Arrival in Antarctic waters

We are now at more than 66 degrees South and will soon cross the Antarctic Circle. Yesterday water temperatures plumeted to 0 degrees overnight, and we saw our first iceberg early that morning and many more since. Activities are ramping up across the vessel as we approach our first drillsite. Everyone will be on their shifts tonight (midnight to noon for me). Drillers are getting ready. The co-chief scientists, ice watchers, and operational personnel had a meeting yesterday to assess the ice conditions for the drillsites. Drilling will commence at a deep-water site in the Amundsen Sea after the captain has had a chance to monitor the ice conditions on site.

To get a drillbit into the sea floor the drill crew will need to assemble more than 3 km of drill pipe. On board the ship sets of three approx. 10-meter sections of drillpipe have been assembled into "stands". So, now imagine you are a driller: how many stands of drillpipe does the drill crew need to fit together to reach the sea floor? It will take some time to do this, so once we are on site and the captain is comfortable with the ice situation, it will take about 12 hours before we can start drilling with the more than 3km long drillstring. Imagine that!

The drillers initially will use two different drilling technologies. First, the piston corer is used to about 150 meters below sea floor. The piston corer consists of a 10-meter long hollow metal tube with a sharp edge, which is shot into the seafloor under high water pressure, like a syringe. The metal tube cuts like a knife through soft mud, which then fills a plastic liner inside the tube. Below 150 meters below the seafloor the sediment layers are much harder because of compaction due to the weight of the overlying stack of layers. Once it becomes difficult to advance the piston corer down into the rock formation, a rotating core barrel with a toothed edge will be used to cut into harder rock.

Reed's dirty little secret

Yesterday we entered the Drake Passage and the seas were so rough that many had to retire to their cabins to avoid sea sickness. Today conditions are much better and the sedimentology team, that I am part of, invited a well-known Antarctic paleontologist, Reed Scherer, to explain the correct process of making smear slides. And: Reed revealed his dirty little secret, which involved a potato and some ballet movements.


So what is a smear slide? A smearslide is a smear of sand and mud from the drillcore on a glass slide, so that it can be viewed under a microscope. The sedimentology team uses smear slide observations to characterize microfossils and minerals in the sea floor sediments. The fossils tell us something about the living conditions in the ocean around Antarctica thousands to millions of years ago. The minerals would tell us something about the rocks on Antarctica the glaciers were eroding, because rocks are made of different minerals. More about that later. The image shows an example of microfossils of a group called Radiolaria, a kind of zooplankton.

So how to make the perfect smearslide? Well, the sediment needs to stick to the slide. Water doesn't work, because it creates a droplet, so you can either lick the slide, or...... use a potato! The potato is very important. First of all, it needs to be clean, so no microfossils or dirt sticking to it. Second, you need to take care of your potato: wrap it in foil after use and store it in a refrigerator (I think we may get only one potato for the entire expedition?). The potato is used by rubbing your finger over a cut face so that starchy liquid can be transferred to a thin glass cover slip. This is then where the mud will stick. Then, the cover slip with mud is left on a hot plate to dry after which the glass slide is put on top of the cover slip. This involves a special type of coordinated movement: closing the two glass slides on top of each other like the jaws of an alligator, while bending the knees. Reeds says it doesn't work if you do not bend the knees, so that is also very important. We have all been practicing bending our knees and we hope to be experts by the time the first core gets on deck!

In transit to Antarctica

We left yesterday, on January 23, and took the route from Punta Arenas through the Magellan Straights into the Atlantic Ocean, because low pressure systems with high wave heights were present to the West. On the map is our ship's location near the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula projecting North. The map at the bottom is the wave height projection. This information is available on monitors around the ship. At present we are passing between Isla de Los Estados and the Argentina mainland. The ship crew is enjoying the last views of land before we enter the Southern Ocean. The red line is the track we might follow through the South Pacific, although we will probably deviate from it to stay away from strong storm systems. We will probably arrive on our first site in Antarctica around February 1, weather permitting of course...

Getting ready to leave Punta Arenas

We have been enjoying some nice last evenings onshore: it is Summer here and there is daylight until after 10pm. But: the JOIDES Resolution is now being prepared for departure. All scientists are on board the ship and the crew is complete. We are still waiting for some heating and communication equipment and we will leave port as soon as that arrives.

The captain and his crew are preparing the passage plan to the Amundsen Sea. Equipment is being secured for a possible rough passage with high waves. Today we inspected our life vests and tried on our survival suits, which is routine at the beginning of each voyage. Because of a newly adopted international Polar Code we will adhere to a number of new safety measures. The shipboard equipment, including cranes, are serviced for freeze protection and everyone on the ship will go through Cold Water Operational Safety training, which will take place tomorrow morning for the scientists and JRSO staff.

Unfortunately we will likely not have internet coverage during most of our time in the Amundsen Sea because the satellites are very low near the horizon as we operate in that part of the world (it is a communications "blind spot"). Iridium phones are used for data traffic, weather and sea-ice reports. Daily and weekly reports will have priority over social media communications, so if you'd like to find out what is going on and nothing is posted here, you can check for operational and science reports on the website of the JR Science Operator.

Getting ready for Port Call IODP Expedition 379 Amundsen Sea

I am about to embark on another Antarctic Expedition with the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)! This is the first time that the drillship Joides Resolution will be visiting the Amundsen Sea Embayment of Antarctica. No ship has ever drilled deep into the seabed in this area. Hence we know very little about its history.

The Amundsen Sea today is the focal point of ice discharge from West Antarctica into the ocean. An area roughly the size of California in West Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating pace. Scientists are questioning whether this is a response to recent warming of the oceans and would like to know if there is a point of no return beyond which ice can be lost permanently or for a very long time. Two IODP expeditions, one to the Ross Sea (Exp. 374) and the current one to the Amundsen Sea (Exp. 379) are addressing this question.

By drilling into the sea bed, geologists can access deeper layers that date from before the last ice age and find out how the ice sheet behaved under warmer climate conditions in the past. In fact, today's developments are like an incomplete movie: we cannot yet see the end of the ice-sheet change. By going into the geological archive of past climate changes embedded below the sea floor we can reconstruct the full cycles of ice growth and melt from beginning to end over hundreds to thousands of years. Such a complete story of ice-sheet change will give us information on whether its current behavior is outside the normal range, and will help predict how the ice sheet may behave in the future.

I will be leaving for the port city of Punta Arenas, Chile next week. I am currently packing and getting ready for a 2-month stay on a drillship without an opportunity to get off! See you soon.