Processes Regulating Iron Supply at the Mesoscale

Friday, January 6, 2012

Our First Sampling Station

Today, January 7 at 22:32 UTC we reached our first station. This is the first of many stations lined up to be occupied and sampled thoroughly by the PRISM group. So far we have been gathering along- track data and and doing some occasional tows for chlorophyll, plankton, etc. The next station (Station #2) will be within the sea-ice and the final and third one, before we set off close to the Ross Ice Shelf, will be onshore of the sea-ice.

Dan Powers manning the CTD/Rosette. Photo by Scott McCormick

Antarctica Megafauna

Emperor Penguin (Photo courtesy of Scott McCormick)

Antarctic iceberg - slowly drifting away from the continent (Photo by Scott McCormick)

Seal (Photo by Scott McCormick)

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Photo of the Day

Seal perched on a floating sea ice (Photo: by Marco Pedulli)

Broader impacts of the PRISM –RS Project

The broader impacts of this project address three main categories of NSF’s Merit Review Broader Impacts Criterion:

1) “Advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning”,

2) “Enhance infrastructure for research and education”, and

3) “Broad dissemination to enhance scientific and technological understanding”.

In order to promote teaching and training, the approaches and results from these studies will be incorporated into a graduate course in physical/biological interactions co-taught by Dennis McGillicuddy (WHOI) in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program. Eileen Hofmann (ODU) will incorporate results into courses she teaches at ODU on ecosystem modeling and ecosystem analysis. This collaborative effort will also provide new opportunities to the graduate and undergraduate students participating in the research, with direct support for Ph.D. students in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program, VIMS, and ODU.

As part of the outreach program our cruise (PRISM-RS) will officially host a blog (http://www.steminaction.org/blog/) for anyone to follow during and possibly after the duration of the cruise (Dec 24, 2011 – February 07, 2012). The blog is prepared and maintained by Stephanie Hathcock (email: stephanie.hathcock.guest@nbp.usap.gov - only during the length of the cruise). If you have any questions or would like to read more about a particular aspect of the cruise, please direct your questions to Stephanie.

On the science front, after a day of hiatus we continued with our slightly queasy PRISM seminars. Today’s seminar featured Dennis McGillicuddy (WHOI) who gave some preliminary results from the VPR (video Plankton Recorder) which his team deployed on January 1^st. The second part of the talk featured Joshua Eaton (WHOI) who talked about the engineering aspect of VPR.