KenMankoff

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.

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, ice, LMG09-09, 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.

Tags: Antarctica, fauna

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.

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, NBP09-01

Penguins and Polar Bears

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, NBP09-01

Pine Island Glacier and Minke Whale

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, ice, NBP09-01, Pine Island Glacier

Adelies on Iceberg

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, NBP09-01, Pine Island Glacier

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.

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, NBP09-01, Pine Island Glacier

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…

Tags: Antarctica, fauna, ice, NBP09-01, Pine Island Glacier

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…

Tags: fauna, Personal

Diatoms

Last week was the first time I'd ever looked through a microscope, (which I prefer to think of as a 1/telescope), and so I don't know much about diatoms, but I do know they are beautiful.

Diatoms are single celled phytoplankton (very small floating plants). There are lots of different species of them, and they exist both in the water today and have in the past. When they die, they sink to the bottom and become part of the geologic record as they get covered, and preserved, by new layers.

They are useful in two primary ways. First, certain types and species existed at different points in the past, so they can be used to age-date the geologic record. In addition, diatom growth is a function of the climate at the time they were alive. So we can look at the diatoms in the core and based on the number of frustules we can infer the amount of sunlight they received. (Think of tree rings, only really really small.) The amount of sunlight can be used to infer whether there was an ice sheet over the water where the diatoms, and that part of the core, existed.

So far, in the top twenty or so meters of core, we have seen very few diatoms. Here are two images, one of a partial diatom and one complete.

From Antarctica

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica, fauna, flora