Weather or not...

One of the features of working on a ship is that the weather (and sea) conditions play an important role in determining what you can and can't do (research-wise) from the boat.  In order to safely deploy and

retrieve equipment, the ship and deck crew are often at the mercy of the sea.  As we sailed away from Palmer Station this morning (we're a few blog posts behind right now but they should show up soon), I met with the ship's Captain (or Master) Sebastian who showed me this weather map:

There's a large low pressure
system stretching from continent to continent which means we may be
getting some rough weather as we attempt to begin our survey.

The map shows a large low pressure system that covers almost all the area between the Antarctic peninsula and the southern tip of South America. Where you have large pressure gradients, you get strong winds. Where you have strong winds (and lots of fetch or area for that wind to blow over), you get large waves.  We're headed toward our first station, but it's not clear if we'll be able to get there tonight. Or if we do get there, whether or not we'll be able to safely deploy the CTD, net, or acoustic systems on the ship. I'm going to go catch a couple of hours of sleep and see how things look when I get up (or somebody wakes me up). One of the benefits (features?) of being Chief Scientist on the cruise is that I'm never really off the clock, so I can expect to be woken up if there are any issues that might arise while I'm asleep.  So I generally try to catch some shut-eye whenever I know there'll be a couple of hours of transiting ahead of us.

Last night after we were done off/on-loading cargo and then continuing this morning before we left the dock, we started to test out the equipment that we'll be using on the cruise.  The blue thing hanging off the stern of the Gould is our acoustic towfish which contains a two-frequency echosounder that we will use to assess what types of small animals are in the ocean. We tow it from the ship while we transit between stations, but in order to get useful information from the instrument we have to calibrate it. In this case, that means hanging some metal spheres underneath it, lowering the whole thing in the water and measuring the echoes (from sound we transmit) that reflect off the spheres.  We had a couple of hiccups with the data recording end of things but thanks to our two ETs (Mike and Tony) we got those straightened out this morning and that piece of equipment is ready to go.  We also tested our small-boat mounted echosounder which also was working well.

Our acoustic towfish being lowered into
the water at the pier at Palmer Station (various buildings are in the
background). This instrument is like the fish-finder on a boat (except a
lot more complicated) and we'll use it to detect small animals in the
ocean as we do our survey).

Caption: ETs (Electrical Techs, not
extra-terrestials) Tony (left) and Mike (right) pose for a picture with
our towfish before craning it over the side of the ship.

- Joe