In the Drake…

60.07S, 67.37E

We are now in the Drake Passage, a.k.a. the Drake Shake. So far the wind
gods have treated us gently, with partly sunny skies and breezes in the
20-30kn range. This makes the ship move quite a bit, with water splashing
onto the lower portholes and pouring over the lower decks, so we cannot go
out there. Everyone has settled in and is preparing for their work, once we
get down to Antarctica.

Although we are sailing through the vast open ocean that reaches for as far
as you can see, there are subtle changes in going south. Once we got out of
the strait of Magellan, lots of birds were flying around the ship. We saw a
lot of giant petrels, some cape petrels, a few wandering albatrosses, a few
more black browed albatrosses and some soothy albatrosses. And I’m
pretty sure I saw two Magellan Penguins in the water, diving down as the
ship approached. This morning, when I looked out the porthole, a lot of
smaller, grey birds appeared that weren’t there yesterday, I think they
are prions of some sort.

The ships sensors that are displayed on screens all over the ship also tell
things are changing. Yesterday, the water was 5C, today it’s 1C.
Yesterday, the fluorometer that looks at algae in the water was around 0.7
with spikes around 2, now it’s been steady below 0.5 (close to Antarctica
we hope to get up to 10). There are some large scale ocean currents that
flow around Antarctica and get squeezed together in the Drake passage. This
gives the changes in the water temperature and nutrients in the order of
days of travel time. But as these large systems interact, you also may see
that you’re traveling through little patches of warmer or colder water
that last for maybe an hour. This may also be a spot where more nutrients
get mixed in, and the phytoplankton can respond. So, all of a sudden, a
patch of higher phytoplankton biomass may appear in the big blue ocean.
This patchiness is good for the bigger animals that can seek for these
patches for higher concentrations of food. But it makes life for
oceanographers hard, since we can only take little scoops out of the big
blue ocean, and have to reconstruct how things work based on those. And it
makes a big difference if you get a nice juicy phytoplankton scoop, or a
barren Drake scoop.