Almost a month at sea. It’s not the first time. I have been at sea several times in these years but every time is special and unique. It is unique for the research we conduct, for the people we meet, the seas we cross, and the infinite things we still learn from each other at […]
Tumbling along like a tumbling tumbleweed Ok, so the title might just have outed my love for all things Lebowski, but hopefully I will be able to make a link, irregardless of how tenuous it might be, between tumbleweeds and and the subject of this post, drifters. First things first, we have to remind ourselves what […]
Cloud formation depends on several factors, and one of those is the presence of aerosols. Marine aerosols come from a number of sources (sea salt, biogenic aerosols, continental aerosols that are carried over by wind) and differ in size and composition. We’ve collected CCN and CPC data to determine, respectively, the concentration of particles that […]
All Quiet in the Main Lab Oceanography is a bunch of tired people filtering the ocean. It reminds me of a Norse story I read a long time ago: Thor was mad at someone so he went to their place to confront them. They were scared of him and his advanced musculature, so they decided […]
It doesn’t take a lot of technology to see that the ocean is blue. And when it comes to the blueness of the ocean, it doesn’t get much more blue than where I am. I’m sitting on the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer—the largest icebreaker that supports the United States Antarctic Program—on an oceanographic expedition […]
Sleep. I don’t mean to say it is taken for granted, but it is dependable. Dependable in the sense that after the day’s activities, we go to sleep. Each and every night. That’s how it works at home at least. Here on the ship, work is being conducted 24 hours per day to get the […]
A variety of things during a day at sea The motion woke me up this morning around 10 am. We finally have some weather after days of calm seas. First things first, I made a B-line for the coffee machine in the galley. If you’ve never had a cup of coffee on the deck of […]
Here we are again, sailing, sampling, studying the ocean, and overall enjoying the adventure of living on a floating island with a diverse group of people and learning from them. Today we are working on the most northern station and ready to bring back home samples and measurements. During my second cruise and third in […]
When we think about the ocean the first reflex is to imagine the blue of a paradise tropical island or massive waves hitting remote cliffs on a stormy night. The most adventurous may think about submarines exploring the deep ocean and rovers sampling underwater volcanoes. There is something extremely fascinating that sits right “in the […]
