It is the morning of the 26th. We are getting our first glimpse of land since the pilots and Chilean observer departed in Ancud, Chile 22 days ago. Everyone's getting anxious about getting in tonight. We should enter Puget Sound at about 10 am (Seattle time), and it will be 12 hours after that when we arrive at the dock. ... Read more...

While we are all working on projects related to atmospheric chemistry and air-sea interactions, we all have different areas of emphasis and expertise. We have to communicate our results to each other and eventually to the rest of the scientific community. The first step is discussing what we are all doing. Even at sea we give talks to present prelimina... Read more...

The focus of this cruise is to look at the how saturated or under saturated the ocean is with respect to methyl bromide and other gases in the atmosphere.  We study this deviation from equilibrium, or saturation anomaly, by measuring the concentration in the surface water and in the air repeatedly every day.  We use something called an equilibrator (figure 1) ... Read more...

An additional component of the measurement systems deployed by the team at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, University at Albany, State University of New York, is a system to measure the air-sea difference in the partial pressure of CO2 (dp CO2). The dpCO2 level is measured as the difference in CO2 levels bet... Read more...

This is my first research cruise. Almost everything can win my curiosity. One of the most fascinating part in cruise is a life with sunrise and sunset on the sea in the same day everyday. I get up early every morning waiting for the first light from the sun to penetrate the sky, color clouds and wake up flying fish. I really enjoy standing on the deck, breathi... Read more...

As a few previous blog posts have indicated, the ship has a ping-pong table in the main lab which has been the site of nightly matches among the ship's crew and scientists (see pics 1 and 2). Its been a good way to get a break from data collection and analysis (and the main source of exercise for some of of us). Usually the... Read more...

Work for the cruise does not stop once the scientists get back to dry land. I am a biological Oceanographer working with Sarah Brooks and German Vidaurre from Texas A&M University. I am not on the cruise, but I will be processing samples and collecting data from samples collected by Sarah and German. They are currently measuring atmospheri... Read more...

Sarah Brooks and Daniel Thornton, both of Texas A&M, have a collaborative NSF project to define the role of marine microorganism and the chemicals they produce in cloud formation and properties. During the cruise we have set all up all equipment in the laboratory van in the front of the ship (see Picture 1). The van is spacious (and has... Read more...

The MAX-DOAS (Multi-AXis Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy) instrument is now collecting data since almost two weeks. It uses a telescope to gather the scattered sunlight from several vertical angles (0 degrees to the zenith). This enables the construction of a vertical profile of the trace gas species under consideration, which for this campaign... Read more...

Pictured here are graduate student Shanlin Wang and the UC Irvine 'miniCIMS' instrument, both hailing from the Department of Earth System Science at UCI. We are using this small mass spectrometer to make continuous underway measurements of a dissolved gas called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS. DMS is released into the ocean by tiny plankton and escapes into the ... Read more...

The group from the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, University at Albany, State University of New York, is deploying a whitecap camera on the R/V Thompson during the Punta Arenas-to-Seattle leg of the cruise to supplement our air-sea gas exchange measurements.  The camera is being... Read more...

Methyl bromide and methyl chloride in the seawater was removed through chemical reaction and biological degradation by bacteria. Understanding how fast these two compounds are degraded in the seawater will help to understand the partial atmospheric lifetime with respect to the oceanic losses. It also helps to estimate the total production rates of met... Read more...

CTD cast happens every day at noon. A sunny day like today makes it even more enjoyable. The purpose for a CTD cast is to look at various parameters in the seawater, such as dissolved gases, water temperature, salinity, density, and biological distributions. My research is on polyhalogenated trace gases. My tasks during a cast are to coll... Read more...

In order to sample waters from different depths, we use something called a CTD with a rosette of sampling bottles. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature and depth. We first launch the CTD with the bottles open on both ends (figure 1). We lower to the lowest depth we want to sample and signal the unit to close a bottle. Then as we bring it back up we stop at the... Read more...

Our team is from the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, State University of New York at Albany. The weather now in Punta Arenas where it is almost fall is similar to Albany where it is almost spring, so packing for the trip was easy. Traveling time from Albany to Punta Arenas was about 28 hours door-to-hatch, stopping in Santiago, Chile where airport operations are being don... Read more...

Chile, along with Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela celebrates this year the bicentenary of the independence.  More than 8 countries joined them in a spectacular cruise around South America, from Brazil sailing south the Atlantic coasts of U... Read more...

Being docked in Punta Arenas waiting for engine repairs had some advantages. A group of us took a ferry to Isla Magdalena, the island home of one of the largest penguin colonies in Chile. Every October  120,000 Magellanic penguin come to mate... Read more...

Last night, after many delays, we finally left Punta Arenas on the ship.  We spent our time there setting up and testing our equipment for the cruise.  It is rare that we get so much time to do this.  Usually, we only have about 3 days.  We discovered a few problems and fixed them.  This should mean smoother sailing and more data. We also took a little time in Punta Arenas to look around the town and sightsee a bit.  A group went to see the Magellan pengu... Read more...

Hi, I am Lei. I will do saturation anomaly measurements of halocarbons and hydrocarbons, and degradation measurements of methyl bromide and methyl chloride in this cruise. After a bunch of problems, we finally got here yesterday. It was a long trip to fly from Texas to Punta Arenas. Although I was tired after 27-hour fly, it was very exciting when I got here. Beautiful wild flowers grows everywhere; cows, sheep, and horses play on the green grassland; a lot of seabirds are flyin... Read more...

Hello everyone, my name is Yina Liu. I am a graduate student from Dr. Shari Yvon-Lewis's group. My tasks on board are collecting halocarbon, cyanobacteria, and nutrient samples; help collecting dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and pigment samples; and monitoring our analytical systems (depth profile and saturation anomaly) when I am on shift. The seven thousand miles transit between Punta Arenas, Chile and Seattle WA not only means I get to enjoy a 30-days sea time,... Read more...