13 November, 1996

The last few days have been pretty routine--just work in the lab, eat, work out....fun but not much new to tell. I am meeting so many nice and very interesting people here. It is really interesting to find out about other peoples research projects or just what made them interested in coming down here to work.

Today we went out and took cores but now we aren't just taking random samples, we are doing a spatial study so we are taking 32 cores, 1 meter apart to start with in a transect line to try and figure out if the distribution changes at all as you move away from a certain point. Later on we are going to move the distance out to 10 meters and then 100 meter intervals. We are going to try and do this in a few different locations around McMurdo and then again while we are out on the ship. 32 cores is quite a bit of work--luckily it was once again a beautiful day, we didn't even need our parkas on very much. To take the cores we use a Jiffy power head attached to an ice auger drill and drill down almost all the way through to the ocean but leave the bottom 10-20 cm intact and then using the Sipre corer, extract that last part of the core where the algae live and transfer it into a baggie and put it in a freeze safe where it is kept cold and dark. It is very important to keep the algae out of the light because they are very sensitive and might die---so when we do a lot of our lab work, we have to have the lights off!

Tonight I went to another seminar, this one was on Antarctic meteorites--a hot topic right now that I thought was very interesting.

Jessica