It was around 5 in the morning. Katie and I were performing titrations with sea water of different salinities in order to find the densities of individual salps, and I happened to look outside. It was the first crystal clear sunny day in a while and there were hundreds of birds swooping down to the water. A dozen or so penguins broke the surface of the water, porpoising. Porpoising is when penguins leap out of the water while swimming, making them look like they’re pretending to be porpoises. Katie and I ran up to the 01 deck (above the main deck where we work) to see the feeding frenzy. A couple of whales spouted. The boat steamed steadily along, and we realized that we and the people on the bridge (where you steer the boat) were probably the only ones who had seen this. The pictures I took did not adequately represent the explosion of life that we witnessed on that cold crisp sunny morning.
When we returned to the lab, the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler; also shows bottom contour) showed that we had just passed over a sea mount.
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| A seamount as seen on the ADCP computer. |
Sea mounts are underwater features that are typically associated with high levels of biological productivity. This is often due to the upwelling of nutrient-rich deep waters that they cause.
- Karen
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