Brian Powell

8/25: Our email was down for a day, so there was a delay to getting a new entry out. Last night, we were able to witness our first Aurora Australis. It was quite a sight and different from the images I have seen of the Borealis. They were long, vertical strings in the sky that would light up for 30 seconds or so before fading away. Very impressive.

Every day, we seem to have 1-8 penguins hanging around the ship. This morning, one was very interested in the balloon we launched. Sometimes, it can be tough being a flightless bird. Actually, one afternoon I watched them from the bow chasing each other and "flying" around under the water, and they are incredibly quick and maneuverable in their environment. The leapord seals have a difficult time catching them when they are under full swim: the seals tend to grab them when they stand near the edge of the ice or when they first jump in. The penguins are quite enjoyable to watch, they always huddle close together if there are more than 1 on the ice. Whenever one makes a move to go somewhere, the others will invariably follow. They are quite the plump little weeble-wobbles and it can be humorous watching them try to get out of the ice. There were 3 large whales swimming down a lead we were drifting near; however, I missed those having been asleep at the time.

We have settled follow into our Phase III plan: we launched two Lagrangian buoys with localized acoustical trackers that we can use to follow the particular water column we launched them into. We will track the buoy and go 5-10km upwind of the buoy. We then park the ship, "mow the lawn" (clear the ice away from the ship for a large pond around the starboard side), deploy the micro-structure instruments and drift toward the buoy. Once we have passed over it for some distance, we pull out all of the instruments and repeat the cycle.

And now that time of the show---Questions from the comments:

1) Petting/Taking Penguins: Well, as part of the Antarctic treaty, we can't do anything toward the wildlife. They can come to us, but not vice-versa. Penguins--not having a natural tendency to shy away from humans--are curious as to what we are doing there (we aren't part of their normal life) and come to us. The closest one has come to me is about 5 meters. Up close, they are much more bird-like, their head bobs around, they squawk, etc. Biologists can get permits to capture and dissect some number of penguins; however, we don't have any biologists on board so we don't have to deal with that.

2) Evil penguins: Fortunately, I can rule out a penguin conspiracy based on the empirical evidence that simply shining a flashlight near a group of them will send them slip & sliding the other direction. I don't believe they have it in them.

There are 11 Comments for opus

Add A Comment

Name:

Email:

URL:

Message:

Performing Spam Check