That's a wrap!

NBP25-01 is coming to an end. Today we had the last 'events' of the cruise. Each activity ranging from a run of multibeaming to image the sea floor to deploying an instrument like the epibenthic sled is given an event number. Today we had our last sled samples with event numbers 257 and 258, for a total of 24 successful EBS casts!  These samples were taken as we began our transit north, which enabled us to expand the geographical area we sampled during the cruise. Because the ice is really starting to get thick in the Ross Sea, finding a suitable site for an EBS deployment has gotten tricky. 

This morning, we thought we found a suitable site but keeping the ship at a steady 0.5 knots without churning up big chunks of ice that could hit the EBS proved impossible. We steamed further north and the Captain and First Mate identified a good site with cooperative ice and a depth of around 540 meters with nice and flat bathymetry. Whereas we usually collect a sample from the EBS and sort it carefully under the microscope, picking out nearly all the animals and sorting them taxonomically before taking photos and preserving specimens, we didn't have that luxury today. Instead, we took a quick look at the sample, picking a few interesting animals out and then bulk preserved the rest in cold 95% ethanol for sorting at a later date. This isn't ideal because many animals lose their color or shrivel after being preserved, but we will be getting out of the ice soon and needed to pack up the lab and have everything secured in case there are rough seas. We repeated this process again this evening at another site with cooperative ice and a depth of around 497 meters.

We have about 24 hours before the ship leaves the protection of the ice, when we could experience rough seas. Today we continued taking down the lab and packing up all of our supplies and tomorrow we will spend the day cleaning the lab, packing samples, and filling out the necessary paperwork to get our lab supplies and samples home safely.

The IcyInverts team is overall thrilled with the outcome of the cruise. We got to see a lot of amazing animals and collected some really valuable samples for our research. In the coming days we'll post more about the process of getting our samples home and next steps for our various projects.

Dr. Kevin Kocot
University of Alabama