Wednesday, November 16, 2005

No LMG for us!

Sorry for that pause.  We had a very busy day with a new experiment (which I will explain in a comment for those of you who would like to read it).  We also had some issues with the LMG (Lawrence M. Gould).  The ship, bringing new people, much needed gear, freshies, mail, and not to forget to mention to bring home all of the people that are scheduled to get back to their lives, could not push its way through.  The LMG was short one engine and the ice is abnormally thick.  So the administration here got to work on alternatives to receive our gear and return our people.  This made for a very busy and distracting day, every hour or so an announcement would come over the “all call” saying “We have found a cruise ship in the area, we are trying to contact them and see if they can help.”   These type of updates continued all day until finally the LMG had worked its way out of the ice and was back in open water.  This opened the scheme of alternatives up much wider.  Now the plan was to ask the British base at Rothera to fly our team and good out to King Georges Island and meet up with the LMG to bring back personnel and our most important selection of our gear.  We are still waiting to find out what is going to happen…  1600 this evening.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

George - I'm curious as to how Palmer station get's its power and how environmentally friendly it is.

Anonymous said...

George,

As an ESF alumni, it's great to see the school having its hands in things in all corners of the world. Keep up the fantastic work and good luck with that ice.

gorg said...

It is great to see that the general public, especially our alumni, are getting the opportunity to see this stuff. I know that this comment might sound very speech oriented, but I am very proud to be a part of such a great program that is totally supported by ESF. Thanks for checking on things here.

gorg said...

Our research here is best summed up by giving you the big picture. Dr. Ronald Kiene a PI in of this project said:

The biocomplexity of the global DMS cycle – The biogeochemical cycle of DMS in the ocean involves many different types of organisms (algae, bacteria, viruses, grazers) interacting in a complex web of ecological, processes, all of which depend greatly on the geophysical and biophysical conditions experienced by the plankton community. In turn, DMS emissions to the atmosphere can have an enormous impact on atmospheric chemistry and climate with potential for feedbacks on the plankton communities that produce DMSP and DMS. We are funded by the NSF Biocomplexity program to work with other DMS specialists, food web modelers and climate modelers to advance understanding of how the DMS cycle functions and how it responds to forcings such as temperature, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, nutrients, water column mixing depths and other factors. In addition to laboratory components, this project has two major field components. The first will be a month-long cruise to the Sargasso Sea near the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS) station to investigate the late summer “DMS paradox”, a period of high DMS concentrations when plankton biomass is extremely low. The second field study will be an extended time series and experimental investigation of DMS cycling in the productive waters near the Antarctic Palmer Peninsula.