Nothing new has really happened down here. Nathalie and I are still doing a lot of dissections. We're trying to get rid of a lot of fish so that way we'll be prepared when more scientists arrive and take most of the tanks. Only real update I can give is that the days are getting significantly shorter. We lose about 6 minutes of daylight everyday. Soon it will be mid-winter (June 21st). We'll get a two day weekend then and an amazing banquet-like dinner. Should be exciting!
If we get snow this weekend, Jason, the lead power plant mechanic on station, said he'd help teach me how to ski. Jon, the head of the maintenance department, said he could help with snowboarding lessons as well. Should be exciting. I've never done either in my life, so it will be another experience to add to the list. So far Jason taught me how to drive an ATV, a snowmobile on a glacier, and how to change oil and hydraulic fluid on heavy machinery. Tonight I may even learn how to weld from Chuck, but that's going to be dependent on wind speeds and timing. I'm honestly not really feeling up for standing outside in the dark cold tonight even if I do appreciate having the opportunity to learn something cool. Maybe another week?
Today's been a slow day. Nathalie's been focusing on preparing a powerpoint for her presentation tonight to the station. She'll be talking about her work at home and how it could tie into what we're doing down here. As a result, I've just been hanging around all day. We had a fire drill at 1:30, giving me the opportunity to learn my new role during emergencies: alternate emergency support supervisor. Cool title, but really don't have too much responsibility. I just listen on my radio as people call in and say they're present. If they aren't, then I have to let them know who is and isn't accounted for so that way they can go on a search. I only do this if the primary emergency support supervisor is unable to be present during muster.
Dinner's in 27 minutes (not that I'm counting...), so I guess I have some time to fill until then. Perhaps I'll get started on this current season of Game of Thrones.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Winter's Coming
Well, the other researchers and most of the personnel on station left on the ship this morning. We're now down to 19 people here including me. Nathalie and I are the only research scientists on station and therefore in the Antarctic peninsula. Some people on station even claim that we may be the only ones on the continent as there isn't much science going on during the winter season at most stations.
It's been quiet today since everybody left. I'm used to people buzzing around in the labs downstairs and the galley. Right now there are a couple of people in the galley, but it's only because lunch will be served in 30 minutes. In the labs though, I'm the only one. It's eerily quiet. The other research team never made much noise, but at least there was equipment present and at least one body or the soft humming of somebody's iTunes. I don't think it helps much either that most of the people on station have the day off today. They put in so much overtime trying to help everybody pack cargo and move off of the island so ASC (Antarctic Support Contractor) told them to just take some time for themselves.
The goal for today between Nathalie and me was to dissect some fish and look at some of the fish females. She decided that we should take the morning off, so we'll see what we end up doing after lunch. Tomorrow she would like to go boating again to drop some traps. We lost the only MT (marine tech) we had on station, so now the lab manager here will be going out with us...or anybody else with boating two certifications. Our fishing expeditions is a nice excuse for them to leave the station for a few hours.
Soon we should be getting our fish to spawn. It's now or never. Right now and within a few weeks is C. aceratus' breeding period. Nathalie and I have unfortunately had to dissect a few females who were near full maturity. Had they been alive for just a few more days we would have been able to get some eggs. If we do manage to obtain some eggs, the next difficulty will be finding a male. Not many of our male fish are "milking males." In terms of our rock-cods though, we should be okay. We have so many of them so we're bound to get some ready males and females for our experiments.
As an aside, I'm not writing blog posts for Northeastern's research blog. Eventually I'll be contributing to a co-op blog if it is up and running in time. The research blog is fun, but I'm always so tempted to get too detailed with the science. I'm supposed to keep it conversational and fun. The next post that should be up at some point this week is about my fishing trip. It was a bit too scientific, and I think that I spent more time recounting events than describing things. While the trip was just a month ago, I've been so busy doing other things here that it's difficult for me to remember some of the finer details (i.e. date I left, fish count, etc.). A lot of edits were made, so hopefully now it'll be a lot more fun to read and not so filled with scientific terms and step-by-step recounts.
It's been quiet today since everybody left. I'm used to people buzzing around in the labs downstairs and the galley. Right now there are a couple of people in the galley, but it's only because lunch will be served in 30 minutes. In the labs though, I'm the only one. It's eerily quiet. The other research team never made much noise, but at least there was equipment present and at least one body or the soft humming of somebody's iTunes. I don't think it helps much either that most of the people on station have the day off today. They put in so much overtime trying to help everybody pack cargo and move off of the island so ASC (Antarctic Support Contractor) told them to just take some time for themselves.
The goal for today between Nathalie and me was to dissect some fish and look at some of the fish females. She decided that we should take the morning off, so we'll see what we end up doing after lunch. Tomorrow she would like to go boating again to drop some traps. We lost the only MT (marine tech) we had on station, so now the lab manager here will be going out with us...or anybody else with boating two certifications. Our fishing expeditions is a nice excuse for them to leave the station for a few hours.
Soon we should be getting our fish to spawn. It's now or never. Right now and within a few weeks is C. aceratus' breeding period. Nathalie and I have unfortunately had to dissect a few females who were near full maturity. Had they been alive for just a few more days we would have been able to get some eggs. If we do manage to obtain some eggs, the next difficulty will be finding a male. Not many of our male fish are "milking males." In terms of our rock-cods though, we should be okay. We have so many of them so we're bound to get some ready males and females for our experiments.
As an aside, I'm not writing blog posts for Northeastern's research blog. Eventually I'll be contributing to a co-op blog if it is up and running in time. The research blog is fun, but I'm always so tempted to get too detailed with the science. I'm supposed to keep it conversational and fun. The next post that should be up at some point this week is about my fishing trip. It was a bit too scientific, and I think that I spent more time recounting events than describing things. While the trip was just a month ago, I've been so busy doing other things here that it's difficult for me to remember some of the finer details (i.e. date I left, fish count, etc.). A lot of edits were made, so hopefully now it'll be a lot more fun to read and not so filled with scientific terms and step-by-step recounts.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Flood in the Aquarium Room
Zane and I both selected a Free House Mouse, so we get to take some time to ourselves now. Since she's been helping Nathalie and me dissect some of the red-blooded fish we have outside, I suggested that we spend our free house mouse time doing a dissection. We walked into the aquarium room, and everything is flooded. The main drain is clogged in some manner. We're not allowed back there because there may be an electrical hazard at some point. I feel bad for all of the people working in there though since we have our fish waste out on the counter top with our fish waste buckets on the floor. Hopefully nobody tries to open one of those or else they'll certainly lose their appetites.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Great Day So Far
This morning the ship departed around 9 A.M. as scheduled. I was up at 7:30 to go and open up our fish tanks and take the morning measurements. We had a beautiful sunrise; the sky was lit up with pink and orange hues. After taking some photos and going back inside, I reluctantly prepared for my polar plunge. I did it, but it did take me some time to work up the nerve to let go of the rails on the pier. I decided to just suck it up and do it when I noticed a crowd was forming and started singing "Come on Eileen." Guess I'll go to some pretty far extents to avoid hearing people serenade me with that one hit wonder. Anyway, the polar plunge is not exactly something that I'd look forward to repeating. It wasn't the most awful experience I've had, but it's by no means comfortable. You stand around outside in shorts or whatever you're wearing waiting in line freezing. Then, you go and you jump (or in my case, whine by the ladder saying that you don't want to do it as everybody else sings you a song). Your first instinct when you hit the icy water is to inhale. I didn't inhale, but I did get a mouth full of water. As I had expected, it was salty. Of course, that may seem silly to other people who don't know this little detail about Antarctica: the seawater down here has a higher salt content than that of the waters near Boston. So as soon as you hit the water, you feel pins and needles everywhere. I immediately swam to the ladder and attempted to climb out. You can't really feel your extremities so climbing that slippery metal was no easy feat. It was even difficult attempting to put on my flip flops since I couldn't feel my toes. I began to put my Big Red on as I headed towards the hot tub, but something strange happened. I didn't feel cold. I felt anything but cold. It was like I just stepped out of the ocean in the Caribbean. Everything was so warm. Granted, this was more than likely my body's response to hypothermia. When I reached the hot tub water, it felt incredibly hot. It was almost like it was burning. Once I dunked my head though I was okay. Urjeet, Yinan, Zane, Kris, Jason, and I were the ones who jumped, and we spent an hour or so in the morning in the hot tub.
I finally got out and showered and whatnot. Urjeet made Yinan and I some curried eggs and toast for a mid-morning breakfast. I've been told that your body uses up an insane amount of calories during that one jump. Guess I found my new workout regimen!
After lunch, Jason took me out on the ATVs and snowmobiles in the backyard and the glacier. We almost didn't go because of the high winds, but we figured that we'd try our luck. He actually let me drive the ATV until we got near the glacier. We switched because of all of the rocks in the backyard. It was getting too tricky for me, and he leads the search and rescue team so it sounded more sane to let him handle the four wheeler. On the glacier, we started up one of the emergency snowmobiles and he let me drive all the way down, turn around, and then back up. It was quite the experience with an even more amazing view. If you ever find yourself on a glacier with a snowmobile nearby, I highly recommend taking it for a drive. Jason signed me off on an ATV and snowmobile license, so now I'm all set to drive around the station with them if I so please. If I want to drive the snowmobile on the glacier, he would prefer that I take him with me just in case anything does happen. It's eerily quiet when the wind isn't blowing up there, so it would be nice to have a friend nearby to talk with.
Now I'm just defrosting myself a bit before I head downstairs to see if Urjeet and Yinan are doing dissections and need any help. Once again, I was placed in charge of our team. It's a neat position to be in, but it also means that I don't necessarily get to do a lot of the hands-on science and dissections. I'm just monitoring things. I'll probably go check on the two female fish that we manhandled yesterday to make sure that they're doing okay. We named them Dimples and Popeye, with Dimples having a pink zip-tie connected to her first dorsal fine to tag her. Popeye got her name because she's missing an eye, and Dimples got hers because her belly had all sorts of markings and dimples on them. We just want to monitor these fish until the LMG returns on Tuesday morning. We aren't prepared to have these fish spawn, but they're also pretty close to the completion of their reproductive maturation so we want to try our best to keep them alive. In the event that they do spawn or they die, I have to try my best to capture the eggs and take care of them. They can last for 12 hours without fertilization if I put them in the 4˚C freezer. During those 12 hours, I'll have to figure out what I want to do with the eggs. Hopefully I'd be able to find a milking male so that I can go ahead and complete the fertilization, but so far all of our males seem to be immature (figures...).
I finally got out and showered and whatnot. Urjeet made Yinan and I some curried eggs and toast for a mid-morning breakfast. I've been told that your body uses up an insane amount of calories during that one jump. Guess I found my new workout regimen!
After lunch, Jason took me out on the ATVs and snowmobiles in the backyard and the glacier. We almost didn't go because of the high winds, but we figured that we'd try our luck. He actually let me drive the ATV until we got near the glacier. We switched because of all of the rocks in the backyard. It was getting too tricky for me, and he leads the search and rescue team so it sounded more sane to let him handle the four wheeler. On the glacier, we started up one of the emergency snowmobiles and he let me drive all the way down, turn around, and then back up. It was quite the experience with an even more amazing view. If you ever find yourself on a glacier with a snowmobile nearby, I highly recommend taking it for a drive. Jason signed me off on an ATV and snowmobile license, so now I'm all set to drive around the station with them if I so please. If I want to drive the snowmobile on the glacier, he would prefer that I take him with me just in case anything does happen. It's eerily quiet when the wind isn't blowing up there, so it would be nice to have a friend nearby to talk with.
Now I'm just defrosting myself a bit before I head downstairs to see if Urjeet and Yinan are doing dissections and need any help. Once again, I was placed in charge of our team. It's a neat position to be in, but it also means that I don't necessarily get to do a lot of the hands-on science and dissections. I'm just monitoring things. I'll probably go check on the two female fish that we manhandled yesterday to make sure that they're doing okay. We named them Dimples and Popeye, with Dimples having a pink zip-tie connected to her first dorsal fine to tag her. Popeye got her name because she's missing an eye, and Dimples got hers because her belly had all sorts of markings and dimples on them. We just want to monitor these fish until the LMG returns on Tuesday morning. We aren't prepared to have these fish spawn, but they're also pretty close to the completion of their reproductive maturation so we want to try our best to keep them alive. In the event that they do spawn or they die, I have to try my best to capture the eggs and take care of them. They can last for 12 hours without fertilization if I put them in the 4˚C freezer. During those 12 hours, I'll have to figure out what I want to do with the eggs. Hopefully I'd be able to find a milking male so that I can go ahead and complete the fertilization, but so far all of our males seem to be immature (figures...).
Friday, May 2, 2014
Sorry for not posting
I've been reminded that I've been slacking on my posts. It's because things have been busy around here what with all of these fishing trips I've been conducting on zodiacs, running the entire aquarium/lab facility for our group while those with doctorates are off fishing, video-conferencing with the NSF for take your child to work day, and managing fish that are getting sick and becoming reproductively mature. Today Nathalie and I attempted to sex the fish in our tanks. We removed two large female C. aceratus fish to inspect them (weight, length, physical attributes) and check their bellies by gently rubbing/squeezing the belly. They were clearly full of eggs, but unfortunately they were not ready to actually spawn. Nathalie, Thomas, and Dr. Detrich will be going on another fishing trip tomorrow to the Banana Trench down south, so I suppose it's a good thing that we didn't get the fish to spawn.
Right now I just finished "House Mouse" and am sitting in my room. House Mouse is when we all get together as a station to clean everything. We draw from a bucket to see what duty we'll be assigned, and on our sheets of paper have bulleted lists of tasks that need to be completed. Last week I pulled Bar & Lounge. This week I got Bio Top Floor Hallway. Both are really simple house mouse duties. The bar and lounge just needs to be tidied up here and there, and the Bio (my building) top floor hallway really only needs to be vacuumed. Since we have a station meeting at 3:30 today, I was able to find some time to write. Normally when I have free time I'm elsewhere on station or reading up on something that I need to know for my work this Antarctic winter.
Tonight in the bar we'll be having swing dancing lessons apparently. Yesterday was a science lecture from one of the researchers on station, Bouvard Hosticka. Bo is a research scientist from University of Virginia, and he's here to run tests on the atmosphere to see if anybody in the world is setting off (testing) nuclear weapons. Pretty cool stuff. There's a lot of physics behind it that he's explained to me a number of times, but I won't get into the details of germanium crystals and electron excitations. He also gets to observe a matter-antimatter reaction. I actually got to see the data results of said reaction. Essentially, with a matter-antimatter reaction you go from a photon of light (a photon is to light as cell is to life) to mass (although energy and mass are essentially the same) to finally kinetic energy. Neat. The data isn't as cool though as it's just a spectrum with a peak in it.
Tomorrow since the ship is leaving, I'm probably going to do what's called the Polar Plunge. When the ship departs from our little pier, I'll be jumping off of the pier with a number of other people on station. I convinced a few newbies to do it with me since this will be my first time. My thought is that if I go around telling people that I'm doing it, I won't chicken out and will actually follow through with it. I want to do it now if I'm going to do it at all since the water is near 32˚F (0˚C...really at 0.4˚C though). On mid-winter's day, the water will be near 27˚F. Too chilly for my taste. I guess now I have to find the bathing suit that I reluctantly packed. Maybe I'll throw on some water-repellant shorts in the hopes that it could manage to wick even a little bit of water away from my body.
Right now I just finished "House Mouse" and am sitting in my room. House Mouse is when we all get together as a station to clean everything. We draw from a bucket to see what duty we'll be assigned, and on our sheets of paper have bulleted lists of tasks that need to be completed. Last week I pulled Bar & Lounge. This week I got Bio Top Floor Hallway. Both are really simple house mouse duties. The bar and lounge just needs to be tidied up here and there, and the Bio (my building) top floor hallway really only needs to be vacuumed. Since we have a station meeting at 3:30 today, I was able to find some time to write. Normally when I have free time I'm elsewhere on station or reading up on something that I need to know for my work this Antarctic winter.
Tonight in the bar we'll be having swing dancing lessons apparently. Yesterday was a science lecture from one of the researchers on station, Bouvard Hosticka. Bo is a research scientist from University of Virginia, and he's here to run tests on the atmosphere to see if anybody in the world is setting off (testing) nuclear weapons. Pretty cool stuff. There's a lot of physics behind it that he's explained to me a number of times, but I won't get into the details of germanium crystals and electron excitations. He also gets to observe a matter-antimatter reaction. I actually got to see the data results of said reaction. Essentially, with a matter-antimatter reaction you go from a photon of light (a photon is to light as cell is to life) to mass (although energy and mass are essentially the same) to finally kinetic energy. Neat. The data isn't as cool though as it's just a spectrum with a peak in it.
Tomorrow since the ship is leaving, I'm probably going to do what's called the Polar Plunge. When the ship departs from our little pier, I'll be jumping off of the pier with a number of other people on station. I convinced a few newbies to do it with me since this will be my first time. My thought is that if I go around telling people that I'm doing it, I won't chicken out and will actually follow through with it. I want to do it now if I'm going to do it at all since the water is near 32˚F (0˚C...really at 0.4˚C though). On mid-winter's day, the water will be near 27˚F. Too chilly for my taste. I guess now I have to find the bathing suit that I reluctantly packed. Maybe I'll throw on some water-repellant shorts in the hopes that it could manage to wick even a little bit of water away from my body.
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