Nathaniel B. Palmer time lapse

This time lapse video was recently forwarded to me, taken from the deck of the NSF research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer during a cruise through the Ross Sea.  It’s entertaining, and illustrates the wide diversity of sea ice that can be encountered in the polar spring and fall, particularly near polynyas.  The video was put together and originally posted by Cassandra Brooks, a marine ecologist and science writer at Stanford.  She does a great job narrating the video and explaining a little bit about the Ross Sea Polynya.  This cruise was part of the Amundsen Sea Polynya International Research Expedition (ASPIRE), an interdisciplinary effort to characterize the biological and physical phenomena that make this one of the most productive regions of the ocean anywhere in the world.  There’s a good, non-technical article describing preliminary findings from ASPIRE available here.