May 23, 2000 am

Moving North



Photo shows the bio team of Courtney Zimmer (left), Jim Blake of the ENSR Marine & Coastal Center in Woods Hole, MA, and Dan Catlin. Jim is on board representing co-principal investigator Dr. Patrick Reynolds of the Hamilton College Biology department, who remains in Clinton with his new baby daughter. The biologist are studying the encrusting and burrowing organisms found on the rocks and in the surface sediments of the sea floor.

We have left the Larsen A area behind and started heading back to the Prince Gustav Channel to begin coring and seismic studies there. The past 3 days have been bitterly cold with temperatures ranging from -3 to -10 F and winds averaging around 40 mph. The extreme cold and developing heavy ice have made work difficult and less productive than we would like it to be. We hope that the conditions will improve within the channel. Plans call for us to establish a number of core sites across the Prince Gustav Channel as we move up through it.

Technical difficulties made viewing the bottom camera video tape impossible today, but the problem should be corrected soon. Hopefully I can send an image from the tape in the next day or two.

A number of people have been asking about the digital images I've been sending so here's the story. Photos are taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950 which has now been replaced by the 990. Camera captures about a 6 mb image that is compressed within the camera and stored on a 48 mb compact flash card. I use a G3 powerbook to download the card, process the images in Photoshop, including resizing for the web and save them as JPEG files. Finished files are in the 40-45 k size range. The images are then transferred on disk to one of the ships computers in the computer lab and attached to a regular e-mail message as an attachment. Due to the high cost of satellite communications attachments are limited to 50 K. E-mail is saved to a common server. Twice a day one of the computer techs connects to Denver operations via modem through a satellite uplink and sends all the accumulated e-mails in a single transmission. From Denver the e-mails enter the internet system. Incoming e-mails are sent from Denver's server to the ship during the same connection. People anxiously await each day's downloads and when we are in a position that the satellite signal is not strong enough to make the connection at the allotted time, the poor computer tech is hounded constantly until he posts the message that the "E-MAIL IS IN".

Been hearing that weather has not been all that nice in the Clinton area these past few weeks. Hope you dry out soon.

Cheers,

Dave

tewksbda@nbp.polar.org

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