The Real Antarctica

Today is January 29th and we really feel like we are in Antarctic waters.  We went south until we were in the sea ice as far as we could safely go about 70.05 S.  This is the farthest the Gould has ever gone!  We are completely surrounded by sea ice and there are large tabular bergs around us too.  Summer sea ice used to extend farther north but has retreated with climate change since the later 1970′s.  The first picture is by Tim Hollibaugh and shows the shadow of the Gould on an iceberg  at sunset last night.  The second and third pictures are looking around the Gould this morning after sunrise near our most southern position.  We performed our normal oceanographic sampling here and the 4th picture shows Chance and Oscar recovering one of the instruments we use to measure the optical properties of the water.  It was tricky working with all the ice around.  The last picture shows the CTD rosette as it just entered the water and is ready to be lowered to around 300 meters to get our water samples.  Again, you can see the ice very close to the ship and the rosette wire.  The captain uses acombination of the ship’s propellers, the bow thruster and rudder to keep a small patch of ice-free water near the boat.   Later, we also did  net tows successfully and didn’t even get ice in the nets.  everyone is very excited to be here.  We will remain here for the day and into the evening for another round of sampling as long as the weather and ice conditions permit.