As I walked into the dry lab this morning everybody was talking about all the icebergs they saw earlier that morning. I looked out of the porthole and there were 3 of them floating on the horizon.
It was very exciting to observe my first icebergs. They are beautiful!
My afternoon was spent doing my normal duties, watch log and ping editing. Matt, my watch log partner, was busy trying to bust up the rocks found earlier in one of the trawls. He was attempting to use a sledgehammer to break apart a big rock known as a basalt pillow. The basalt pillow was so hard that he was having trouble both breaking it and keeping it still. Josef, a marine tech, helped Matt by using a drill down the middle of the rock to break it into more manageable pieces. A piece of the basalt will be sent to Florida State University because they keep an archive of all the rocks found in Antarctic waters. Later this evening, Matt plans to go back to the sledgehammer to break the basalt into smaller parts. I might even have a whack at it for fun!
We continue to survey the area around a particular seamount in the central Scotia Sea by gathering new multibeam bathymetry, magnetics, and gravity data to determine the best dredge site on that seamount. There is very little previous data in the central Scotia Sea, so we need an accurate context of the area before doing a dredge. The new data continues to be very interesting.