Week 2 — 5–11 December 20075 December 2007M. Schüller, University of Bochum
How to waste a night away...
The time has finally come, we reached the first station. Yippiiieeeh... after a week of setting up the laboratories, trying to find one’s way on and below deck, fighting and winning against sea sickness and, above all, suspenseful waiting, we were quite surprised when we went on the work deck after breakfast. Like gnomes the crew has put our gear from the C deck onto the work deck with the help of cranes in the very early hours of the day. So we just had to grab our screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers and other tools and start happily to assemble our gear. We have missed the hustle and bustle for days, and very noticeably the mood on the ship was slowly shifting to being on alert. I am scheduled for the box corer — a 50 x 50 x 50-cm box which is pushed into the seafloor to hopefully bring back a nice block of deep-sea sediment with organisms in it. Today this gear has many advantages to it — it is relatively easily assembled so that we were done by lunchtime. However, it also has its disadvantages today. The first deployment was not scheduled until after Midnight — while the first groups already have their first samples, busying themselves with sorting and fixing, I have to somehow make the time pass. As I mentioned, I am doing that since mid-day, and by now it is nearly half past nine. I am now running out of ideas as to how to stay awake. Sleeping is no option, I did that in the afternoon. The gym — I was there already. Taking photographs... good idea, but by now people are sort of irritated about the flashlights above their samples. Playing games, making small talk... not too bad really, but whoever is not working sleeps, so the hallways look completely deserted at times. Reading a book- very nice... tiring in the long run, though, and that is something I don’t find very helpful. Yaaaawn... I am sitting on hot coals, when do we finally start!!!!! Well, some way or another time will pass, and after that I will have enough work for weeks to come. And if I can’t think of anything at all to keep me awake, I’ll don my bright red polar clothes and clamber onto the uppermost deck. It is, after all, the night before St. Niklas’s day, and I am absolutely sure that at some point of the night, Saint Niklas will appear on Polarstern. He surely must need help with filling everybody’s shoes with goodies. I would be dressed appropriately anyway :) 6 December2007
A. Brandt, University of Hamburg
Today is St. Nicholas Day and my birthday. Saint Nicholas has been busy during the night, and yesterday he actually came all the way from Holland and brought us beautiful stationary with expedition stamps, and on top of all that he had even written a poem!
As we are on station, I was on duty all day and could only sit down to write this report after Midnight. My first task was to run the Agassiz trawl with Dorte who wants to learn how to do this. Neptune was very gracious, and Dorte could bring a nice haul on deck during teatime. A towed gear needs about 4500 m deep-sea cable (which, by the way, has an impressive diameter of 18 mm) to trawl in 3000 m depth. A station thus takes about 5 hours, and once we work in greater depths, it will take even longer. In the net there was very little mud, which consisted of globigerines and foraminiferans, small unicellular organisms, and plants, and within that mud the big megabenthic animals were found. These included at least 6 different species of sea cucmbers, many starfish and brittle stars, a sea anemone, fish, isopods, amphipods and many other things. One of the most bizzar animals was a 30 cm long, flat, purple sea cucumber which reminded me instantly of the Swiss deepsea researcher Jacques Piccard who reached the seafloor in 10,916 m depth in the Mariana Trench with his submersible ‘Trieste’. Quite excitedly he reported from the deep: ‘...during the last stretch I discovered something wonderful. Exactly beneath us there lay a flatfish, quite like a sole, about 30 cm long and 15 cm wide...’ I wonder if Jacques Piccard possibly could have seen such a sea cucumber.
7 December 2007Annika Henche and Gritta Veit-Köhler, Senckenberg
The multicorer — a success story
We, that is Annika Henche and Gritta Veit-Köhler of the Senckenberg Institute in Wilhlemshaven and five other colleagues working with samples from the multicorer. The multicorer (MUC for short) looks like a moon lander that is sent to the seafloor on a steel wire. On the MUC there are 12 plexiglass tubes which bore into the sediment on the seabed if all goes well. When the Muc is hauled back, the cylinders close automatically, and we get 12 wonderful tubes filled with deep-sea mud and deep-sea water. The MUC is the only gear that allows us to cut out cores with a truly undisturbed surface. That is why the MUC is very popular among sedimentologists and biologists like us who work with very small marine animals, and it is used worldwide with great success.
8 December2007V. Wadley, Australian Antarctic Division and Census of Antarctic Marine Life
On Saturdays I often sleep in and read the newspaper. However today is a normal working day at sea, thankfully more relaxed than the intense sampling during the previous 48 hours. There is an opportunity for consolidation — to stack samples, review data sheets and computer records, compile photos and their metdata and generally just catch up. The underway data continues and the Continuous Plankton Recorder is sampling the zooplankton as we go.
The weather overnight was stormy and the Polarstern altered course from south to south–west to avoid the worst swells. Under these conditions, sleep is patchy. The seas subsided during the day, making it easier to move around the ship. At 3 pm I need fresh air and go out on deck. Form our position at nearly 53 degrees south, two icebergs are visible on the southern horizon. Antarctic prions and storm petrels swoop across the waves.
Before dinner, a group gathers to prepare Christmas celebrations. We have various musical instruments and some people have remembered sheet music. The makeshift choir is practising a nautical version of ‘The twelve days of Christmas’. Our group of 53 scientists has some remarkable talent! Tomorrow’s menu promises some specialities for the second Sunday in Advent. These observances bring a sense of belonging to families and friends, despite the distance that separates us.
Each evening we gather to plan the coming events and listen to a lecture by one of the scientists. Tonight we make preliminary arrangements for refuelling the German Antarctic base at Neumayer, which we should reach in the next week, depending on ice conditions. Eight scientists who have overwintered at the base will visit Polarstern. I try to imagine what this would feel like, after a year in a small group in such a remote and inhospitable location. Our lecturer tonight is a Dutch scientist and he explains how the seabird observations of his team fit into the larger context of top predators and their food in the seasonal sea-ice zone. They have invented a special net to sample under the ice — a productive habitat that could be impacted by climate change. These guys stay on deck for three hour shifts to observe birds and mammals, in strong winds and freezing conditions — without a murmur of complaint! The statistical method allows them to quantify the sightings and make population estimates. 9 December 2007B. Ebbe, Senckenberg
2nd Sunday in Advent
It is nippy outside — later I see on the computer screen that for the first time we have temperatures below freezing. Later, during the evening meeting, Harry reports that we crossed the circumpolar current and have reached the Weddell gyre. Another 24 hours, and we are in the ice!
When I go up to the bridge about half an hour before lunch, we are moving towards two icebergs that lie like twins in the calming sea, probably broken apart only since a short while. We will travel right through the middle and reach them probably in about three quarters of an hour. Every now and then, the sun is breaking through the clouds, and then it makes the blue giants shimmer. ‘Oh, I better go and get my camera after all...’ says Volker, who is standing beside me and who has most likely seen a lot more icebergs in his life than me. At some point the oh-I-have-seen-it-all mood with which you deliberately ignored the first icebergs leaves you, and then the magic of the ice takes hold of you again. While we approach the two icebergs, we begin to discover tiny black dots on them. Once we are so close that only one of the icebergs fits on a photograph, the dots turn out to be hundreds of penguins, most likely Adélies.
10 December 2007John Kitchener, Australian Antarctic Division
As part of the Southern Ocean — Continuous Plankton Recorder (SO-CPR) program, zooplankton samples have been annually collected on a dedicated Polarstern voyage to the Antarctic continent and back over the last 4 seasons or so, including this one, and I am the responsible scientist. Zooplankton are sensitive to environmental parameters such as temperature, movement of currents and water quality. Due to their sensitivity, short life spans and fast growth rates plankton populations respond rapidly to environmental change, and consequently make excellent biological indicators for climate change and pollution.
The Continuous Plankton Recorder, commonly referred to as a CPR can collect surface or near-surface zooplankton at normal ship speed during a voyage. CPR sampling does not usually interfere with any other projects, and because of this it is a very versatile piece of equipment. The unit, which is known as ‘the fish’ among the crew, is usually towed about 100 metres astern of the ship for approximately 450 nautical miles at a time.
So far, the CPR has been towed 3 times between 45°S and nearly 60°S. This came to an abrupt stop last night. The CPR doesn’t fare too well with meeting ice at sea. Ice is much harder, and I know who will win any encounter! Yesterday, Captain Pahl said to me that we should be meeting the first of the pack ice later in the evening. So, feeling quite diligent, I decided to stay up for as long as I could last night. Sure enough, not long before midnight I first heard the characteristic sound of ice scraping along the sides of the ship. And of course when I looked out of my cabin window, there was ice for as far as I could see. We had encountered a wide band of pack ice, and so it was time to retrieve my gear to safety. Some of the deck crew came down straight away, and in no time the CPR was back on board. Just as well, as more and more of pack ice loomed in the distance.
I then extracted the gauze with the zooplankton on it and preserved the animals for analysis after the voyage at my laboratory in Kingston, Tasmania. Then it was off to bed, in the early hours of the morning, and the last thing I remember before falling asleep was the sound of ice scraping along the hull! I will be looking forward to tomorrow, where we will hopefully be in among some impressive pack ice, photographing not only the seascapes but the array of animals we hope to see hauled out onto the ice. I can’t wait!!! 11 December 200766°20’S 2°23’W
Hauke Flores, IMARES
Already for the second day now, we travel through the seemingly endless pack-ice landscape of the Southern Ocean. We passed the ice edge in the night from 9th to 10th December. Passing the ice edge is a magic moment for many of us on board. This expedition is already my 5th trip to Antarctica. Assuming a certain habituation to emotional ice moments, I was still overwhelmed by the impression that awaited me the moment I stepped on the bridge and saw the ice for the first time this year.
While steaming through the ice, the ship produces strange noises. It bangs and scrapes and screams, bringing to mind associations with various ‘Titanic’ movies. There would be reason to worry indeed if we were not on an icebreaker with an extra strong steal hull, designed to cut through the ice. Experiencing this special sound in combination with the typical shaking of the ship at repeated times, merely gave rise to a feeling of familiarity in me. ‘We’re there’ was my spontaneous thought when I felt the shaking in my bed again.
Previous week — Week 1
Next week — Week 3
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