Category Archives: Palmer 2015 field season

Wrapping up the season

Yesterday morning the Gould returned to Palmer Station, which means that it’s time for Jamie and I to take off. I’m looking forward to getting home and working through all the data we’ve collected (and who wouldn’t want to spend … Continue reading

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Making sense of megafauna: The canyon hypothesis

Earlier in the week we had our orca show, yesterday this was the view of the top of our boat ramp: In fact that view hasn’t changed.  From the science office I can just make out the penguin colony on … Continue reading

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National Geographic moment

This is a very short post to share the spectacular National Geographic moment we had this morning when a pod of killer whales swam into Arthur Harbor and spent about an hour terrorizing the local seals.  Spoiler alert for the … Continue reading

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The news from Palmer Station

It’s been another quiet week at Palmer Station, out here on the edge of Antarctica… This week was punctuated by a set of intense storms.  The one that came in on Wednesday was the most intense storm that we’ve had … Continue reading

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Sea ice redux

We were supposed to sample the regular LTER stations by Zodiac yesterday, but this was the view of Arthur Harbor as of yesterday evening: No possible way to get a zodiac through all that.  We’ll have to wait until the … Continue reading

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Up by two

We gained two more members to our team this week; Conor Sullivan, a field technician with the Ducklow group at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and Ribanna Dietrich, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  After dropping them … Continue reading

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Enduring is easy 100 years after Endurance

Today’s a special day in the annals of Antarctic exploration, it’s been 100 years to the day since Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed by ice and finally sank after 307 days beset in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea.  … Continue reading

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An end to ice (sampling)

It’s been a busy few days as we wrap up ice sampling and make the transition to sampling by boat at the regular Palmer LTER stations.  This afternoon we’ll break down the ice removal experiment we started over a week … Continue reading

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No boating yet and a sneak peek at phytoplankton

The storms of the past week cleared most of the pack ice out of Arthur Harbor, although the land fast ice that we’ve been sampling from has survived.  In anticipation of the start of the boating season there was a … Continue reading

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The Gould, a gale, and a bit more on SAM

The Laurence M. Gould departed for Punta Arenas last night, taking Colleen with it and leaving Jamie and I on our own until reinforcements arrive in two weeks (you can check out Jamie’s blog here for more on what we’re … Continue reading

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