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23 - The Quiz

Hi Everyone,


As implied by the title, the highlight of the day was a mega-quiz for everyone onboard. More on that later.


Thanks to the 24 hour lag time on salt samples, as they have to be left to equilibriate to room temperature, I had two crates of bottles to process today. This took most of my afternoon but was good fun. I feel like I am finally getting into the rhythm of the salinometry now, with a good audiobook and fitting in the occasional squat or lunge it can be quite therapeutic.


Otherwise, there were some further bergy bits and a very generous snow shower. This might not sound so exciting but actually we haven’t seen a huge amount of snow since we have been here because the Southern Ocean is quite dry. So to see the huge flakes and clumps falling around the ship was really fun and made it feel very Antarctic!


After my salinometry, Nadine (a fellow scientist) introduced me to her copepods. These are small ocean-dwelling critters only a couple of millimetres in length which we viewed through the microscope. They are absolutely fascinating creatures, with long antennae attached to a vaguely shrimp-like body. They also have a visible lipid sack towards the front of their body. This is used to store up lipids during the summer and autumn so that in the winter when there are less light and nutrients available the copepods can migrate into the deeper waters and avoid predation. In these deeper waters they essentially hibernate and enter a state of suspended animation until the light returns. This also acts as an interesting lipid pump, taking the lipids into the deep ocean and then those that do not make it through the winter sink into the depths. Even more amazingly, to analyse these creatures, those that are adults need to be identified and this is done by counting the number of ridges on their miniscule tails through the microscope. The patience required is incredible!


Finally, we reach the quiz. This was kindly prepared by one of the engineers onboard and we all quickly separated into teams. My team was composed of myself, Pip and Evelyn, under the fantastic name of “RRS Quizcovery” courtesy of Evelyn. Unfortunately, it turns out that being one of the smallest teams and being entirely under 30 did not help with our quiz ability…. But we had a great time, excelling in the general knowledge and music rounds while crashing somewhat in the film round (3/20…). A novel round was an all or nothing round to begin where we were given 11 pictures of different events through history and 11 spaces. We had to place each of the events in order and name them. If we didn’t know a name we could leave it out but had to still have it in the right location in the spaces. If a single name was incorrect or in the wrong place then zero was scored on the round, which made it very intense. We managed to get a solid six on this round, which was one of the higher scores. We were mostly limited by a lack of certainty on when prohibition ended. Overall, very good fun and more importantly we beat the other “kids team” so that was a good morale boost.

10/01/23

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