We won't be served traditional breakfast until Wednesday when the new cook is trained. He came to the station on the same ship as me. Until then, we're all fending for ourselves with whatever's available. We can't use the stove or anything else to cook until we undergo a training course with the chef. At least there's peanut butter here, albeit not the best. I'm learning to make do without my bananas and green tea. There's always espresso I suppose.
After breakfast, we went down to the basement of the Bio building to check out our labs and aquariums again. We just wanted to get a general understanding of where everything is and what has to be done. As a team, we met on the LMG with Dr. Detrich to review the plans for the upcoming fishing trip. Tomorrow at 8 A.M. two of my team members and my PI will be off to Low Island to trawl for icefish (the white/clear blooded fish). They'll be setting pots/traps for the rock cods (the red blooded fish) just before they reach Low Island. At the trawling site, they're expecting to fish throughout the night, meaning a 12-14 hour shift. We should expect the ship to be back some time on Wednesday or Thursday, hopefully full of fish and embryos.
When our meeting finished, we went back to the labs to try to find supplies. I went with Nathalie, the other woman wintering over with me, to check out our chemical supplies. We had to find a specific liquid that helps repair the mucous membrane of the fish's skin. When they're in the nets during trawling, the mucous gets wiped off, causing them a lot of stress. The extra stress on top of the stress of just being caught in a net may be leading to their premature deaths. We're hoping that by using this liquid we'll be able to prevent such a high mortality rate. We also found some anesthetics for our fish. Unfortunately though, we have a limited amount. We have to be careful when it comes time to kill the fish (the humane way to kill fish is to overdose them on anesthetics); we have to try our best to preserve the powder for when we actually want them to just fall asleep.
Our group had another meeting at 1:30, this time with all of the PIs and their team members who will be on the LMG for fishing. After thirty minutes of outlining our fishing plans, we could go back to the labs and the marine aquarium to prepare for the ship's departure. I luckily was assigned a job that didn't require me to put on my rubber wetsuit and steel-toed boots. I just had to organize and set up one of our labs as well as dilute some of the mucous repairing liquid to a concentration that won't harm the fish. Two other team members were in the aquarium bleaching (0.5% concentration since we don't want to be dumping a lot of bleach out into the ocean) the tanks. They're pretty large baths that require you to get inside of them to scrub around, making it a wet and messy job. Needless to say, I was fine with being a little chilly from my drafty lab while organizing supplies.
Around 5/5:30 P.M. we managed to complete the majority of our work for the day. Dinner included pork tenderloin, flavorless broccoli, saffron split garbanzo beans, and other items that I didn't touch. Most people here rave about the food. Dinner wasn't bad, but I certainly wasn't a fan of lunch. Who fries vegetable spring rolls anyway? Plus the zucchini was way overcooked. Oh well, maybe it was the new chef learning to cook with these stoves.
In terms of weather around here, it's quite erratic. I should be used to crazy weather changes from an entire lifetime in the Boston area, but Antarctica is a whole other story. Right now it remains around 30˚F, but the winds are crazy. This morning it started snowing. When I looked out the window, the snow in front of the LMG was blowing completely horizontally. Just slightly to the left through the other window, it was falling vertically. About 10 minutes after snowing pretty hard, it completely came to a stop. Then it started to hail. Then the winds stopped. Then it started to snow again. You get the picture. The weather is crazy here. Everything's also slicked over with a thin coating of ice. It's because during the day the snow can melt or be washed away from any rain storms, but at night it just freezes back up again.
In terms of scenery, two large icebergs blew into the inlet by the LMG and the station last night. They've stuck around and are still there today. Hopefully they'll get out of the way of the LMG so we can get our ship out there to fish. In terms of terrestrial, we're on a rocky surface, but, as I said earlier, it's slicked over with a thin layer of ice. There's also an inch of snow everywhere. We have a large glacier in the "backyard" of the station too. It's a nice sky blue color when there isn't any snow covering it. I also saw some fur seals through a window yesterday. They hopped out of the water in Hero Inlet to lie down on some rocks. Somebody else on station said that they saw a penguin waddling around outside the station, but I missed that.
Another thing before I go back to studying for my upcoming ecology and physics finals, I ate a piece of glacial ice last night. Well, it was put in my glass of water. It's the clearest ice you will ever see - not a single impurity present. It's because, over thousands of years, all of the impurities have been essentially pushed out due to the immense pressure of the glacier. Sometimes we see this ice floating around (we call it bar ice here), and we'll scoop it out of the water and bring it to a bucket outside of the bar. To me, it just tastes like any other form of ice. Apparently thinking that way is insulting to the glaciers though. I guess it's cool to say that I drank water from 2,000 years ago, so that's reason enough to choose bar ice scooped out of the Antarctic waters over regular ice you get from a fridge.
After breakfast, we went down to the basement of the Bio building to check out our labs and aquariums again. We just wanted to get a general understanding of where everything is and what has to be done. As a team, we met on the LMG with Dr. Detrich to review the plans for the upcoming fishing trip. Tomorrow at 8 A.M. two of my team members and my PI will be off to Low Island to trawl for icefish (the white/clear blooded fish). They'll be setting pots/traps for the rock cods (the red blooded fish) just before they reach Low Island. At the trawling site, they're expecting to fish throughout the night, meaning a 12-14 hour shift. We should expect the ship to be back some time on Wednesday or Thursday, hopefully full of fish and embryos.
When our meeting finished, we went back to the labs to try to find supplies. I went with Nathalie, the other woman wintering over with me, to check out our chemical supplies. We had to find a specific liquid that helps repair the mucous membrane of the fish's skin. When they're in the nets during trawling, the mucous gets wiped off, causing them a lot of stress. The extra stress on top of the stress of just being caught in a net may be leading to their premature deaths. We're hoping that by using this liquid we'll be able to prevent such a high mortality rate. We also found some anesthetics for our fish. Unfortunately though, we have a limited amount. We have to be careful when it comes time to kill the fish (the humane way to kill fish is to overdose them on anesthetics); we have to try our best to preserve the powder for when we actually want them to just fall asleep.
Our group had another meeting at 1:30, this time with all of the PIs and their team members who will be on the LMG for fishing. After thirty minutes of outlining our fishing plans, we could go back to the labs and the marine aquarium to prepare for the ship's departure. I luckily was assigned a job that didn't require me to put on my rubber wetsuit and steel-toed boots. I just had to organize and set up one of our labs as well as dilute some of the mucous repairing liquid to a concentration that won't harm the fish. Two other team members were in the aquarium bleaching (0.5% concentration since we don't want to be dumping a lot of bleach out into the ocean) the tanks. They're pretty large baths that require you to get inside of them to scrub around, making it a wet and messy job. Needless to say, I was fine with being a little chilly from my drafty lab while organizing supplies.
Around 5/5:30 P.M. we managed to complete the majority of our work for the day. Dinner included pork tenderloin, flavorless broccoli, saffron split garbanzo beans, and other items that I didn't touch. Most people here rave about the food. Dinner wasn't bad, but I certainly wasn't a fan of lunch. Who fries vegetable spring rolls anyway? Plus the zucchini was way overcooked. Oh well, maybe it was the new chef learning to cook with these stoves.
In terms of weather around here, it's quite erratic. I should be used to crazy weather changes from an entire lifetime in the Boston area, but Antarctica is a whole other story. Right now it remains around 30˚F, but the winds are crazy. This morning it started snowing. When I looked out the window, the snow in front of the LMG was blowing completely horizontally. Just slightly to the left through the other window, it was falling vertically. About 10 minutes after snowing pretty hard, it completely came to a stop. Then it started to hail. Then the winds stopped. Then it started to snow again. You get the picture. The weather is crazy here. Everything's also slicked over with a thin coating of ice. It's because during the day the snow can melt or be washed away from any rain storms, but at night it just freezes back up again.
In terms of scenery, two large icebergs blew into the inlet by the LMG and the station last night. They've stuck around and are still there today. Hopefully they'll get out of the way of the LMG so we can get our ship out there to fish. In terms of terrestrial, we're on a rocky surface, but, as I said earlier, it's slicked over with a thin layer of ice. There's also an inch of snow everywhere. We have a large glacier in the "backyard" of the station too. It's a nice sky blue color when there isn't any snow covering it. I also saw some fur seals through a window yesterday. They hopped out of the water in Hero Inlet to lie down on some rocks. Somebody else on station said that they saw a penguin waddling around outside the station, but I missed that.
Another thing before I go back to studying for my upcoming ecology and physics finals, I ate a piece of glacial ice last night. Well, it was put in my glass of water. It's the clearest ice you will ever see - not a single impurity present. It's because, over thousands of years, all of the impurities have been essentially pushed out due to the immense pressure of the glacier. Sometimes we see this ice floating around (we call it bar ice here), and we'll scoop it out of the water and bring it to a bucket outside of the bar. To me, it just tastes like any other form of ice. Apparently thinking that way is insulting to the glaciers though. I guess it's cool to say that I drank water from 2,000 years ago, so that's reason enough to choose bar ice scooped out of the Antarctic waters over regular ice you get from a fridge.
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