Leg three, the beginning

February 28

I have to admit that I’m starting to “lean north” as we used to say in McMurdo. I am ready to go home and sleep a little bit. Although sleeping on a non-rocking bed would be hard.
During the stop-over in Hobart I had the bestest time with my Australian friends, I smelled the trees and played with kids and felt rejuvenated. I had to do some work during the Punta Arenas stop-over. I also did not get to stay off the ship, so I slept in my cabin even in port. And honestly – maybe it’s for the best. Going back to ship after a night in a real bed would have been that much harder.

That said our first day at sea was really smooth and peaceful. We observed the solar eclipse in the morning (see my previous post) and had one of the most spectacular sunsets.

We did our first CTD station on February 27 and then did another station on February 28. The second one was shorter and only our project sampled the water from it – so it got designated “Masha station” on the white board in the expedition office.

I told you I will become an oceanographer ;)

Peter the 1st

February,17

On Wednesday February 15 we arrived at Peter the 1st island. It is located at roughly 90 degrees west - which marks about 70% of the longitudinal journey we have to complete during all three legs. Longitude-wise leg 2 is the most intense and it is also the longest. Ship lag is definitely upon us all...

When we first got the sea ice maps for Peter the 1st island it looked unapproachable. We almost ditched it completely from the program, but the sea ice seemed less intense later and we decided to try. We got into heavy sea ice late morning on the 15th and woke up many seals resting on ice floes:

I have never seen so many seals at the same time, I was taking pictures and videos and I couldn't get enough. I guess they did not expect us at all!

The views of the island were memorizing:

There were all forms of ice all around us - sea ice, iceberg, glaciers, etc. Even though we did not have much time to spare, we decided to use this opportunity to visit the island and collect some samples: drill an ice core, collect biological and geological samples from the beaches and collected some sea ice for the biological analyses. Helicopters and Zodiacs once again were busy for a quite a few hours delivering multiple parties to different locations, which provided good news from our upper deck "office balcony":

Balleny islands archipelago

February 3-4

We arrived to Balleny islands on Friday, February 3rd. The weather was not so good with really strong winds. We did a full CTD station ahead of the island and hoped for a better day tomorrow. It was still quite a magnificent view:

And magically the weather cooperated the next day. February 4th was sunny, albeit a cold and windy day. Island work was with in full swing. In the morning the helicopters brought the mountaineer and the ice coring party on top of the island. After several hours of work in “real Antarctic conditions” of sub-freezing temperatures and really strong winds they recovered a 17m ice core – a first one from this archipelago.

Meanwhile, the Zodiacs were launched into the water. The swell was rather high, but still operational. Two Zodiacs full of people went on around one of the islands in search of a beach to sample soil, microplastics and such. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any suitable place to land on a Zodiac and after an hour or so in the water they returned back to the ship.

At the same time helicopter operations continued. The "guests" of our cruise went onto the ice, but they got cold quite fast and returned to the well-heated icebreaker. After that, our pilots took the journalists and the ornithology team around the islands to take a detailed survey of the area. This digital photographs will be turned into 3-d maps of Balleny islands archipelago – hopefully helping all the expeditions to follow us. They would not need to spend all the time around the islands and would learn from our photographs where the suitable locations for landings/sampling/visits are.

Another activity we did for two days in a row – trawling for benthic creatures (organisms living at the bottom of the ocean). I went to the benthic lab after the first series of trawling we did and admired the organisms we acquired:

There were cold-water corals, star fish and sea urchins. Also cucumbers, several fish and some weird creature I forgot to ask the name of – these did not make it to the pictures I sent out.

All in all it was rather productive couple of days at Balleny islands. We also did a CTD cast before, in the middle and after the islands to study the island effect on biological productivity. As I sample these CTD casts I’m learning more about oceanography of the Southern Ocean, how to distinguish winter waters from the summer mixed layer waters and so on.

As we were cruising past the islands in the afternoon of February 4th, our chief scientist pointed out that we are the lucky bunch. Not only these archipelago is rarely visited by expeditions – it is quite rare to catch such a sunny day and actually see the islands. So here’s one more picture for all the readers of my blog. You are quite lucky to be seeing this as well!