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School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences
Mike Castellini
in Antarctica
Cruise Report
January 6, 2000
Ship time, Lat 77 south, 157 west, Antarctica
January 5, 2000
Alaska time
Everyone,
Here is a journal entry that I have just written about our day, today. It was probably one of the most impressive days I have ever had on the ice:
We reached the continent today. We are on the coastline east of the Ross Sea and it is awesome. Very few people have ever been here and it is a magical and wondrous place. Large ice shelves, grounded ice bergs some 100 sq miles with their own fast ice attached to them! It was foggy and snowy as we came in so you could see only white forever, with little bits of land lost on the horizon and seals and penguins everywhere. We came around one bay at about 0900 today (Thursday, Jan 6) and found over 20 crabeater seals, too many penguins to count, a Weddell and a leopard seal all hauled out on a vast piece of fast ice that was attached to a grounded berg. They were able to put us over in a sling so that we did not have to use the Zodiacs. Three teams went out in three directions: The genetics team went for the Weddell and some of the crabeaters, we headed for the leopard seal and a team went out to put satellite transmitters on two crabeater pups. It was about a kilometer hike through the mist and blowing snow (not very cold though) to the leopard. We were first struck by the quiet . . . when we would stop to rest (we were pulling all our gear on a large sled) all we could hear was the wind blowing the snow over the surface. To the west we could see huge ice cliffs ending in the ocean. To the south, nothing but white as far as we could see, to the east, ice bergs along the coast and to the north, our ship holding off the shore and sort of lost in the mist. The only colors were grey, white and the blue of the glaciers. The ship is always very noisy, 24 hours a day and the quiet was impressive.
We stopped about 100 yards from the sleeping leopard seal and Pam Yochem, our vet, prepared the dart gun and then snuck up with her assistant to the seal. She crawled the last 25 feet to the animal through the blowing ground snow. You should have taken out shares in Eastman Kodak for the amount of film we were burning on this one. She easily darted the animal and we waited about 10 min to approach. The animal was too light to work with, so we darted it again and then surrounded it so that it would not leave the area. By this time, the genetics team hiked over to where we were and helped us put a net and a bag over the head of the animal. Leopard seals are extremely beautiful and yet somewhat scary animals. This one was small by their standards (300 kg), but was over 10 ft long. Very snakelike appearance with a very large, square head and a mouth full of teeth. We were able to collect all the samples we needed from the seal and then prepared to weigh it. We got it into a sling, erected the tripod over it and then cranked on the winch. The seal stayed on the snow and we cranked the tripod down into the snow about 4 feet! After much, but rapid consultation, we were able to quickly shorten the hoist rope and try again, hoping that the tripod legs would hit the ice beneath the snow. We finally got the animal off the ground to get its weight.
On the way back to the ship, we stopped to rest by a group of penguins. Most of the birds got up and wandered all around us to find out what we were. They also came over to the genetics teams while they were taking samples from the other seals to watch the show.
We have been sailing east now for the rest of the day. While we were on the ice, the oceanographers and acousticians went to work collecting data and now we are getting set up to run fish trawls during most of the night. We are on the shelf now (about 500 m depth) and the fish and krill have changed dramatically. We sent out a penguin team today to work with Emperor penguins and they found out that the birds have been eating lots of fish, as opposed to the birds out in the pack there were eating krill. The nets tonight will be extremely valuable data.
We will continue to run the coastline here for about another 500 miles and we are all very excited about it. We spend almost every free moment up on the bridge and have seen cruising killer whales, penguins in the water, all sorts of flying marine birds and every size and shape of iceberg you can imagine.