In my opinion, the luckiest researchers on the ship are the ornithologists, Kathy Kuletz and Liz Labunski from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who stay on the bridge from sunrise to sunset conducting bird surveys. They don’t miss a bird, seal, walrus or beautiful vista as they identify and log all of the birds […]
LTJG Stephen Elliot and MST1 Chuck Bartlett assist scientists deploy the multi-core, a sea floor sampling device.
The science conducted on the ship is dependent on the successful deployment of the marine sampling equipment from the multi-core to the sediment trap to the plankton nets to the CTD. While the operation and positioning of the boat […]
Over the pipes, an announcement to get the small boats ready for launch came over in the early afternoon. It was time to retrieve the sediment traps that had been deployed the previous afternoon. Floating and drifting in the Bering Sea for 24 hours while the ship went about its other business, the sediment trap’s […]
On Monday, we reached the northernmost point of the cruise track and we were in thick ice. This meant that it was time to get off the boat and do an ice station. The ship pulled into the ice and “parked” in order for the scientists to disembark and begin a sampling station on top […]
It was a foggy snowy day on the Healy yesterday as we steamed north towards St. Lawrence Island and the northernmost section of our cruise. In Sunday tradition on the Healy, lunch was a barbeque on the helo deck. The big grill was pulled out on deck and the rest of the food was served […]
In the fog, we were steaming to our next station in the morning. We are in the southern part of our cruise again so we are out of the ice, but we are heading north so we should be back in the ice shortly. One of the first orders of the day was to collect […]
Out in the cold and dark early morning the zooplankton ecologists wait for a net tow to come up from the depths in order to collect krill and copepods for their experiments. Once the net comes up, they put the “bugs” into coolers and get ready to go into the cold room to sort them. […]
Today has been a slower day. The sun is shining and the sea is calm. It was a beautiful morning with temperatures around freezing here in the open water. We are heading towards the shelf edge to do some benthic sampling before heading back to our process station to assess any changes on our quest […]
Yesterday, I had a chance to sit down with the chief scientist, Dr. Carin Ashjian, a zooplankton ecologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to find out more about the mission of the cruise, her role as chief scientist of the expedition and her research.
The mission of the cruise is to determine the importance of […]
I started the day photographing some net tows in anticipation of learning about the mesozooplankton (copepods, krill, etc) grazing experiments being conducted by a team of scientists on the ship. I stayed out on deck for quite a while to observe, as various plankton was being collected along with some bottom grabs of mud. It […]