They definitely know how to celebrate on the NBP. George, one of the technicians on the boat, had a birthday and we celebrated in style. The official “NBP Party Planners” (they even have their own email address) put up decorations around the ship. George got a birthday hat and plastic leis to wear.
After lunch we all got together to sing to George. The cooks made a cake and the Marine Technicians made liquid nitrogen ice cream!
Celebrating technician George's birthday on the NBP in style: with liquid nitrogen ice cream!
As for Antarctica, we’re getting close! We’re estimated to make it to the first area we plan to survey around sometime early Saturday! We’ll be doing more CTDs, start surveying with mutli-beam bathymetry (I’ll explain more when we start collecting data) and hopefully doing a few cores. Time to get to work!
A Closer Look at the Southern Ocean
As we transit, we’ve been passing through the Southern Ocean, which Nicolas, 2nd grade and Aiden, 1st grade would like to take a closer look at.
Nicolas, 2nd, and Aiden, 1st, would like to take a closer look at the Southern Ocean.
Antarctica is surrounded by the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean is much smaller than the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans and is known for having rough seas with icebergs, high winds, and waves. The Southern Ocean is dominated by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which moves in a clockwise circle (west to east) around Antarctica. This current is the world’s largest ocean current and amounts to about 100 times the flow of all of the world’s rivers combined.
A map of the Southern Ocean by euroargo-edu.org.
The Southern Ocean is rich in natural resources including oil, gas, gold, and manganese, as well as wildlife important to fisheries, like krill. The Southern Ocean has the Antarctic Convergence where cold, deep nutrient rich waters flow northward to meet warmer waters. This results in upwelling—when nutrients come up from the deep with the cold water bringing food to the warmer upper waters. These nutrients feed the plankton that support the large Antarctic food web, which includes many popular marine mammals (like seals and whales), and aquatic birds (like penguins), as well as human fisheries.