NBP22-11: And the weather started getting rough....
Float deployment after leaving the US Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula
21 November 2022
Coming to you (almost) live from the Southern Ocean! We’ve been dealing with some rough seas since leaving Palmer Station about 4 days ago. We had to skip over the deployment of a float named the Chunky Seal completely and deploy another, named Alfred, with no CTD station, just sampling from the ship’s underway system. The underway system simply takes seawater from the surrounding ocean via an intake at the bow and runs it through certain sinks and hoses available in the ship’s labs. So, we only got samples of surface seawater rather than water from different depths like you can get from a CTD cast. We’re currently a little less than 24 hours out from our next deployment location, the replacement station for the float we weren’t able to deploy due to weather. Hopefully by tomorrow morning the Chunky Seal will be in the water!
Our last glimpse of the Antarctic Peninsula before heading out into open ocean. Credit: Josie Adams
Ben and I posing for a quick photo at Palmer. Credit: Josie Adams
Float 19319 (otherwise known as Alfred) was launched on 11-20-2022 at 1458 UTC (Universal Time Code). Latitude 63 degrees and 10.931’S and Longitude 088 degrees 18.414’W.
Adopted Float Alfred seen being launched into the water. Photo by Josie Adams
Closeup of Alfred, the adopted float by the Kenai Classical School in Kenai, Alaska. Photo by Josie Adams