The past week has been particularly social on station. Through the Christmas holiday we had the best weather since we arrived. We had 2 straight days of sunshine. Those 48 hours of continuous light (the sun dipped below the horizon for about 2 hours between those days) provided more sunlight than we had seen over the previous 2 months – combined. No joke. There are lots of clouds and lots of precipitation here at Palmer. So, rather than take a holiday, we used the excellent weather to get out and sample stations E & B. Unfortunately we had some laptop issues on one day and software issues on another day, so our sampling wasn’t perfect but we were able to get the bulk of our measurements. We also used the fine weather to test our newly constructed incubator for radio isotope studies. In short, we use radio-labeled carbon to track the rate of photosynthesis by phytoplankton. Measuring the rate of photosynthesis lets us know how fast phytoplankton are drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The incubator is pretty leaky but will definitely do its job of controlling the temperature and light of the samples being measured. A pretty action-packed past few days, so the next few days should be pretty heavy on posts to the blog…

More soon.