Polar plunge

It’s tradition here at Palmer Station that when the boat leaves to give a proper goodbye, you jump in the water after it. Well, since all the other kids were doing it I figured I should as well. After watching the boat pull away, we all stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped from the pier into the freezing Southern Ocean. Really you just go numb, so the water doesn’t feel cold but man, that run to the hot tub was a little chilly going barefoot through the snow…

Everyone in the hot tube post-jump

It turns out that I get my own room here, I moved into the Bio building which is a bit older than the other main building. But it’s nice to have my own space and of course be super close to the Galley! The bottom of the Bio building is also where all the labs are. The other main building, GWR, has the gym, bar, dorm rooms, and a nice lounge.

Bio Building

We were finally able to have our Boating II course this past Friday. It was my first time driving a zodiac so I was really excited. We practiced landing on islands, which is pretty difficult because you have to hold the boat steady pushing the nose onshore while swells come in – it’s a mixture of a little gas and steering the boat in the right direction. Our boating coordinator bravely put on an immersion suit and flung himself into the water several times so that we could practice “man overboard” drills and retrieve him. Most notably as we were about to head into the station he flung himself out as I was driving…but I successfully steered a rescue without running him over. Now that we’ve had the class though, Kim and I can head out and start sampling!

Let me take a little time to explain the type of research I’m doing. The basic idea of Kim’s research is to use an echo sounder to locate and document krill, and plot their location/volume is comparison to tides. We will be going out during diurnal tides (one high and low tide in one day)to collect most of our data, to see if these tides effect where the krill are located and thus have an effect on the foraging behavior of penguins. This means once the diurnal tides come in we’ll go out everyday for almost 2 weeks! We plan to be out each day for 8 hours, so let the work begin…

The actual echo-sounder is a round black object, which connects to a computer via cable. We attach this black object to a piece of board to floats at the surface as we conduct our research. Appropriately the board has dorsal fins, and was in need of a new paint job this year. I took charge with sanding it down, applying primer, and then finally being able to decorate it. The idea is that it is a leopard seal (a ferocious predator down here in the Antarctic) with a fake dorsal fin attached to disguise itself as something less threatening. Science humor? 

Echo-sounder

My work in progress

Completed with spots

and teeth (echo-sounder attached on bottom)!