The MFin FTL

We spent the week preparing for the LTER cruise, which departed today after two days of stressed hussle to get all the sampling equipment on the boat and ready to go. The ship left this morning at 11, meaning I am now the Field Team Leader, and three people are now sharing the work of three labs that, up until today, had been done by 10 people. I was thinking about how the 12 hours on, 12 hours off schedule on the ship would wear on you, but it seems like we might be having a lot of days like that here on station as well. It's going to take a lot of hard work, but I am really looking forward to the next 5 weeks. It will mean a lot of time in the boat (Yay- Yay!), and learning a few new techniques used by the primary production (measuring chlorphyl produced by and nutrient uptake and cycling in phytoplankton) team and the microbial guys (girl) (who are studying the role of the bacteria in carbon cycling as well as community diversity). Variety is the spice of life, right?

Part of the ships departure was saying goodbye to good friends and new family. Even though I will see many of them in a week (The R/V Gould returns to the area for a high density sampling grid, and I will be driving Rubber Duke out to meet them and help in the sampling) and the rest of them in a month, saying good-bye is never easy. The station atmosphere will change a lot in this transition as well, the dancers left, but a new group of buggers has arrived. They study (arguably) the only truly terrestrial organisms in Antarctica, a tic that feeds on penguin blood, and a midge that feeds on penguin shit. They must be an interesting group...

One other really cool thing involved with this LTER cruise is the release of an Automated Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that will cruise down the Antarctic Peninsula diving between the surface and 100m (I think) gathering various oceanographic data that is streamed in real time to Rutgers university and around the world via the internet. Visit http://marine.rutgers.edu/cool/auvs/ to read about the project and see the data as its collected!! These AUVs are pretty incredible and are leading a new era in marine science. There might be a whole lot more about this subject, but I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to talk about it right now. That's just how cool it is, I mean, the page is even called "cool." How cool is that? All joking aside, it is pretty cool....