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>Seas: 3 feet
>Winds 19 knots
>Temp -1.0 C ; w/ wind chill –17 C
>Location: Latitude 64 degrees 28.10’ S; Longitude 64 degrees 48.50 W

Above, Three crew members with the ship in the background on land in Whaler's Bay, a former Norwegian whaling station.
Below: "Neptune's Window" is a U-shape hole in the rock wall.
Click on each image for larger view.

10 December 2004

We’re heading south….

We have turned the bow of the LMG to the south and we are towing and trawling our way toward the Antarctic Circle (66.5° S). The waters surrounding Anvers Island (the site of the northernmost U.S. Antarctic facility, Palmer Station) are covered with ice and our plan is to skirt the ice edge and sample the continental shelf before we arrive at Palmer on the 16th of December. [The thought of breaking ice to gain access to Palmer Station is exciting, but is tempered by the realization that this ship is made of metal, that we reside in a cabin in the bow of the ship, and that the bow is the first part of the ship to impact ice.]

There is no hope of seeing stars in the evening sky. Although the sky does darken a bit sometime between 2-4 a.m. (equivalent to dusk in Bloomington), you could easily read the Argus anytime of the day.
I’m keeping this short today. It’s 1:30 a.m., and Dr. Balser and I have just finished for the evening. In the last trawl of the evening (11 p.m.) we found an apparently different species of pterobranch hemichordate. This is the fourth species of pterobranch that has been collected on this cruise. This species and two of the previous three species that have been collected broods its embryos within the tubes in which the adults reside.

At 8 a.m. we begin another day of "a trawlin’ and a towin’".

Cheers, WBJ

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Invertebrate Larvae Page

Projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation


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