For the first time in a month I put on my land sneakers instead of my steel-toed deck boots. In the halls I saw people I didn’t recognize. The people I did recognize had changed: they were wearing port clothes and their Big Red jackets. They paced around the empty labs, waiting for the decks to clear so we could disembark and walk up the brown gravel road to the unfamiliar town of McMurdo.

The Baltic Room, where we sent 89 CTD casts over the side last month, has become our front door. The gangway slants out from the gargantuan steel hatch and down to the ice pier. People are clanking across it the way I did on Jan. 18, after the redeye flight from Christchurch. Back then the ship was so big and unfamiliar that I couldn’t remember which direction the bow was in when I was inside.

But the world doesn’t pause when an expedition comes to an end. Out the window, Dr. Chris Measures’s trace-metal van is hanging from a crane over the ice pier. The yellow gliders are packed away in long, gray plastic boxes. Bruce Huber’s yellow mooring float is already gone, replaced by an orange one strapped to the main deck and ready for the next voyage. People are saying goodbye and hello at the same time to different people.

Read on through the slideshow to see how this last long day went. We’ve also got some birds, some sounds, and a wrap-up map to show you at the end of the post:

Birds of the Ross Sea

We’ve seen seals, orcas, and minke whales, not to mention krill, copepods, diatoms, corals, and chloroplast thieves. But our most frequent visitors were the birds of the Ross Sea: penguins, skuas, petrels, and albatrosses. Here’s a glimpse at four species (look closely for the albatross—it’s soaring low over the water) that I caught on my iPhone—I hope it gives you a sense of the special grace of these ocean birds.

Sounds of the Ship

Listen along to some of the sounds that have kept us company over the last month:
Download audio file (Sounds_of_the_Palmer.mp3)
This is what you’re hearing:

• Our bow wave sliding over smooth water during a late-January calm.
• Engine noises along the aft 02 deck.
• Remember how I said that Darth Vader lives in the microscope room? (listen also for the rhythmic sharp click of our depth sounder—the most pervasive sound on the ship).
• Water gurgling down the laundry room drain.
• The complex drumbeat of ice chunks caught in the ship’s propellers as we break ice.
• The quieter sound of ice chunks washing in our wake.

Animated Ship Track

We’ve been all over the Ross Sea in the last month. I’m still not sure where we went some of the time, and I was keeping track. So to help you envision where we’ve been I asked Eli Hunter if he could produce an animated map. Of course he could:

The ship’s course is a red line that represents a 3-hour stretch of travel. When the line shrinks into a dot, that indicates we stayed at a station for more than three hours. The animation ends at 76°S latitude because we turned off our data logging shortly before we returned to port.

Thank You

As this expedition comes to an end, we’d like to thank everyone who helped make it a success. Thanks to our website and outreach team back in New Jersey: Sage Lichtenwalner and Igor Heifetz at Rutgers University; Kate Florio, Katie Gardner, and Harold Clark at the Liberty Science Center; Chris Parsons at Word Craft, and Janice McDonnell of COSEE-NOW. Thanks also to Dr. Peter Milne and the National Science Foundation for making the expedition and outreach possible.

Thanks to Captain Yousri Maghrabi and the crew of the Nathaniel B. Palmer for making all the science on the ship possible. Special thanks to Jace Eschete, Gary Talbot, Chris Peterson, Vladimir Repin, Jamee Johnson, Jullie Jackson, Jeremy Lucke, Mark Harris, Alan Shaw, Ethan Norris, Lindsey Loughry, Lindsey Ekern, Sheldon Blackman, George Aukon, Bill Jirsa, Paul Huckins, Kathleen Gavahan, Ale Monje, and Dave Trotter.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who followed the blog from home or classroom. Teachers and students prepared and asked excellent questions on the blog and during the 9 live calls—we were consistently impressed with the inventiveness, insight, and curiosity in the questions you came up with.

In fact, many questions were so well put that our scientists thought they’d make good doctoral dissertation projects. There’s so much left to learn about the ocean that those questions may still be unanswered by the time you go to graduate school. We hope you’ve seen enough of how science is done, the many kinds of people who do it, and the strange and beautiful ways that the world behaves, that you’ll continue our journey from the Ross Sea to wherever your curiosity takes you.

Yesterday, while Eli programmed the ship-track video, I asked him if it would be possible to make a few additions. Lifting his fingers from his keyboard for a moment, he looked over and smiled a half-smile. ‘We are only limited by our imaginations,’ he said.

With e-mail, satellite phones, and shorter voyages, today’s sailors don’t have to put up with quite so much isolation. But today is Valentine’s Day, and everyone on the ship misses loved ones, family, and friends at home. We’re all looking forward to coming home and being reunited with the ones we love. Read on through the slideshow to see a few examples of how people keep their links with home strong:

We’ve been steaming toward McMurdo all day today. By the end of the day tomorrow we’ll be in port, unloading all the science equipment, trying to walk on solid ground again, and getting ready for our flights home. Tomorrow will be our last post for the blog, although we’ll continue to answer questions if you have them. For now, we wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day.

Read more in the following posts:

• Sights and Sounds of Summer in the South (Jan 16)
• The Day That Lasted Two Days (Jan 25)
• Time-Lapse Tour of the Ship (Jan 31)

Forty-five minutes later, the scientists and crew file in to check on the results: fresh breadsticks. This is the galley, one of my favorite rooms on the ship. Just two staff, a cook and a galley hand, make meals for the ship’s 70 inhabitants. They turn out three entrees per meal (one of them vegetarian), plus vegetables, rice, a couple of soups, a salad bar, and two or three desserts.

Keeping up that kind of variety is a challenge when the nearest grocery store is 2,000 miles north of us. Each time the ship stops in McMurdo it takes on more food, but even McMurdo gets only limited amounts of fresh food brought in on C-17 aircraft. The avocados and kiwi fruit that I looked forward to at the beginning of the voyage are now just a pale green memory, and cabbage has replaced lettuce in the salad bar. Read on through the slideshow to see how the cooks keep the hungry crew satisfied:

As good a job as the galley does, it can’t cater to everyone’s favorites. I brought a dark, shade-grown coffee for when I sit down to write. Dr. Chris Measures, an Englishman who now works at the University of Hawaii, starts each day with marmalade on toast. Dr. Mariko Hatta brought a rice cooker on board. It’s a versatile device—she knows how to make a cake in one.

Graduate student Xiao Liu drinks chrysanthemum tea she brought from China. Electronics technician George Aukon carries ‘kvas,’ a fizzy root-beer-like drink from Russia. The marine technicians stock up on cheeses and salami before they board, as well as a New Zealand cookie called a Tim Tam. Apparently, if you bite off both ends you can drink your milk through it.

For most of us, the galley’s cookies are our comfort food. Watch this reenactment to see some of the different styles of cookie-grabbing. In order, these are George Aukon, Bruce Huber, Eli Hunter, Dr. Phoebe Lam, Elizabeth Halliday, Max Grand, me, and Chris Linder.

Download the Quicktime Version (3.7 MB)

To give you an idea what I mean, here’s a photo from the bridge of the bow plunging through a storm wave. In about 1 second, the spray will hit the bridge windows—60 feet above the water.

Many scientists spent the time preparing data plots and then discussing what they meant. Others worked quietly in the Aft Dry Lab taking down equipment they’ve finished with or filling out shipping forms for sending gear back home. This expedition is winding down: we’re due back in to McMurdo early on Feb. 16th, and we’ll begin steaming there on the 14th.

Chris and I took the opportunity to head down to the engine room, where we met Chief Engineer Dave Munroe and Engineer Johnny ‘J.P.’ Pierce. They’ve been working on the Palmer since the day it first sailed, in 1992, and they’re proud of their engine room, though they don’t come right out and say so. On the tour we found out how the ship generates electricity, drives its propellers, makes drinking water, and handles its wastewater.

In the accompanying time-lapse you can see where they led us—down into a two-level warren of pipes, vents, fans, towering engines, oversized toolboxes, hatchways, pressure valves, and circuit boxes. The whole space is freshly painted—though what I took to be charming interior design turned out to be color-coding to indicate what’s in each pipe. It makes troubleshooting a lot easier, Dave said, as he listed them off on his fingers: blue for freshwater, orange for saltwater, yellow for fuel, black for bilge (wastewater), green for air, and gray for hydraulics.

What the time-lapse can’t tell you is the way the engine room sounds and smells. Even with our yellow ear-protection headsets on, I could feel the engines rumbling through my skull, and the whine of spinning parts vibrated my teeth. When 2nd Engineer Richard Johnson leaned over to yell something in my ear, I still couldn’t hear him.

The bottom floor smelled of diesel and lubricants. Heat wafted from the great yellow engines, big as stacks in a library. With no windows in sight, there were flashlights clipped to chargers everywhere. Tool benches held assorted tools neatly organized, and racks held pry bars, plumb lines, a welder’s mask, and miles of extension cords. Cheerful yellow trash cans were scattered about, each one with a blue circle painted on the lid. Take the tour and see how much you can see:

It goes by pretty fast, so here are some times to watch for:

• 00:00 Scientists are conferring over some exciting new silica measurements from Pennell Bank. From left: Menglei Chu, Ashley New, Dr. Adam Kustka, Dr. Phoebe Lam, Dr. Chris Measures, Dr. Josh Kohut.
• 00:05 I’m zigzagging down the hall (at one point bouncing off the wall) as the ship rolls in the storm.
• 00:10 In the control room we meet J.P. and Dave, whose nickname on the ship is Gandalf. We put on headsets to save our ears.
• 00:23 We’re on the upper floor, where generators make the ship’s electricity to power lights, computers, instruments, and tools.
• 00:25 The four big yellow machines are generators with 12 cylinders that can produce 4,200 kilowatts total. Typically the ship runs on two generators at a time, keeping two in reserve.
• 00:27 Dave heads down to show us the engines and driveshafts. At the bottom of the stairs, we’re about 16 feet below the surface of the water.
• 00:35 It feels hot down here, but the engineers love that the Palmer spends its time in Antarctic waters. That keeps the temperature down to about 80°F compared to 120°F on other ships. On those, ‘even the handrails will burn you,’ Richard told me.
• 00:40 JP is working on one of the ship’s fuel centrifuges. These machines spin the fuel to separate out any contaminants that might have found their way into the ship’s giant fuel tanks.
• 00:44 The big chrome covers are the ship’s water distillation system. They provide up to 5,000 gallons of freshwater to the ship each day for drinking, bathing, cooking, and scientific work. They use engine heat to evaporate seawater, then condense the freshwater and collect it. The freshwater passes through 42 carbon filters and 5 ultraviolet lights to purify it before going into a storage tank.
• 00:46 Oiler Ogie Pagdanganan walks past. The engine room is staffed 24 hours per day, typically with 2 or 3 workers.
• 00:52 The Palmer’s four immense engines provide the ship with about 13,000 horsepower. ‘Oh, we can always use more horsepower,’ Dave said, ‘But this is enough. In heavy seas, or ice, it’s a good feeling to know you can handle it.’ The ship runs on two engines except when it’s breaking ice. On a normal day it may burn 6,000 gallons of fuel, and up to 14,000 gallons in heavy ice.
• 00:54 The big metal cylinder is one of the ship’s two driveshafts. The yellow guardrails are there to make sure no one gets in their way.
• 1:05 Farther along, the shiny metal driveshafts are painted black and yellow. They turn the ship’s two 13-foot-diameter propellers. The port and starboard propellers spin in opposite directions, and the yellow stripes remind people which way each is rotating.
• 1:19 A bank of dials on each engine keeps track of operating temperature, pressure, and other engine conditions. This engine was running at 210°F, and I could feel the heat through my shirt as I walked past.
• 1:22 Engineer Jerry Lakarnafeaux walks past.
• 1:30 Dave grabs a bucket of oily rags for cleaning. The engine room has its own laundry so that their clothes don’t leave grimy residues in the ship’s main washing machines and wind up on everyone else’s clothes.
• 1:40 Back in the control room, Dave shows us some of the places we just visited, and we leave him to get back to his walnut praline, fresh from the galley.

Download the Quicktime Version (13 MB)

If you ask him a question, he answers slowly at first and then accelerates, as if his brain is a voluminous hard drive that takes a few seconds to access the full stream of ideas inside. He told me he misses his breakfast routine back home, which is a glass of diet ginger ale mixed with a Red Bull. He gets a ‘frequent buyer’ discount on rare isotopes of carbon. He and his team have a lot going on.

They’re trying to understand the lifetime of a phytoplankton bloom—the give and take between organisms, the battles that go on for nutrients like iron, the ways that phytoplankton bodies get recycled as a bloom flourishes or dies away. At the moment, a bloom is kind of like a television: we don’t know what’s going on inside; all we can do is watch what comes out of it.

Dr. Kustka’s team is trying to change that, using subtle principles of chemistry, precise lab techniques, and hours and hours of painstaking preparation to set up controlled experiments on the ship. Read on through the slideshow to find out what they’ve been doing lately:

I’m sure you noticed the Adélie penguin that was swimming around in the ‘Gray light’ photo in today’s slideshow. I’ll admit it: we didn’t have to use that photo—we have plenty of great photos showing white sky and gray water uncluttered by penguins. But we’re in Antarctica, and to tell the truth at least one of us is kind of crazy about penguins. Maybe you are too. At any rate, here’s a close-up look at Chris’s amazing penguin-in-the-water shot:

Read more in the following posts:

• A Little Iron Goes a Long Way (Jan 26)
• Where Biology and Chemistry Meet (Jan 27)
• A Cupful of Smelly Gooey Phytoplankton (Feb 3)

Staring through a moving microscope and looking at a watery slide on a rocking ship in the dark is a prescription for seasickness. But the biologists on this voyage spend many hours per day in here counting cells, and I haven’t heard them complaining yet.

At one point Dr. Angelicque White sat me down and showed me some beautiful diatoms, including one that I called ‘grass skirt’ because it had a fringe of long spines around its middle. (Turns out it’s called Corethron). Ever since, I’ve wanted to look at some more examples of the microscopic citizens of the Ross Sea.

Today I got my chance as we dipped an 8-foot-long plankton net over the side of the Palmer. I looked at less than a tablespoon of that water, and still the microscope revealed a parade of plants and animals. We found at least four different levels of the food chain, each one a bit larger than the next. Read on through the slideshow and travel up the food chain with us:

There’s one more photograph we needed for this post, but we just couldn’t get it: a picture of you. Humans sit at the top of the food chain—we eat pretty much anything we want, and nothing else eats us. So even if you’ve never been to Antarctica, what you eat for dinner can weigh on the health of its ecosystems.

As alien and distant as the microscopic creatures in this post look, they’re just a couple of stops away from us on the food chain. Small fish and krill from the Southern Ocean are caught in great numbers to feed to farmed fish and shrimp. It takes many, many of these small creatures to end up with a few giant shrimp.

Even here in the remote Ross Sea, vessels are venturing farther south each year to catch Antarctic toothfish, which is sold as Chilean seabass. These large fish eat other fish that have fed on krill, so even they are only a few steps removed from the creatures in this slideshow.

Many thanks to Dr. Angelicque White and Dr. Scott Fay for help with the net sampling, petrel poop sampling and filtering, and microscope setup. You can find more information about where seafood comes from through the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.

Read more in the following posts:

• Plants That Eat Food (Jan 30)
• Glider and Pumps Fight the Waves on a Stormy Monday (Feb 1)
• A Cupful of Smelly Gooey Phytoplankton (Feb 3)

A brief calm spell took hold in the afternoon as the sky brightened and petrels and albatrosses gathered around our ship. People gathered at the bow, cameras raised, admiring an iceberg in the near distance.

Back in the Dry Lab, Dr. Kohut realized that Bruce Huber’s mooring was uncomfortably close to the massive berg. After narrowly getting Bruce’s instruments back during an all-nighter on Jan. 25, it seemed only fitting to pull another one tonight. As the wind regained its strength, the marine technicians readied their grapples, boathooks, coils of line, and winch cables for a soggy recovery. Read on through the slideshow to see the sights from our day:

Over the last 30 hours we’ve seen some stark reversals in the weather—the wind has gone from stiff to slack and back to blasting with barely a pause. But you don’t have to take my word for it: instruments on the ship keep track of wind speed continuously.

In fact, as we were marveling over the way the weather kept changing its mind, some of the scientists couldn’t contain their curiosity any longer and decided to graph the data:

Can you read this graph? It’s actually tracks our day pretty well. Wind speed is graphed on the vertical axis and time is on the horizontal axis. So as the day went on you can see that there was a really windy period followed by a weird, short calm spell. After that the wind built again.

Can you follow along with the events I described in the slide show and match them to the periods of wind and calm shown in this graph?

Many thanks to Eli Hunter for plotting the wind speeds.

Read more in the following posts:

• Looking Back, Looking Forward (Jan 28)

As I sloshed and swirled my cup, hoping the hot chocolate powder would mix with the hot water, I realized I was facing the same problem that phytoplankton face in the Ross Sea. At the bottom of my cup were a whole bunch of particles that I wanted, while at the top there was only clear water.

If I could get just some of the powder up to the top, the water would be sweet and chocolatey, and I’d be happy. But even though I was adding a considerable amount of energy in the form of swirling, I still had to go back and get a spoon. If all that work couldn’t mix the chocolate just a few inches in my cup, how does mixing happen at sea, where nutrients have to move up through thousands of feet of water?

This is one question that Dr. Phoebe Lam has spent much of this voyage thinking about—and it has prompted her to start looking at what lies on the bottom of the Ross Sea in more detail. We’ve been looking over her shoulder. Read on through the slideshow to see what she has found:

For the rest of our expedition, the Palmer is going to crisscross two shallow parts of the Ross Sea: Mawson Bank and Pennell Bank. Dr. Lam will be sampling the seafloor as we cross, and Dr. Kohut’s and Bruce Huber’s teams will measure the currents that flow along the seafloor. Here’s a map of the area to help you keep straight the parts of the Ross Sea we’re studying:

If the Ross Sea is getting mixed like a giant cup of hot chocolate, how is it happening? Dr. Lam’s analyses will tell us about the particles on the seafloor: how much iron is there, and whether particles of it might be reaching the phytoplankton.

To move that iron up to the surface waters will take a lot of energy. Dr. Kohut’s and Bruce’s measurements will help decide if the bottom currents are providing enough. And the terrain of the seafloor, as shown on the map, might be acting like that spoon I needed today—a hard surface that deflects the swirling currents upwards. That’s why the scientists are focusing on these two shallow banks and their sloping sides.

Many thanks to Dr. Angelicque White and Dr. Scott Fay for help with the seafloor creatures, and to Kathleen Gavahan for plotting the map.

Read more in the following posts:

• Checking in With Our Hypotheses (Feb 7)