Thursday, January 05, 2006

Arrival of the January Crew

Our team has arrived! The Biocomplexity group is finally together again. Ron Ray and Maria were on another trip that I took last summer to the Sargasso Sea, right in the vicinity of Bermuda. Yes we were in the Bermuda Triangle and nothing happened out of the ordinary. Back to Palmer… Everyone had a great crossing but they were all very happy to have arrived. Now it is time to try and get resituated around here. Lab space will need to be reallocated and the stations residents are in store for a lot of shuffling in their cabins. We are going to be fully loaded with 45 residents after we have moved everyone off the ship and everyone else on who is going to participate in the LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) cruise. There are some people losing a person out of their bunkroom and some will need to move to accommodate rooming situations. The most invasive switch here is a lab swap for the phytoplankton group; they have many people leaving on the cruise leaving only one behind. The Phyto group is set up in the largest lab on station to supply enough room for their people and equipment. Some equipment is leaving on the cruise but much will stay behind and will be moved to a smaller lab to open lab space for another large group. They have been working on this transition for weeks. We all have a lot of training to complete, for ourselves and for the newer people. We need to learn processes so that we can take some vacant places in the Phyto group, help our new people to understand our analysis and prep, and to start up all of our experiments that have been on the back burner while there was only two of us here. This is all going to lead to a very busy first week and a half.

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