International Polar Year 2007-2008 website
Ross Island Map
Field Guide to Antarctic Marine Life
Local Weather
A Brooklynite on the ice: A fellow antarctican's blog, containing much hilarity
The Antarctic Sun Newspaper
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11/15/06: Ainley and the Royds Rookery
Went to Cape Royds today to see the Adelie penguin rookery and meet with Dr. David Ainley. We spent 2 hours taking pictures and watching them from afar, while the penguins spent that time doing mating displays and stealing rocks from one other’s nests. We also got to go inside Shackleton’s Hut and see how they lived. All in all, a stellar day.
11/14/06: Please, could you stop. We have never seen the mountain this way.
Took documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog and his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger out on the ice this morning. We pulled up our mawsoni hooks hoping to impress him… GIANT BUST! Werner and Peter still got plenty of footage of us winching up the line and guessing how many fish there would be. Failure to catch a fish may have provided Werner with an opportunity to set up a melodramatic storyline of epic struggle, man-against-beast, order vs. chaos, thanksgiving turkey vs. electric carving knife, etc. Seriously though, these guys were great to hang out with. They were very professional and knew exactly what they wanted. Gretchen, the media darling of the lab, was a prefect subject for Werner's camera.
11/14/06: Good Morning America
Gretchen was on Good Morning America this morning, talking about the importance of Antarctic research. Because of the time difference, the 7am interview in New York meant that she had to be on camera between 1am and 3am Antarctica-time. We all went to watch and cheer her on and then celebrated by staying awake until breakfast.
11/13/06: Mawsoni Fishing Begins
We put down some mawsoni hooks today at Fish Hut 6, hoping to catch big Antarctic cod Dissostichus mawsoni that can get up to 254+lbs and almost 6ft long! Below are some pictures of the fish hooks and the “coffin” that we put the fish in when we bring one up so that we can get our samples. Sounds simple enough, but we’ll see how easy it is to get a fish in there if we actually catch one.
This is the box we use to transport the fish back to station
These are the hooks we catch them with
11/11/06: ROV is a giant success!
We took the ROV out on its maiden voyage today! We brought the ROV to our other fish hut, Fish Hut 1, at Cape Evans and dropped it down in about 30 feet of water. The first images we filmed turned out great. The bottom was covered with sea stars, urchins, nemerteans and sponges, along with a few bernies. We also got some great views of the sea ice from below with the top-facing camera. We couldn’t be happier with the ROV, and owe a special thanks to Ryan Garner and Amanda Wilson from Cabrillo High School (Lompoc, CA) for their amazing work in building it for us.
11/4/06: Ice Arrivals
The rest of the team has finally arrived. Jessie (Delta), Steve (Gonzo) and Peggy (Pretzel) arrived on a C-17 on November 3rd and settled into the swing of Mac town. Steve and Peggy rocked snow school and sea ice training. Jessie went straight to fishing detail and caught a dozen bernies and one elephant whale bat dragonfish, Gymnodraco acuticeps, of heroic proportions.
11/3/06: To The Barnes!
November arrived and B-134 decided to push north. Having surveyed Inaccessible Island and Cape Evans we moved on to new territory and this meant crossing the sinister Barne Glacier Crack. Armed with our trusty shovels and the mighty Kovacs, the particulars of the Barne crack were surmised. Check out our video of what it takes to profile a crack in the ice.
Once it was deemed safe to cross the crack, we went on a jolly for an up close and personal of the Barne Glacier.
10/31/06 Halloween Emperors:
Hi there. It's late at night and I can't write much, but I had to post these videos because they're the bees knees. 2 things to look for here; 1 the emperor with cold feet on the right of the first two videos, 2 the way he gets told off by the big penguin.
10/28/06 general update type stuff:
The weather link on the left is working now. Should be fun for you to see how freezing it is down here, while you're all basking in the cool, early evenings of fall and watching the sun set before falling asleep in your own beds. We're not jealous of such things though, not at all.
10/24/06 fun with crinoids:
Here's a neat invertebrate we pulled up from 400 meters. It's called a crinoid, or, for those of you who aren't into the whole brevity thing, Promachocrinus kerguelensis. We didn't find any fish down there though, so we'll have to shift our hut to a sweeter spot.
Today we drilled a hole in the old ship channel. When the resupply ship comes into McMurdo for the summer, the ice cutters have to cut a channel for the ship. Our hole was right where the channel was last year. The ice there is fresh and tends to be loaded up with Borchs, Pagothenia borchgrevinki, which we haven't caught yet. Not that we're worried, Gretchen's trusty rod named "sweet-thing" will have its revenge. While we were drilling a C-17 buzzed us on its way to the ice runway.
10/20/06 photo updates:
10/20/06 Ummm, Ummm Good!:
Can't wait to get this stuff in my mouth. A little brown, a little red ...white. Top it off with a survival doughnut! YUM!
Saturday - October 21
LUNCH 11am-1pm
Smokey Mountain Chicken Sandwiches
Beef Pot Pie w/Biscuit Topping
DINNER 5pm - 7:30pm
Spaghetti with Meat Sauce
Pork Green Chili
Beef Stew10/18/06 More Fishing and Bright Lights:
Today we drove out to fish hut 6 with hopes of pulling up some Eelpouts, otherwise known as Lycodicthys dearborni.We had set 3 large traps at the bottom 428 meters below the ice. We let the traps soak for a day or two before we came back to collect the goods. Unfortunately we only pulled up one Eelpout. The good news though is that we did catch some cool invertebrates as bycatch. Glyptonotus antarcticus, the giant Antarctic isopod came up big today. That's not at all what we're looking for, but it makes a good addition to the touch tanks in the Crary lab. The coolest thing we caught today was totally unexpected. After winching up the traps for about 15 minutes we started to noticed that the winch line was glowing bright green and blue as it came up from the water. A cluster of bioluminescent jellyfish had been blown into our line by the current. There's a video of that below. Well, there will be when we find the firewire cable to Gretch's camera.
Anne hauling up a longline trap at fish hut 6
10/17/06 ROV is in the water:
We dropped the ROV into the aquarium last night to see if everything survived the trip down here. It works great! Everybody who came down to the sea water room wanted to check it out and have a turn chasing after bernies with it. We're going to bring it out in the field as soon as the weather clears up. Here are some stills of the test flight.
10/14/06 Fishing for bernies:
Today was a great day for fishing. We drilled our own hole on the north side of inaccessible island and dropped our lines to see what we could catch. The bottom was about 50 ft. down and it was packed with Trematomus bernacchii, we call them Bernies for short. We caught about 20 of them and headed back to station to house them in the aquarium.
10/13/06 Drilling our holes:
Trusty fish hut 6 was dragged out onto the sea ice early this morning. The huts are pulled out into position using a Cat. The Cat also tows a drilling rig to bore through the ice. If you click on the button below you can see a video of the drill in action.
The B-134 team is also gearing up to test our ROV in one the large aquarium tanks located in the Crary lab. We'll use the test flight in the tank to set the buoyancy of the bot and make sure all the systems are operational. Once we check the bot out in the lab we'll pack it into the piston bully and head out for the calm shallow waters of Evan's Cove. Hopefully we'll get the bot in the sea by next week. We'll try to have video of the lab test flight up by Tuesday our time.
10/10/06 We're on the sea ice:
Today we made it out to the sea ice for the first time. While out on the ice, we loaded up our fish huts and outfitted our snow mobiles for action. Notable achievements of the day include; Mackenzie and Tim standing up to -40 degree wind chill while lashing down the survival gear to the vehicles, Anne hopefully surviving survival school, we'll know how that went for her tomorrow, and Gretchen performing miracles on the logistic support front. Below is a little video we put together while out on the ice. As mentioned above, it's was very cold today. Once Anne gets back from snow school we'll put up some pictures of her survival ordeal... if she was able to shoot anything in the terrible weather.
10/9/06 Our first round of updates:
We've made it to the ice. We're tired, travel-worn, and cold, but we're ready to fish! Below are a few movies that show what we've been up to. The operation black cod movie on the left is the first slide show we made with an audio track. We didn't know what we were doing but it came out funny, so it's up. It's supposed to document B-134 bringing the New Zealand black cod down to McMurdo.