Nojima park

A shortish ribe today, as I'm feeling a wee bit of strain in my muscles. But packed full of sunshine and the smell of pine needles, so was 100% enjoyable.

I went back to Kanazawa-hakkei via the little canal in Oppama and the sea front, through Nojima park (where the barbecue pits are), all the way to Sea Paradise entrance, and then back again. And everywhere you look, people are out clamming. In fact, everywhere I went was crowded with people, either digging clams, picknicking with their family or simply out for a Sunday ramble. Or out to brush their dog, even!

I also went up to the top of what is probably called Nojima hill, and they have a super lookout, surrounded by sakura. From there I got my fist view of what the Nissan race track near JAMSTEC looks like, and was amazed at how big the Nissan factories surrounding JAMSTEC actually are! From the ground, it's very hard to tell, as the sea front is so uneven.

Nissan complex, everything.

bicycle

Well, out of all the things I had planned to do while in Japan, I have done one!

And that was to buy a bicycle!

So here is a photo of my new baby. A nice yellowish orange, so I can find it easily, a big basket, and a carry thing in the back. A chain cover and skirt wheel cover thing. A wheel lamp in the front, and reflector in the back. And a lock. And a bell. All a person could ever want, and more! Well, being a bit taller is something some people could want, but I spent many years in France on a great 3/4 size bike, so size is nothing to worry about. (When much much younger, I spent many years on a little pink bicycle so small my knees touched the handle bars, but I wouldn't want to actually BUY a bicycle that small!!)

And to try out this new bike, well first off I had to come back from Kanazawa-hakkei, which is where I bought it. I was a bit unsure, and a bit swervy at first, but am making progress. You never forget how to ride a bike they say, but changing bicycles sure makes a huge difference. You have to set up straight and everything on this one!

On the way, I went by the barbecue park I had gone to last year with the guided tour.

And then, as it's an absolutely fantastic day today, I just bicycled around, somewhere between the road to JAMSTEC, the road to Yokosuka, and the sea. There, I found a fabulous hill, where all the houses had vegetable gardens AND a magnificent view of a small estuary and port. And I also founf an amercican base, a dockyard, a nice little park near the estuary where I watched a very successful cormorant for a while; and a couple extremely beautiful temples. I am, however, ashamed at having forgotten my camera!!! But that just gives me a very good excuse for going back again!

And it's so easy to get around! Many streets are small enough that you can just bicycle on the edge and the few cars just go around. On bigger streets, it's considered ok to go on the sidewalks. This is not necessarily true, I've heard, especially in cities, but in Oppama it's what's done.

And tomorrow, I have every intention of packing lunch, map and water bottle, and cruising around the countryside! As an extra precaution, I will also take sun glasses and cream, as tanned is nice, but lobster red is just not my style.

Sakura!

Photos from my latest walk along the 'Buddha trail', this time from Oppama to Jinmuji.

It's spring! And there are flowers everywhere!

The maples are blooming....

... and so, of course, are the cherry trees!

And all these wonderful pink trees make wonderful photo oportunities:

A bicycle and sakura.

The Buddha and sakura.

A bird and sakura.

And a squirrel and sakura!

I must admit though that more than half of the squirrels I saw (9 or 10), were not in the cherry trees: the magnolias are in bloom, and their nectar must be very sweet!

A japanese dove, without sakura.

'blooming' liverwarts!

This video is the view of Oppama, but I made it only for the characteristic bird one can hear, and that I have never actually seen!!

Antarctic Inhabitants

In summer time, Antarctica is filled with life, and not just with penguins and mad scientists!

Being a rocky island, DdU has lots of little nooks and crannies for petrels to nest in. We were not allowed to go too near the nesting sights as there were chicks, but here are a few photos of snow petrels (white) and Cape petrels. These are about the size of a pigeon, and are not a big threat to anyone.

This, however, can not be said of the skuas who also inhabit the islands. These birds are really big, and really are not very nice. They mostly eat carcasses, but tend to have a rather lax definition of being dead. They also are kind of lazy, so will usually eat only the bottom half of a penguin, and leave the rest strewn around the rocks. They also have nests in the rocks, but instead of simply warning you that you have come too close will dive-bomb you from behind and attempt to scalp you instead.

Other birds that kind of look like skuas are the giant petrels. We saw these off and on during the campaign, but the most marking were the hundred or so that decided to sit around behind the boat for the whole time we were sampling. They come in white and brown, although nobody really knows why. I guess as they're one of the top predators, noone has dared ask. These birds are, historically, even more awful than skuas, but the ones we had weren't doing much of anything, and so were quite acceptable.

We also saw a few Albatros, but only close to Tasmania.

As well as birds, the Antarctic is also noted for it's marine mammals, and we saw our fare share of those, too.

The most impressive were the humpback whales, of which we saw a great deal. There were also a few killer whale sightings, but never when I was on the bridge, so I won't speak of those. The Whale Watcher group wished to take tissue samples from the whales, which meant we got to go right up close. The best group we got close to was a mother and her 6-month old 'baby'. It was an amazing experience, as they were obviously undisturbed by the boat, and the baby was having a huge amount of fun, rolling belly up, and zooming under his mother, etc...

Another wonderful encounter, but this time back at DdU, was the Weddell seal that decided to plop down on the ice right next to the ship. We had seen others before, but quite a long way away, and so this was a nice final gift.

Another nice final gift, but this time of the whole trip, was the huge group of dolphins we met right outside Hobart.

A magnificent moment, to make this an unforgettable trip.

How hard it will be to go back to a 'normal' life on Monday!

Oceanographic Campaign

Icefish

I would like to remind everyone that my trip to Antarctica was not (only) for fun!

So after a few delays due to the weather, and after finally finding all our crates and containers on the Lion, we started out on the campaign.

The main lab container, with the disassembled IKMT net in front.

Our main working ground was the rear of the water-level deck, used mainly for cargo transport, and called the garage. This has a large overhead panel, which opens to let the crane maneuver the cargo in and out, and 2 rear doors. The main rear door is quite large, but has a 70cm sill (otherwhise it floods), which makes moving things out onto the rear deck a bit of a pain.

Astrolabe with the main garage door open.

Our 'lab' was commosed of 2 small containers. The first, near the back doors of the garage was for the formalin and sorting of the larger animals. The second, with a little window, was at the back of the garage, and so a bit warmer and a bit quieter. That's where we did all the precision sorting and identification, chlorophylle filtration and coffee breaks.

Orange formalin container, right, and the rosette of bottles, left.

Interior of the main lab container.

There were 5 teams on board: one doing whale watching from the bridge; one doing the physical parameters of the water; one geology group doing sediment cores; our group fishing for stuff; and one group doing physiological studies on any krill they could get from our nets.

Interior of the krill tub.

This means the boat time had to be split, equally if possible, between the different groups. This was not as easy as it sounds, as we did not all want stations in the same places, and also as we were sampling the zone which used to be close to the Mertz.

B-9B

The Mertz is a big glacier a bit to the East of Dumont d'Urville. It used to have a large tongue of ice going straight out into the sea, and creating a very interesting area on its western size, with retention zones for fish latvae, etc.... Unfortunately, there is a huge iceberg (called B-9B) which has been roaming around East of that since 1987! And last year, its roaming brought it into a collision course with the Mertz. Not only did the B-9B completely break the glacial tongue off, but it has become stuck (for now) just West of where the Mertz tongue was.

All that yellow on the radar is ice! How fun!

Scientifically speaking, we had a block of ice over 300m thick and about 97 x 30km across, which just happens to be sitting on half of our station points. Well as there's not much you can do about that, so we just did what we could around it!

And what we did was:

Water samples, with measurements of the physical parameters of the water (temperature, salinity, etc...), with a rosette of 12 bottles.

The bottles can be closed at different depths, and we then recuperated the water and filtered it, to catch all the small phytoplankton present in the water. The chlorophylle concentrations on the filters are then determined in the lab. I will note here that the Ricard bottle is not part of the official scientific protocole, but turned out to work much better than the plastic keg originally planned.

Sediment cores

A small-meshed net (WP2), in which we mainly got phytoplankton soop.

Seawater, above, and what came out of the net, below...

2 small-meshed nets next to each other

(called Bongo nets because they look like bongo drums).

They were also filled with phytoplankton but we still had to sort through one of the buckets to get out the few fish larvae that were inside.

And finally a large net! The IKMT (for Isaacs Kidd Midwater Trawl) is a super nifty net to fish with, but rather a pain to set up. However, a new technique was used for storing it, in its own box, and that seemed to limit the amount of tangling it could achive between uses.

The IKMT, as well as being a beautiful net,

aslo yields catches of the utmost interest and amusement!

And it is in fact in the IKMT nets that were found most of our precious fish (the cook and various ukrainian crew members had to be forcibly manhandled to a safe distance of this catch),

and my even more precious jellies!

All this makes it sound as if we were working full tilt for 2 weeks. However, for every person working, there were usually at least 2 photographers.

And of course when off shift, we had plenty of leasure time to raid the dining room for M&Ms, observe the wildlife and enjoy the sunset.

Some of the hundred giant petrels that took to following the boat one day.