Soon after Logan spoke to Bill, we got our gear together and about ten minutes after leaving station Logan spotted blows on the horizon. Most surfers on the west coast and Hawaii knew the winter surf season would be epic this year, just like many scientists along the Antarctic Peninsula knew it was going to be a big ice year. If we are lucky enough, we are able to do this across seasons and years and we’ll even know what to expect from large-scale climate fluctuations like El Niño. This was notable, because we have not recorded significant amounts of krill in the vicinity of Palmer Station this season.īill mentioned to Logan that the whales might finally arrive today.Īny great field biologist, fisherman, or surfer knows the value of constantly observing the weather, the waves and the sky to know what to expect out of the day.
Bill was observing krill along the water’s edge. Bill has been studying the environment here for more than twenty seasons, since before most digital technologies. He happened to be one of my graduate advisors, and one of the most senior scientists here at Palmer Station, Bill Fraser. Yesterday morning while Logan and I were taking our first few sips of coffee and looking at the latest weather forecast that is conveniently waiting in our inboxes every morning, there was a man standing on the shoreline by our boat dock. So we know where we are by looking at our GPS, we know where the krill is thanks to our fishfinder, and we know what the weather is doing thanks to real-time updates on our radios. We look at a computer screen or in this case, turn our marine radios to the ‘weather station’, and we get the wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity and air pressure all by pressing one button. This technology is kind of analogous to the weather stations we have around Palmer. If krill or small fish (or the occasional penguin) are beneath us, they’ll show up on our computer screen as fuzzy looking colorful patches suspended in space (or along the seafloor). Here at Palmer, we have expensive acoustic equipment that allows us to see down a hundred meters or so to the bottom of the ocean.
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