Diari de l'expedició

It's 21st of January. In the southern hemisphere it is summer. But we have snow from heaven. Everything in here is very clean and wonderful. Outside we can see huge icebergs on the sea, penguins taking rest on an iceberg, and sea birds which freely flow within the winds. We are at the end of the world; we may find Captain Jack Sparrow somewhere around here. We’ve been observing the blood circulation of the Earth: the currents in the Weddell and Scotia Sea are essential components of the thermohaline circulation, which in turn regulates the Earth climate. In fact, these seas play the role of the heart, by making the most cold, and dense water in the world and spreading it into all the oceans of the world. Can you imagine how cold it is?

I am trying to handle ADCP data to know the absolute volume transport. It’s too hard and difficult to handle it

Unfortunately, my main jobs are related with CTD watching and data processing. So during most of the time I am trying to look at the deepest side of the data with my computer. Our observation results of this ocean could be just an array of number and they could seem useless. However, as the step of data processing goes on and physical data are combined with other data such as topography, wind, current, air temperature and iceberg distribution, simple arrayed numbers turn into the information of the earth system and show some of the secretes of nature. How beautiful and cool is it!

It’s my computer screen, with an example of the analysis: the S05 Section. With CTD, we can get information about the oxygen, density, temperature, salinity and geostrophic current. Based on these plots, we can understand the physics of our section. It’s cool!

Almost three weeks have passed since I got onboard for the first time. This means that my first cruise to investigate some of the secrets of the nature in the Antarctic Ocean is coming to the end. Without Internet, TV and cell phones it has been a really nice and peaceful time to me. I should save some time until our precious cruise will end.

The Antarctic Ocean: yesterday it was quite angry. Today we had some snow, some rain and some sun shine

Local time: 10:00 (12 GMT)
Location: latitude: 62º 12’ 50’’ S; longitude: 58º 02’ 18’’ W
Wind: 11.5 m/s
Air temperature: 2.5ºC
Surface water temperature: 0.8ºC