We are homeward bound!

At 05:25 local time on Tuesday, 19 April 2011, the rosette from station 140, the easternmost station we planned, and the last one on CLIVAR S04P, was brought into the Baltic Room. This completed the over-the-side work for our cruise, though it took a day to analyze the samples that we backlogged as we crossed the eastern boundary of our study area. We arrived at the eastern end a little earlier than expected due to an unprecedented (for this cruise) eight day string of days with light winds, plus our equipment worked nearly flawlessly.

Homeward bound!

At 05:25 local time on Tuesday, 19 April 2011, the rosette from station 140, the easternmost station we planned, and the last one on CLIVAR S04P, was brought into the Baltic Room. This completed the over-the-side work for our cruise, though it took a day to analyze the samples that we backlogged as we crossed the eastern boundary of our study area. We arrived at the eastern end a little earlier than expected due to an unprecedented (for this cruise) eight day string of days with light winds, plus our equipment worked nearly flawlessly.

Not everything on a research cruise goes as planned or hoped. We headed south last Saturday on a dual-purpose mission. The NOAA research ship Ronald Brown had stopped southward progress at an iceberg corridor near 69°S in 2008 when doing the north-to-south "P18" cruise for our long-term program. We hoped to extend their work south to the Antarctic continental shelf break somewhere near 100°W. There was also the issue of mooring recoveries in that same general area for LDEO investigator Stan Jacobs. We knew from satellite images sent to the ship that sea ice covered nearly 100% of the surface in the area, but the Palmer can handle sea ice if not too thick. Still, we decided to first see how long it took us to get to our desired end point near the shelf break, allotting a certain maximum amount of time to icebreaking (in accord with our master plan for the remainder of the cruise), at which point we would know how much time we had for our work plus the icebreaking and steaming as we headed back north. Admittedly success with the mooring recoveries seemed remote because those could not be done in full ice cover, but one never knows until trying.

The PolarTREC program is sponsoring a live event THURSDAY (April 14th) with Juan Botella on the satellite phone along with an on-line presentation. Anyone is welcome to participate on line, but registration is required. See the announcement below.

Not everything on a research cruise goes as planned or hoped. We headed south last Saturday on a dual-purpose mission. The NOAA research ship Ronald Brown had reached the ice edge in 2007 doing the "P18" cruise for our long-term program, and we hoped to extend their work south to the Antarctic continental shelf break somewhere near 100°W. There was also the issue of mooring recoveries in that same general area for LDEO investigator Stan Jacobs. We knew from satellite images sent to the ship that sea ice covered nearly 100% of the surface in the area, but the Palmer can handle sea ice if not too thick. Still, we decided to first see how long it took us to get to our desired end point, allotting a certain maximum amount of time to icebreaking (in accord with our master plan for the remainder of the cruise), at which point we would know how much time we had for our work plus the icebreaking and steaming as we headed back north. Admittedly success with the mooring recoveries seemed remote because those could not be done in full ice cover, but one never knows until trying.