Day 6 Steaming south

Calm seas

Pingu, the mascot

"Sand" under the microscope

The sand turns out to be microfossils

Foraminifera seen through the microscope

No instruments in the water all day (well, other than the underway CO2 sampling system, the multi-beam swath and various echo sounders pinging the ocean floor at lots of funky frequencies). That's because we're on the move. Steadily steaming south at about 12 knots.

Most of the day was foggy, which doesn't make for great wildlife watching. For a brief moment, the sun came out and I had my camera ready. For the remaining 11:59 hrs of day light it went back to fog. How lucky was that. Well pingu, the mascot, was at my cabin porthole all day keeping a good lookout. He saw a couple of whales blow near the horizon, but not close enough for a picture. They were barely within binocular distance.

So what to do with a Sunday at sea? One could do laundry or tidy the sock drawer. Well, not quite, the paleontologists (who study marine fossils) did a lot of squinting through a microscope instead. The samples are from the box corer which went to 3000m depth yesterday and didn't find any sediments, but "only" sand. Or better what looked like sand. The "sand" turned out to be composed almost entirely of Foraminifera - microscopic plankton, which leaves a calcified shell when it dies. These tiny critter are real beauties under a microscope. Whoever said they came in all shapes and sizes forgot to mention that they come in even more shapes! Spirals, discs, globules, rugby-ball shapes and everything in-between.

We have about 12 hrs to until we get to Orkney Passage. This will be the site to deploy a mooring, a long instrument chain to gather long-term time-series data on ocean currents. Now that's a lot of cool toys to throw over the side. I can't wait!