January 4th, 2011
We passed 60 degrees south today and are quickly approaching 63 degrees south. It is still light outside now and it is past midnight. It is also 33 degrees outside and the wind has been blowing 20-30 knots for most of the day.
The sky has been gray and foggy all day today, but the waters are extremely blue and clear down here. The seas have stayed rather calm and it looks like we will not have extreme weather conditions on the trip down, which makes for a memorable nonmemorable trip. I’m pretty sure we would rather have this than the other way around. Most likely this means we will get beat up on the return trip.
Another correction from yesterday is that the sbt survey are actually XBT survey’s which stands for expendable bathy thermograph. We continued deploying the XBT’s last night, along with taking water samples. We also took an air sample, which will be shipped back to NOAA for analysis. Mostly they are looking for CO2 levels.
Everything else on board is pretty much the same as yesterday. We are scheduled to arrive at Palmer Station tomorrow in the later morning so everyone is getting ready to start actually doing something.
The ship’s crew is planning how they will move everything off the ship that needs to go off, and then reorganize the items that are staying on to best facilitate the science objectives.
The food is still good and everyone is getting along well. Some people went outside to bird watch for albatross and other unknown small birds. Otherwise it has been pretty lonely in terms of animal life.
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