KenMankoff

BUBBLES And A Fish

Bubbles is a small ROV built from a kit with a customized camera mount for looking up at ice from below and down at the bottom. Her construction was motivated by some underwater footage of bed load transport due to wave action.

BUBBLES is an acronym for some combination of the words Bubbles the Underwater Undersea Blue Bathymetric Basal Buoyant Little Liquid Exploration Submersible or Submarine.

Bubble was previously deployed in a hot-tub and in Younger Lagoon, Santa Cruz, CA, as test sites. Recently Bubbles went swimming under the ice-covered Silver Lake near Kirkwood, CA. Due to the late season, we could not walk on the ice and the shore-based deployment was complicated by the shallow waters. Nevertheless, she again proved to be liquid-worthy, and spent some time swimming in the shallow waters with some fish.

Bubbles heading under the ice. Photo by E. Lynne Harden

Bubbles operations. Photo by E. Lynne Harden

Bubbles was built by Ken Mankoff and E. Lynne Harden.

More Photos from Antarctica (LMG09-09)

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some photos from the latest trip to Antarctica. We sailed on the Laurence M. Gould through the Drake Passage and the Bellingshausen Sea, then along the Antarctic Peninsula to Palmer Station. We saw a lot of ice and some wildlife.

If you want to read about the trip you can do so here or by clicking on the LMG09-09 tag to the right.

If you were on the ship here is a GPX file so you can geotag your own photos.

Whales

Some photos of Minke Whales I took in January and February. The first is a pair, one is beginning to dive and you can see the fin, and the second has just breached while blowing. The second image was two pods, one about 10 and one about 20 in size, swimming around and through each other. I held my camera up to the eyepiece of a pair of binoculars to get a better zoom, hence the strange border on the image. The third is a single Minke in front of Pine Island Glacier.

Other whale news I have recently come across: The Australian Antarctic Division has just performed an aerial survey of Whales in the Southern Ocean. Perhaps they saw some of the same ones I saw.

And National Geographic has a very nice Blue Whale infographic website (including how it compares to the Minke Whales in size and weight). Click around there to learn all about their weight, size, anatomy, behavior, and threats to their health and livelyhood.

Seal Breathing Hole

I apologize my last post (More on Sextants) had a typo. 0.18 nm does convert to 333 m, but then I switched to 320 m for some reason.
 
If doing the math with your students, I suggest changing all 333 m to 320 m, (that way the 10 m offset to 310 m makes sense). Therefore, if the radar was 320 m away, it would have read 0.173 nm, not 0.18 nm.

Penguins and Polar Bears

Pine Island Glacier and Minke Whale

Adelies on Iceberg

Life Stinks

Yesterday we excited the ice (on the Southern side) into a polynya in the Pine Island Bay. The water turned from a clear dark blue to green. We are sailing through the most biologically productive ocean on the planet. I’m not sure but the seas here might have even more life than a rainforest. And it stinks.
 
The smell is subtle inside, but when you are working outside or with the doors open there is a strong smell of rotting vegetables.
 
In other news, land ho! We still cannot see the mainland but have passed some small islands. The islands are on the maps from satellites, but we are charting new waters and making our bathymetry maps as we go. We should see the continent (or at least the ice sheet covering the continent) within a day or two depending on our meandering path.
 
Current location: lat:-74.104 lon:-105.423
Current Temperature: -1.3C Air, 1.2C Water
Wildlife today: Billions of diatoms one Minke whale and a seal.

Icebergs and Whales

(Out of Order Repost)
 
The iceberg I saw a few hours ago was a sign of things to come. We are now surrounded by a dozen or so of them. Big and small, nearby and drifting over the horizon. These are just big ice cubes, nothing huge and tabular yet, and no sea ice yet.
 
And playing near the ship are a pod of Minke whales.
 
Not a bad day at the office…

A bat in the shower

Yesterday we found a bat (status: deceased) hanging from the shower head in the bathroom. The bathroom door and window were closed. The bathroom is in the house. Most of the time the house door is closed too. No, I don’t know how or why either…