My project

Leaving Palmer Station - 

Lat - 64'S 50.91

Long - 63'W 53.88

Water Depth - 362m

So what am I doing out here? Just realised I haven't really said that as yet, so here is a little spiel about what I will be doing on this trip. 

I'm a tag along on this cruise, so although I am not part of the main project, the scientists out here are sampling in areas I would like samples from, and my work coordinates nicely with their science goals. I look at cold-water corals - these are corals without the photosynthesising algae like you would find on the Great Barrier Reef - these corals tend to live in the cold deep-sea, generally at depths of 500m all the way down to 6000m and probably beyond, though there are some exceptions that live in shallower water, in areas where the it is cold (like the Antarctic). My research looks at why and how these corals are found where they are, and what happens to them when they are impacted - such as with climate change (ocean warming and acidification) or human impacted (commercial trawling). Specifically I look at reproduction and population genetics - so seeing how they reproduce (corals reproduce in a variety of ways) using histology, electron microscopy and larval culture and then also tracing corals genetically, to see how the populations are all connected together (or not as the case might be). This is my first of four Antarctic cruises in the next year, so the hope is to start experiments to see how different factors affect how corals reproduce and grow - but that is probably for the final cruise! 

One of the really cool things of working down here in the Antarctic, is the corals I'll be working with on this cruise brood their young - so they produce fully formed babies that crawl out of their mothers - i'll be taking these babies and growing them in aquaria to try and see how they behave and how they build their skeletons. I started this work on a cruise in 2006 - you can see a story about it - http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=15366&archives=true - and it was really fun, so i'm hoping this will be too! 

Other than that, as I am invited on this cruise, I will be helping out with whatever else is needed onboard. When you stand a watch, you do everything and anything that comes your way. The things we'll be doing on this cruise are - Camera Tows, Sediment Traps, Time-Lapse Cameras, Box Coring, Mega Coring, Trawling, Epibenthic Sled, CTD, Plankton Towing, Nutrient Analysis - so alot to get done. We have five different sites down the Western Antarctic Peninsula (map on right) and we have three days at each site to collect all the data and samples we want to collect - it's going to be alot of work, but at this point everyone is really looking forward to getting working!