ITS GETTIN’ COLD IN HERE
It felt like -22°F (-30°C) for the midnight to noon crew last night. We’re the closest to Antarctica we’ve been and will be and we had a katabatic wind hit us overnight. Now that it’s fall down here in the southern hemisphere and this year’s ice is forming in Antarctica, the air at higher elevations gets cold and heavy and rushes down to the lower elevations, which means out to sea on our side of the continent. And into us (nooooo…..)
It's expected and we have great gear, but it’s a big problem for our science:
- The folks who drag a net to collect bigger stuff sitting on the bottom had the water freeze inside their sorting buckets. You can’t sort a sea star if it bounces off the ice instead!
- The 2 groups that uses a sled to coast on the bottom and gently swish tiny, delicate animals into a net on the sled were having their rinse water freeze. They can’t study their critters if they’re just making muddy critter ice cubes instead!
- The 2 teams punching clear tubes into the mud to bring up sections of the seafloor were having the water inside their tubes freeze. You know how water expands when it freezes? They can’t explode their mud tubes- we need those!
We expect our temperatures and windchills to climb back up to around freezing as we transit to other sampling spots farther from the continent. Today was much better already and we’re just about 50 nautical miles further out.
🌬 Virginia
Moonrise over Antarctica. The moon has been coming up around 4:30pm ship time, when the sun is in its final 30 minutes of its 2-hour sunset. It’s nearly full right now and shows up as huge and glowing like the setting sun. When I first saw this happening, I thought it was a gap in the clouds reflecting the setting sun. I turned back around 3 minutes later and gasped like I was auditioning for the role of “shocked crowd” in a one-woman play.
Your question: “I'm super curious why the iceberg with the Adélie penguins on it was so dark-colored. Is that sediment or guano from a huge flock of penguins (or both?)” This is that iceberg, and it’s a piece of a glacier that has flipped upside down (the bottom of the glacier is now the top of the iceberg). You can tell it used to be a glacier because of the long grooves very close together on the top of it. Those are a classic sign of rocks grinding the glacier ice away as it moves. That grinding pits rocks, pebbles, and dust into the ice on the glacier bottom, which is why this glacier looks really dirty- it is!
Fun fact: penguin poop is pink! You can see pink splatters on the left side of this glacier, on the smooth white part in the very left of the picture. Penguins eat krill, which have pink shells. I’ve heard penguins are actually pretty smelly and gross, in case you wondered 💩