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Melting Antarctica Dispatches


Our Last Day at Sea

We have come to the end of our 16th annual LTER cruise, and what a wonderful one it was. Thank you to everyone who has followed our dispatches. Below are some photo selects from over…



The Microbial Loop

The Microbial Biogeochemistry group (B-045) (under the direction of Dr. Hugh Ducklow) is one of the science groups here on board the LM Gould. Our goal is to study the bacteria that live in the…



Avian Island in Pictures

Each year on the PAL-LTER summer cruise, members of the seabird group (B-013) spend 5 days working on Avian Island. Avian Island is located just off the southern tip of Adelaide Island, south of the…



Avian Island in Video

To accompany our current featured story on Avian Island, we have uploaded a video taken by our scientists on the island. This one minute thirty second clip shows Adelie Penguins as they move around their…



Fun With Phytoplankton

Today we will introduce you to the work of B016, the researchers here on the LTER cruise that study phytoplankton (microscopic plants.) This is the 14th year for the group! They study the plant life…



Zooplankton Under the Microscope

As you may have seen in one of our earlier dispatches regarding the zooplankton sampling methods (to read the dispatch click here) the zooplankton team scours the ocean with two nets, the smaller of which…



Marine Mammals

Each year on the cruise, we are privileged to have many encounters with marine mammals -- mammals that live and feed primarily in the ocean. Mammals originally evolved on land and a subset later adapted…



Penguins: Barometers of Climate Change

While it may not be initially intuitive to think so, penguins make up a major proportion of top predator species found in the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP.) This means that measurements of their population sizes…



Shrinking Under Pressure

Monday we reached the first station of the southernmost portion of the LTER grid and started the “200” line. We began sampling offshore at station 200.260 (“260” indicates that the station is 260 km from…



Measuring the Melting (SASSI)

Today we take a look at the Synoptic Antarctic Shelf-Slope Interactions (SASSI) moorings that are being deployed on the continental shelf of the western Antarctic Peninsula during the LMG 08-01 cruise aboard the L. M.…