Leaving Palmer is always bittersweet at best. You are leaving friends whom you have grown close too, in many cases over multiple seasons. Some of them you will see again at Palmer or elsewhere. Some perhaps never again.
As a follow up to Chuck's and Maggie's descriptions of our diving operations (and as a tribute to Dio), I’m going to talk about today's dive. The weather has been fairly bad this month, more temperamental that I remember it being in April. But today we finally got to get away from station.
But before these words address the title I have to say Finally – dive ops today!
Sea stars, also known as starfish (this latter term is a bit of misnomer considering they are certainly not "fish"), are common sea floor animals that are found in all the world's oceans. Most have five rays or arms, but others can muster as many as twenty-five to thirty as saw my previous "Unexpected Surprises" post. Their arms are lined with legions of tiny tube-feet that operate using a unique hydraulic plumbing system that squeezes water through tubes with tiny valves that open and shut. The tube-feet serve primarily for locomotion, but also play a role in food capture and sensing prey.
Every Sunday morning on station Julie and I plus a few station folks gather around to make Thai porridge which we then eat while watching Bobs Burgers for Sunday Morning cartoons up in the Lounge.
On Monday this week we built 18 mesocosm "universes" in the Palmer Station aquarium. That may sound a little out of this world, but let me explain. This week we started our mesocosm experiment, utilizing the relationship a large species of brown algae (the same big branched brown Desmarestia menziesii I mentioned in a previous post) and all of the amphipods on it. We created smaller simulated natural "community" assemblages from carefully collected Desmarestia. See the image right for my multple universes, complete with air lines and pH probes.
The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming regions of our planet. We know this in large part because daily air temperatures have been measured over the past sixty years just a few miles down the coast from Palmer Station at Vernadsky Station (currently a Ukrainian station and previously a British station called Faraday). These measurements indicate that average mid-winter air temperatures have climbed a degree centigrade per decade.
As Chuck hinted in Dive Ops, part 1 this entry will focus on the tender side of our diving operation. Tender, in our vernacular, is used as a noun and refers to the act of tending to one's needs – in this case – a diver's needs. All of our dive operations have two divers and two tenders. Every project member routinely serves as a tender and often a volunteer or 'town tender' substitutes for one of us so that member can remain on station to instead tend to lab work. The other day I served as project tender and had the delightful assistance from town tender Harry Snyder, the winter-over carpenter. In addition to extraordinary wood working skills, Harry jams smiling at ease on the guitar and at the throttle of a zodiac as pictured.
Every time we go diving to collect samples for our experiments (or food for the organisms we are maintaining in our experiments) we get a little by-catch. The by-catch we get is generally very small and either some type of invertebrate or seaweed that we weren’t necessarily intending to catch. Depending on what we are collecting there is a varying abundance and diversity of our by-catch. We commonly get a wide range of sizes of snails and limpets as well as amphipods and small sea stars.
The day I prepared to leave Palmer Station, I took a final glimpse from my dorm window at the splendid architecture of the glacier. I finally had an opportunity to climb the glacier and walk to its far side, days before I left. Crossing the field of boulders in the back yard, separating Palmer Station from the glacier, was a long walk. I eventually reached the glacier and began my ascent, aided by the spikes I affixed to my boots for stability on the ice. I climbed higher and higher; soon, Palmer Station was barely visible.
The Gould arrived in the afternoon earlier this week bringing from Chile the ever-anticipated resupply of freshies. Oh yes, that evening we dined on salad and fresh fruit off-loaded from the ship just a few short hours before all queued up to the station’s short cafeteria line. The freshies are at the end of the line so all made sure to grab a bowl or leave plenty of room on the plate for a mound of greenery.
Scuba diving is a central part of our research here. We call it "Dive Ops" which is short for Diving Operations. All our experimental manipulations on this project are done in the lab but since the organisms we are studying live along the bottom of the ocean (described then as benthic organisms), Dive Ops are critical in order to collect them and their food. Today Julie and I needed to dive to collect food for the amphipods (shrimp-like animals) that she is working with in the lab and also some more amphipods for upcoming experiments.
It is a fantastic opportunity to be able to live and work in Antarctica. It is no less fantastic this sixteenth time than it was the first. The overall novelty may decline, but the appreciation of the splendor, and the sense of privilege in being here, does nothing but grow.