I've officially
been a Palmer Station resident for 5 days now! The ship left on Monday evening to head north back to Punta
Arenas. It was definitely a
strange feeling standing on the pier and watching the ship leave. However, I didn't have very long to spend
thinking about this as it's traditional to do a polar plunge when the ship
leaves the station. Jumping in the
Antarctic water definitely erased any thoughts of the ship from my mind.
There are
currently 33 people at Palmer, about half scientists- half support staff (station
manager, administrative, instrument tech, power plant, chefs, boating
coordinator, cargo and supply, etc.)
Notice that I did not mention maintenace in that list. Very similarly to GMRI, there is no
maintenance staff at Palmer.
Everyone is responsible for helping to clean.
While
it is light all day, I have not actually seen the sun since last weekend.
In true Antarctic form, our weather has been overcast, windy and rainy all
week. The typical wind the last few days has been around 20-25 knots (~23-29
mph) with gusts around 35 knots (~28 mph). However, we have had sustained
wind speeds of 45 mph and gusts of over 50mph several times already.
There
are several science groups here, each working on something different. As I mentioned before I'm in the
microbial group, then there is a phytoplankton group, a zooplankton group and
the birders. (Other groups are
here at other times of the year as well.)
Together, we cover all of the trophic levels in the marine food web in
this region. All of us depend on
zodiacs to do our field work. For
safety reasons we can only use zodiacs when winds are less than 20 knots and if
winds reach 25 knots they call back any zodiacs that are already out. Essentially, this ends up meaning that
planning is very difficult.
Anytime someone talks about doing field work it seems to end with the
phrase "weather cooperating".
For
my lab group, most of our field sampling involves collecting water
samples. Ideally we go to two
different places twice a week and collect water at 7 depths at each place. We're interested in the microbial
activity in the water. There's several
analyses we do with the samples. One
thing we're interested in is how much microbial activity is going on. We measure this using
radioisotopes. Leucine is an amino
acid that is normally limiting for microbes. By adding a radioactive form of leucine to a water sample we
can measure how much has been taken up by the microbes and therefore, how much
activity there is going on. We also
measure the abundance of microbes using flow cytometry. Flow cytometers work by shooting light
beams through the sample and then based on the amount of scattering it can
determine abundance of particles and some other properties, such as size.
I
am also enjoying getting to see the wildlife around here! There's lots of birds, seals and
multiple penguin species. A couple
of gentoo penguins were hanging out around our pier this morning and an Adelie
penguin was playing around our boat yesterday.
A
gentoo penguin next to the pier
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