Weekly Report ANT XVII/3-5 (15-21/04/2000)

This week the only news comes from the pancake researchers, whose work has determined the daily routine on board 'Polarstern' for the last few days. Everyone else dealt with their collections from the eastern Weddell Sea, started experiments in their cooling containers or brainstormed the cruise report, as there will be very little time for this once we have finished our work at the Antarctic Peninsula. In addition, we dealt with our preliminary data from this cruise in a daily meeting; for example, the environmental variability at the coastal shelf on a small spatial scale, iceberg drift, the zooplankton in autumn, different colonisation patterns of the sea floor fauna, and autumnal life history strategies. On some days the specialists gave us a crash course on their groups: feather stars, archaic molluscs, octopods, cnidarians, parasites. You learn so much when there are many scientists on board for several weeks, each of whom has a different area of expertise.

For the last six days we have been at the northern edge of the pack ice zone which, according to the satellite images, occupies pretty much the whole of the Weddell Sea. Last Sunday was the only day we had any sunshine and since then it has been very misty, but not windy at all, which means we have been able to cruise freely on a zigzag course, slowly approaching the Peninsula, between thick pack and open water, according to the needs of the pancake researchers. One by one we have deployed the buoys, which now reveal information about ice formation and drift via satellite. Our three ice researchers have fished ice pancakes and frazil ice from the mummy chair and have recorded the hydrography from the CTD. In addition, Andreas has sent the ROV under the pancakes to investigate their structure. This revealed that pancakes can also form when the wind breaks up the ice cover into thin ice fragments, and the fragment remains as a kind of basal plate to the pancake. Under older ice floes there are sometimes large amounts of juvenile krill. To our delight, in the last few days as we have neared the Peninsula (and the amount of old ice floes has increased), the warm blooded fauna has increased. Adelie penguins are all around us in small groups and there are footprints in the snow ever more frequently. We see fur seals now and then, and three minke whales were seen only a few metres from the ship. Antarctic snow petrels are our continual companions and once there were Antarctic terns visiting the ship.

However, many of us are currently occupied with totally different things: baptism is near. Neptune showed great insight and lifted the air temperature to about 0°C. Yesterday evening Tom Triton gave a speech of impending doom in tropical clothes in front of the unbaptised on the helideck. The suffering of the unbaptised continued this morning in the breakfast room where, under the eagle eyes of Chief Stewardess Petra (in a pirate outfit), the food remains of the last week were offered on a table bedecked with sackcloth and lacking chairs. Also priest Rainer did not show any mercy with the unbaptised riffraff, who turned their imprisonment in the fish lab into a Mediterranean happening. And only a little more mercy was shown by Neptune Francesc with his charming wife Tethys-Igoreva, let alone the internationally occupied stations of the Via Dolorosa. So Josep-Maria says to me: just imagine if all these people would put this unbelievable energy and fantasy into their scientific work. I am not so sure. Energy - well nothing can be said against that, but during baptism people can get rid of their excess energy. And a bit of fantasy doesn't do science any harm - but fantasy at this enormous level should be reserved for the onboard parties, otherwise scientific rationality would be lost, wouldn't it?

In a few moments the baptism barbecue will start on the working deck. During this cruise, we have combined the baptism party with the postponed halfway party and, in addition, it rings in the Easter celebration too. Tomorrow, on Easter Sunday, we shall finally arrive at our working area at the Antarctic Peninsula and then there will be another two weeks of really hard work and scientific seriousness.

With kind Easter regards to everyone at home,

Sincerely yours,

Wolf Arntz