Ice Wranglers!

Happy Holidays from the Rutgers Phytoplankton and AUV Lab at Palmer Station. (L to R, Tina Haskins, Brian Gaas, me. Photo: John Brack)

We don’t take extended holidays while working at Palmer Station in Antarctica. At most we may take a day off here or there, but by and large we work everyday collecting samples, running experiments in the lab, maintaining our equipment and so forth. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are no different. While the Raytheon support staff may take a couple of days off, we deployed a glider last night in pretty tough conditions and then went out this morning to collect samples. While I was taking some of the samples outside to a special incubator designed to help measure the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide by phytoplankton, I kept seeing a couple of bergy bits that looked really close to shore. Plus, today the sun was out, the air temp was in the high 30s and there was little to no wind. So, what better way to celebrate a beautiful holiday other than take a picture of our group soaking up a bit of sun.

Below is the photo essay of the making of the picture. We were fortunate enough to have a world-class photographer, John Brack, nearby and willing to document the entire process – all of the images are his. Perhaps we should treat this blog post a How to manual for setting up a picture on a bergy bit.