February 3: All Packed Up

Adelie Penguin chick.  If you compare this picture to the earlier Adelie chick you can see that it is now getting some real feathers and coloring instead of its all gray fluff.

Well, everything is all packed and in a container to go on the ship.  We spent the last two days taking the vehicles apart to get the batteries out for shipping and then putting them back together.  Once the vehicles were all packed we started with all of the accessory stuff that makes our operation possible.  We had to make sure that everything was packed properly and in the correct boxes so that it makes it back for us to go on our next trip to Palau at the beginning of March.  We handed the packing lists and boxes off to logistics, which will take care of labeling everything and making sure it gets home as quick as possible.  Hopefully everything goes smoothly.

Chlorophyll a concentration.

This is a very interesting limbo period for us now.  We are very excited to have had a successful trip, but now that everything is out of the water and we don’t have to worry about things we can feel our bodies relaxing and we find ourselves very tired.  We also know that we are getting close to being home, but still have 10 days until we get there.  We get very excited thinking about this, but that leads to letting our emotional guard down that has been up for the last month to protect ourselves from missing our families and home life too much.  There is always a little (or a lot of depending on who you talk too) of emotional control that a person needs to have when going away on these long trips and managing that control can always be hard at times.

Acoustic Backscatter.

I'm not sure what the last couple of days will bring here, but the ship comes in tomorrow and we will move out of our rooms on station and back onto the ship.  We still have a lot of data to go over and we need to make sure that we share the data with all the groups we are working with before we leave.  We will also probably try to sneak in a boat trip or a hike. 

I forgot to post an example of the data we have been seeing down here, so I added a couple of quick plots from the REMUS.  The first plot is chlorophyll concentration,which indicated if and where the microscopic plants that krill eat are located. In the second plot, acoustic backscatter is plotted,which indicates where the krill are located in the water column.  For both plots, hotter colors indicate higher concentrations.  For the acoustic backscatter plot, ignore the dark read lines which are noise and look at the blue coloring at deeper depths and the red layers closer to the surface.  The white line down the middle is the vehicle's path.  As I stated in my last post that we have almost 100 hours of this, which we will have to go and examine over the next year and compare with penguin tracks and ocean satellite data.  Scary, but exciting.

Ian