Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 21:51:04 -0300 From: "Sirovic, Ana" Subject: Message 02 6 Feb 2002, 18:30 53 degrees 02.39 S latitude 70 degrees 38.52 W longitude (The Straits of Magellan) Air surface temperature: 12.6 degrees C Sea Surface Temperature (SST): 9.7 degrees C Wind speed: 26 knots, 260 degrees Air pressure: 1006.7 mBar We're off! It was around 17:00 when we finally set sail, with approximately 24 hour delay. The reason for the delay: the batteries for our instruments were not here. On their way from San Diego and LA to Chile, they decided to take a detour through Mexico and Miami! So we spent 3 nerve-wrecking days waiting for their arrival, and they finally got loaded on the ship around 3 pm today. That made us quite happy! In case you are wondering who is this 'we', let me introduce the group I came here with: John (Hildebrand) is my advisor and a professor at Scripps - he's in charge of the project, Sean (Wiggins) is our project scientist / engineer / person who sill solve all our hardware, software, and other problems, and Mark (McDonald) who used to be a student of John's and he now collaborates with our group on several projects and is really into blue whales. We will have several objectives during this cruise. Most importantly, we will be recovering 8 autonomous recording packages (ARPs, as we like to call them) that we put down in March of last year and redeploying them for another year. During the past 11 months the ARPs have (hopefully!) been continuously recording low frequency noise. It is these data that I will be analysing for whale calls and I hope it will be the basis my PhD thesis. The ARPs consist of a hydrophone (water version of a microphone), data logging system, hard disks that the data gets written on, acoustic releases, floatation, and, of course, batteries. Also, along the way we will be oportunistically deploying sonobuoys for real time monitoring of whale calls. Sonobuoys are expandable devices that get thrown overboard and have a hydrophone and a radio transmitter. We can receive the sonobuoy radio signal on our antenna on the underway ship and listen to the sounds, record and monitor them using our computers. I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to describe our hardware in more detail as the cruise goes along, so now I'll just try to give you an idea what we hope to accomplish with this project. We are interested in determining minimum population estimates, seasonal presence and absence of various species of baleen whales, mostly the blues, minkes, and fins, but there are many other information that our data could give us! Little has been learned about these species (the blues in particular) since the cessation of whaling and any information for groundtruthing their abundances in the Antarctic would be very useful. Today's picture: a close up of the circle from my first photo, a place we will be calling home for the next ~25 days -- Laurence M Gould, LMG, or the Gould, as it is known. Well, it's time for our safety and science meeting so I'd better hurry up to the lounge! Ana