After (unintentional) 40 hours of travelling, I arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile. Some of it was due to the rather interesting fact that the Chileans use a different local time at the moment than we assume they do in the UK. Hence my 2 hour stay in Santiago de Chile was cut down to 50 minutes, which was not really enough to catch my flight down to Punta Arenas. But in the end it really does not matter whether you spend 34 hours or 40 hours on airplanes and in airports – it is simply a long, long day. The view out of the airplane was however very rewarding!

 

Nathaniel B. Palmer - my home for the next few weeks.

Yesterday we started loading all our science gear on the ship and setting up our laboratory spaces. It was a whirlwind of activity, and we made excellent progress. The highlight of the day was the collection of our ‘Antarctic cold weather gear’. The National Science Foundation of the US, who funds our expedition, maintains a litte store with clothing down here in Punta Arenas just for us scientists. Upon arrival we get a big bag with things such as thermal underwear, rain proof working trousers and jackets, gloves, hats, and a lot of other stuff.

Hi everybody,

As I am typing this, I am sitting at the airport of Miami, waiting for my connecting flight to Santiago de Chile. From there I will continue to Punta Arenas, the place where our ship and some of my colleagues are already waiting for the rest of us to arrive. The journey down there takes about 27 hours from London! Once I am there I will post a first little blog, hopefully with a shiny picture of the ship and us working hard to get the ship ready for our departure.

Cheers, Tina