I decided last night to join the 4:30am Neuston net team and the 5:00am Conductivity-Temperature-Depth rosetta deployment. These are gangly-looking devices the size of a go-kart and a Madrid street recycling bin, respectively.
My sea legs weren’t that great yesterday. I wobbled a lot and hit the wall sometimes while walking down corridors. My stomach, luckily, is doing much better–no problems at all and I sleep like a brick. Continue reading Malaspina Expedition: First workday
Cape Town was filled with chattering Spanish researchers this week, on shore between legs of a circumnavigation that will take them from Cádiz to Sydney and back, by way of the Panama Canal. They chewed on biltong and rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. Now they are loading water sampling tubes and unpacking their laboratory equipment on the B.I.O. Hespérides, docked here in Cape Town until this afternoon, when we head for Perth. Continue reading Malaspina Expedition: Shipping out
I’m joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish oceanographic cruise
circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794
exploratory voyage (http://www.expedicionmalaspina.es). I will embark
on the Hespérides in Cape Town later this week bound for Perth, a
months’ voyage across the Indian Ocean, all told.
During the cruise I’ll be writing about the science and the scientists
for Nature. The blog posts should appear on The Great Beyond:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/.
I’ll also tweet about my experiences aboard @lucaslaursen
(http://twitter.com/#!/lucaslaursen), in the grand tradition of my
previous short-form reporting adventures: @apolloplus40
(http://twitter.com/#!/apolloplus40) and the Harvard Borkoldoy
expedition (http://www.harvardmountaineering.org/borkoldoy/updates/),
which took place back before Twitter even existed!
Got tips for me? This is my first long ocean voyage and my first time
in the southern hemisphere, not to mention the first time I’ve ever
had to buy a pair of steel-toed, calf-height rubber boots for a
reporting trip!
-Lucas
It’s early June in the Austrian Alps. Tourists in shorts sweat their way up a trail from the cable car above Lake Hallstatt. But the summer heat doesn’t stop a group of scientists from pulling on brightly colored jumpsuits over their hiking clothes at the entrance to Mammuthohle, one of the many limestone caves that riddle the Dachstein Massif. Lukas Plan, a geophysicist at the University of Vienna, straps on his headlamp and pauses to warn the crowd of researchers about the cave they are about to enter. It won’t just be chilly inside, he cautions; it will be an Alpine meat locker.
The crowd, part of the fourth international ice cave workshop organized by a network of European geophysicists and glaciologists, is gathered to visit the cave’s year-round ice formations.
Plan turns toward the tunnel in the mountainside and opens the metal door. A rush of wind bursts out. The group prepares to enter, hoping to read the history of the region’s climate in the cave’s ice.
Continue reading Caves of Ice: The Next Frontier in Paleoclimatology?
