Hi Everyone,
Sorry for the long delay between blog posts, I will confess to writing this one a little late. It has been a very busy and exciting time here as we have been visiting South Georgia!
I woke up early (a bit before 5am, which is especially early for me given that my shift is midday to midnight) to see us arriving into Rosita Bay. The scenery here was truly stunning, sailing into a narrow, sheltered bay surrounded by snowcapped mountains and glaciers. The rocks here are also amazing as they are relatively uncovered by greenery and have been folded and stressed into amazing shapes, which I have been enthusiastically photographing!
The wildlife here has also been fantastic, I have spent a good amount of the day on deck watching them. There is a nearby seal colony in Rosita Bay which we can just about make out with a good camera or binoculars. South Georgia is also home to roughly 4 million fur seals (I think) and so the waters around us are very busy with fur seals playing and jumping around the ship, so plenty of opportunity for fun and enjoyable photography. I also saw an Antarctic cormorant and one even flew incredibly close to the ship, leading me to (somewhat unsuccessfully) try to take some pictures of it. A highlight of our time on deck today was Kevin the penguin. He spent a lot of time following the ship and jumping and effortlessly gliding through the water near us. He was fantastic to watch and also very vocal (he gained his name after responding enthusiastically when it was mentioned).
Finally, there was actually quite a lot of work to be done today. We were in the bay to calibrate all of the acoustic instruments, which is done by moving a very well crafted and acoustically understood sphere around the ship. Believe it or not, this takes a long time and can be quite difficult, though I was not directly involved in this. Most of my work today was helping out with CTD casts and methane sampling before having another go at salinometry in the evening. Salinometry will become one of the main focuses of my work for the rest of the cruise and involves the very precise measurement of the salinity of water samples. This is done using a complex machine which is able to maintain the temperature of water very precisely and measure it’s conductivity, allowing calculations of the salinity. These measurements require precise calibration against standardised bottles of saltwater (which cost ~£30 each!). This was Chris and my second attempt at salinometry and the calibration took us a while to get right…. But fortunately we got into the swing of it eventually and I think by the end of the cruise we will be very experienced!
04/01/23
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