Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 09/21/2007 - 10:03
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SIMBA Antarctic Sea Ice

How are u Sarah Anderson.SmileIs it cool in Antartica?YellXP.How much research have you done?howDo you like to see seals?Do you know how big Antartica is? 

Tue, 09/25/2007 - 08:16

Sarah Anderson

Thanks for taking the time to send a note to me all the way in Antarctica. Its really nice to be able to keep in touch with people via email. I am really enjoying the expedition...we've had some problems along the way, but I think we're making progress now and should get a lot of research done in the next six weeks.Its definitely "cool" in Antarctica - in every way imaginable. Not very many people get to see Antarctica in their life, and many fewer are able to conduct important research there. It's also "cool" in temperature - but not too cold yet, the temperature now is around 29 degrees Fahrenheit, but with a strong wind the wind chill is more like 10 degrees. The ship is very comfortable, though, and we have special clothing we wear when we'll be outside for long periods of time.
We have really just started with the research. Someone is on the bridge 24 hours a day looking at the sea ice - we have a specific protocol that we follow to record what kind of ice, how thick, etc. My shift is from 6:00 AM to noon, so I get to see the sun rise on the bridge.
We've also been deploying a series of buoys that send back information about water temperature, salinity, density, currents, etc. Sea water is continually fed into the ship for the chemists on board to analyze. I'll write a lot more about the data we collect in my journal, so you can learn
more there. In a few days we'll be in a place where the ice is very thick. We'll spend about 30 days in that location. The ice is so think that we can run snowmobiles on the ice to help carry our equipment. We'll be looking at a number of things about the ice - how thick the snow is, how thick the ice is, what kind of nutrients are in the ice, etc. Believe it or not, there is a healthy community of algae that live in the sea ice...and one of our scientists is studying them!
We have seen several species of seal - the crabeater seal, the Ross seal(a very rare species) and the Antarctic fur seal. The seals like to sit on the ice floes and nap! We also saw a couple of sea lions in port at Punta Arenas.
Antarctica is a very large continent - in fact, it's as large the US and Mexico combined (5,400,000 square miles).
Thanks for posting questions, I hope you'll continue to follow our expedition and post more questions.
Mrs. Anderson