Hailing Frozen Thoughts

Welcome to the end. We spent a couple of days doing essentially nothing other than packing and cleaning up the lab. I’m starting to get a little antsy being on station with essentially nothing to do. It suddenly becomes very apparent that you currently exist in a place that you really shouldn’t exist in. People [...]

  An Orca spyhopping at the ice edge. Thanks to Terril Efird for this photo!       Melt-pool by Little Razorback Island – McMurdo Sound, Antarctica Turks Head – Ross Island, Antarctica Scott’s Hut – Cape Evans on Ross Island, Antarctica It seems impossible that four days have passed since my last post, yet [...]

In the process of scouting for seals, sometimes you end up in the most amazing places, like the sea ice edge.       Friday was our last day for deployments. We successfully tagged four animals in two days, and suddenly, just like that we were done. 28 animals tagged this season, 42 tagged over [...]

December 6, 2012   The last couple of days have blurred into what feels like a week’s worth of activity – two recoveries and one deployment yesterday. The weather was easily Condition 2 out on the sea ice. It was difficult to orient yourself considering that you couldn’t really see clearly more than 100 feet [...]

December 2, 2012 It’s been 4 days since my crashing realization that I was running behind on models (well , OK so technically Markus was the one to point out this fact). On Wednesday I had 9 of 18 models completed. Between Wednesday and Sunday, we have tagged 4 more animals, and I have completed [...]

Last night, it was brought to my attention that I am starting to get behind on models. It’s an easy thing to do when we are racking up animals left and right. The girl team went out yesterday and scanned for prospective animals (Jo, Allyson, Rachel, and I). We managed to recover one animal, but [...]

B470 family portrait on Thanksgiving Markus, Allyson, Jo, Rachel, Mee-ya, and John   B479 (B470+B009) plus all of our good friends posing before Thanksgiving dinner   It’s Monday and it’s back to work. 2 recoveries and 1 deployment today. We have more possible recoveries tomorrow and hopefully 2 more deployments. The pups are finally weaning, [...]

We tagged two more animals yesterday and although we spent all morning searching for candidates this morning, we returned home empty handed.  The running count for this week of doubles is 5 tagged animals since Tuesday. It takes all the time and energy I have after returning from a day of doing deployments to update [...]

Two videos to check out today! Henry caught some fantastic footage of a Weddell seal pup interacting with their mother that has already been featured on Boing Boing and another video of me building one of 3D models of the seals! Thanks to John Skinner who took the GoPro footage and to Henry Kaiser for [...]

Check out this hilarious, yet oddly enlightening video Henry Kaiser filmed and put together!  Skyping with a class at Oregon State University Things have been a bit slow as of late. Everyone has been doing different things, but mostly (for me at least), it seems that time has been mainly based in town. I am [...]