Thursday, March 22, 2007

just a few more days now

We are now getting to the very end of the trip. I am currently
heading north from the Antarctic Peninsula. We are nearing the Drake
Passage and heading toward the western entrance of Punta Arenas. We
have a maximum of five days left, but the people who man the ship
believe that we will be in to port in four days.

Yesterday morning we experienced our last little piece of research.
We stopped to pick up a mooring. A mooring is a device connected to
big floating buoy type things that collects information on density,
salinity (concentration of salt), and temperature over a long period
of time. It's just like doing a CTD, but a research left the mooring
in the water for a year or so. I wasn't awake for the recovery of
this mooring, but I had seen it earlier in the trip. It's actually a
pretty neat little machine. When we recover the mooring, we have to
communicate with it through shooting out beams of sound. The little
machine hears us talking to it, and it talks back to us. It tells us
where it is, whether it's working, and if it is on the bottom of the
ocean or on the surface. It's also very good for learning more about
an annual shift in temperature and water composition. Due to
Antarctica's harsh climates, I doubt people would want to come out to
ocean in the middle of winter to find out about temperature and
salinity changes.

Well, I haven't been up to much else. We have been watching a lot of
movies because all of the researchers don't really have anything left
to do. I am working from 8pm to 4am now. I get up at noon and hang
out with people, watching movies, playing games, and just talking (oh
and working on some independent study homework). Then I work for a
few hours. I seem like I have less time now than I did while I was
working 12 hours shifts even though I have been sleeping less. This
lack of time is probably just due to me having way too much fun!

No comments: