Heading East!

This report begins at the end of the last: We travel generally east, from Neumayer a quick 1800 miles to our working area. 20,000 horses pull us through a south polar sea that is hovering at its freezing point. Not all horses gallop simultaneously; several are always allowed to rest. Oats became expensive. We are 12,000 tons of steel holding 3000 tons of diesel and a few hundred tons of cargo. (Neumayer has also saddled us with an additional 20 containers, although they burden Polarstern only lightly.) The interior of the ship, wrapped round with an insulated double hull, is nice and warm- especially in the sauna. Have you ever sweated at 100°C while outside ice floes scratch against the walls? (To prevent the inevitable conclusion that we are all just on a luxury liner: when 100 people work for 10 weeks on a ship with nothing but air and water from which to improve our understanding of the complex workings of our planet, such conveniences become necessities. They keep motivation up on a high level for the duration of the trip.) A swimming pool with its own 100% natural wave generator we have as well.

Whale days are popular. Near the meteorologist around the corner hang posters of local wildlife like mugshots in the post office. With them you can figure out what you've seen and wonder what we shall have today. Off the port side a dozen orcas would be nice, their dorsal fins prominent against a glittering backlight. Later, when there is so much to do on the working deck, we shall wish to be entertained by a playful pair of humpback whales. Waves of pectoral fins, displays of entire flukes, and the light-hearted leaps of high spirits are welcome sustenance. The bull within stroking distance ratchets our enthusiasm for the local fauna up to euphoria. At this level, the cooks leave the pots to boil, and come fascinated, incredulous, and blinking out of their windowless stainless steel kitchen. Drinking in this sight, they fail to think of eating. No Japanese on board.

Our escorts are also seen out of the water: here a crab-eater seal sleeps off his krill, over there a horde of Adelies stand guard over their personal blue iceberg. One deck higher, you get the best look at the flocks of seagoing birds, and the occasional rugged individualist of an albatross, feathered in the deep dark grey of nature (not because he flew too low over the smokestack above the engines). Driven searchingly on endless flight over waves, they must take us for a very impatient iceberg. Some of the idle ice giants are truly monstrous- for us newcomers at any rate, but not for the Antarctic. 200 meter thick platters (like the brain, six sevenths unavailable), table icebergs with a surface area of a few hundred to thousand square kilometers (the city of Bremen is 400 square kilometers), strung like pearls, trapped in the shallows, flanking our way. "Iceberg Alley" it is known on the map. (This has nothing to do with climate change, but is just state of Antarctic art. Somewhere all the snow has to end up that has fallen on a whole continent for 30 million years.)

Only on a few places lies no snow nor flows no ice (2% of Antarctica). Too high, too dark, too dry. Fresh precipitation always blown away or simply sublimated. There Antarctica displays her geologic history. Enderbyland abeam and the geologists rush for the first ice-free exposures. The hammer will get warm and the first treasures bagged: broncite, garnet-pyroxine-biotite-gneiss, hornblende; the land here is so old and, in terms of Earth history, so fascinating, that it even gave a mineral its name: enderbyite. Restite rings a bell as the leftover minerals and must therefore go in the backpack. The helicopter carries the geologists on successful day excursions as part of our Australian cooperation with a good hundredweight of samples on board. The cabin looks like a quarry- the stewardess is not impressed.

The night of Fasching (Mardi Gras) “Jeck in de Bütt” (a special fellow on the stage) enters, presenting Rhineland irritations, information overload within the little world of the ship. Our colorful people with blue hair, red noses, head bedecked with Russian Panzer caps and Swedish outdoor hats, barely clad with sauna towels and bubble wrap, play and drink at his feet. Glacial goggles asure protection from the glittering ice in the cocktails. “Polarfasching” - also part of German (research-)culture.

There are three rooms on Polarstern where watch is always kept: the bridge, MKR (engine control room), and the echo sounder room (the latter served by two groups of scientific watch keepers). Parasound is like a woman who knows exactly what she wants. It talks to the sediment at the seafloor with a sonorous tone and wants an answer not merely from the sediment-water interface but also detailed information from the next few hundred meters of material. With a shouting distance of several tenths of meters within the sediment it is the prefered magnifying glass of marine geologists to find good locations for their coring barrels. (pre-site survey) Hydrosweep by comparison is a canto significantly more timorous, in a higher frequency and with a tendency towards the bigger picture. It reads the Braille of the seafloor with a swath of pings directed at the ocean floor below us as we cruise along, providing a stripe of a map that is the width of two thirds of the water depth. The water depth changes all the time, especially if you are cruising along a continental slope. Thus the watch keepers are required to vigilantly turn their virtual buttons to keep the mapping eyes of the ship in focus. Within the well-defined flood of data, the first cleaning cycle separates wheat-echos from chaff-echos. Science or art? At least a technical aesthetic. The screen springs to life, stimulated by a sequence of hundreds of profiles, the only help to keep the uninitiated oriented are the colors red and green (and guess what those colors mean). The (female) measuring engineers are editing with a darting mouse and only what is good enough to make the map remains.

We are now in a time zone with the Maledives, but palm growing is not merely time dependent. We are in a good mood as the possibility of research looms; we await it with a little bit of impatience and a greater part of pleasant anticipation. Greetings from the palm free part of the zone. Prydz Bay ahead!