Returning to shore.

We're in the middle of the Straits of Magellan about 8 or 9 hours from arriving at the dock in Punta Arenas.  Our return trip across the Drake Passage was actually quite smooth, a little bit of rock and roll action but nothing too severe (i.e. lots more people were at mealtime).  We packed up almost all our equipment before we left Palmer Station and the South Shetland Islands so the past few days were a time for most of us to catch up on sleep, trade photos and addresses, and begin some preliminary analysis of our data.

We won't have any quantitative results for quite some time as we need to take our net samples back to the lab and start processing them, however we can provide the following recap/summary of our trip.  In a little less than two weeks, our team of four did the following: 37 CTD casts, 35 mid-water net trawls, multiple deployments of our acoustic towfish, 6 days and ~ 200 km of small  boat acoustic surveys, measured the density of 146 salps, 585 krill, and 41 chaetognaths, multiple measurements of soundspeed from krill and salps, and measured and photographed hundreds of zooplankton.  It's quite an accomplishment and all the credit should go to the women of team Salp: Karen, Katie, and Melissa.  In addition to rough weather, they had to deal with a sleep-deprived chief scientist who would randomly wander into the lab and then make changes to everything they were doing.  I sincerely thank them for all their hard work.

Some of us are returning home to the states in time for the holidays while others of us are going to take advantage of being in South America to explore the natural wonders of Patagonia.  We've made a lot of good friends with the other scientists on board the ship, the Raytheon support staff, and the ship's crew and Captain.  We'll have a post-cruise dinner tonight in Punta Arenas and starting tomorrow people will start to go their separate ways.  It's a very odd life living and working on a ship.  We've been exposed to the same twenty people or so for the last month and in a few days we'll go our separate ways. Maybe we'll run into one another on a future cruise or when passing through somebody's town or maybe not.  All I know is that it was a great cruise in all regards from the science to the food (Thanks Ramses!) to the people and the people-derived entertainment.

Here are a few pics from the trip and that'll be it for Salp 2010.  The blog will continue to document our future research cruises and lab activities so check back in with us in a few months.

An array of salps from one of our net tows. They come in a variety of sizes.

The other major zooplankton we found here. Krill (these guys are adult E. superba) with stomachs full of green phytoplankton.

umpback whales waved their tales at us when we arrived in the Gerlache Strait.

When the waters were calm, you can see penguins swimming underneath the surface.

A leopard seal hauled out on the ice doesn't seem to bother a group of chinstrap penguins.

This is our laboratory.

 An iceberg sometimes made us change the path of the ship, but we usually didn't mind.

Thanks a bunch for all your efforts Karen, Katie, and Melissa. Let's do it all again next year!

Ta-Da!
-Joe