01.02.2013 (Friday). I wake up in
coughing: I am the next on the list... Morning with gray sky. Open sea. Not
much waves. I repare the attachment of the bag of the dredge and I try to
improve its opening (I have the impression it does not open wide enough). The
planktonologists caught a strange, huge jellyfish:Periphylla periphylla and later on a
very pretty amphipod: Eurisus propeperdentatus.
I begin to understand how to use my Sigma 150 mm objective with the Nikon D5100
camera. The resulting pictures of the Eusirus
are of acceptable quality. In the afternoon I feel really not well and I have
to go to bed. With the krill survey, the ship goes East and West and North and
South and around midnight we enter again into the ice.
A huge jellyfish taken in plankton nets: Periphylla periphylla. The jellyfish is lying on its back so that we can see its oral side. Broad side of the picture = 60 cm.
The jellyfish Periphylla periphylla: detail of oral face.
Eusirus propeperdentatus is a very large amphipod living in the water column of Antarctic seas. This specimen is 30 mm long but the species can reach about 100 mm.
(Cédric)
We continue with the
identifications. We’re almost done, but there’s still probably a small week to
go before we can sample again. Late in the evening, I go out of the deck and
the minute I’m out, I see a seal trying to get away on an ice-plate just
besides the boat. That’s amazing how they are so clumsy on land, but so agile
in water. We are going through the ice again. It’s like miniature earthquakes
all around the ship: the spreading cracks, the plates separating and colliding,
creating ice-hills, the trembling and collapsing of this frozen land. Later on,
I return inside to admire this spectacle in the warmer environment of the
bridge. We soon see a small penguin
trying to hide from the giant ship between two blocks of ice. When he soon
understands that it won’t be enough, he begins to run in its funny and cute
penguin-way and everybody’s amused by the spectacle. Even people who did a lot
of expeditions already, and that confirms what I thought: I don’t think you can
ever get tired of all of this.
(Marie)
Tectonic of ice plates along the passage of the Polarstern
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