Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 23:44:43 -0300 From: "Sirovic, Ana" Subject: Message 01 In-Reply-To: <200202040530.VAA06012@gardyloo> 4 Feb 2002, 23:00 53 degrees 10.12' South latitude 70 degrees 54.41' West longitude Punta Arenas, Chile Air temperautre: 12.5 degrees C Sea Surface Temperature (SST): 9.7 degrees C Wind speed: 17 knots, 240 degrees Air pressure: 1020.3 mBar Hi! It's been 3 days since my arrival to Punta Arenas (also known as PA). I've had some time to walk around the city, have some very good food, enjoy the hospitality of Chilean people, see cars with stickers of Croatian flag (there are a lot of Croatian immigrants in PA) ... So as a little tribute to my stay here, today's attachement is a panoramic shot of PA. If you look closely in the little black circle you will notice the research vessel Laurence M. Gould, my home for the next 4 weeks. But it hasn't been all fun and games since I got here. Setting up the labs has been a big part of most of the days - hooking up the computers, making sure all the equipment is here, testing that everything works and similar kinds of details take quite a bit of time! This cruise, LMG02-01A, is the second mooring cruise of the SO GLOBEC program. By 'mooring cruise' I mean a cruise on which we will service some instruments that have been sitting on the bottom of the ocean and collecting various kinds of data for the past year (since the first mooring cruise). An important detail of every cruise is its code and once you figure them out, they can be quite useful: the three letters tell you the name of the ship (Laurence M. Gould or Nathaniel B. Palmer), first 2 numbers are the year of the cruise and the second set of numbers is the consecutive cruise number that year. The cruises that I'll be participating on this year (LMG02-01A and NBP02-02) are part of the SO GLOBEC program (Southern Ocean Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics) which is taking part off the West Antarctic Peninsula. This is a truly interdisciplinary project, but its main goal is an depth study of the krill biology. I am sure I will be telling you all about the importance of this little animal later (particularly during my second cruise, since there will be a lot of krill biologists onboard at that time)! This project, however, has many overlapping points with LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) program that has been going on off Antarctic Peninsula for more than 10 years now. The coexistance of these 2 large projects if very exciting for most of us since it will offer more chances for deeper understanding of the ecosystem of the area. I know that by now you must be dying to hear what it is that I'll be doing down here. Well, since it's right around my bed time now I'm afraid you'll have to stay tuned for more information on the projects, people, penguins, icebergs and other Antarctic marvels in the upcoming weeks! Ana