Yesterday, we stowed all of our gear on board our ship,
the Laurence M. Gould (or LMG for short). This will be our home for the next
month!
Here is the LMG in port at Punta Arenas. You can see the
crane towards the back working hard, unloading the gear from the previous
research project and loading gear for ours:
The LMG is named after Laurence McKinley Gould, an early
polar scientist and geologist. He came to Antarctica on Admiral Byrd’s famous
first expedition. He died in 1995 at a ripe 99 years old! Two years later, the
LMG was built and named after him. It’s 230 feet long, and specially designed
for Antarctic research. It can break through 1 foot of ice, and has
laboratories and dive and boating facilities, as well as a galley (dining
hall), dorm rooms, and everything else we need to live on board.
This morning, we set sail. We stood out on deck watching
the men work to complete loading and remove our moorings, and then away we
went! Here’s the view of Punta Arenas as we sailed away. Do you see the yellow
and blue building in the middle? That’s the warehouse for the U.S. Antarctic
Program and the pier that we left from.
As we were leaving Punta Arenas, a pod of Commerson’s
dolphins followed us!
We are currently in the Strait of Magellan, at the
southern tip of Chile and Argentina. South America is to the north of us, and
Tierra del Fuego is to the south. Tomorrow, we will be out in the Drake
Passage, which is the waterway between South America and Antarctica, connecting
the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. It is famous for being very rough waters, with
high winds and big waves, and a lot of people get sea sick. The journey will
depend a lot on weather, but we could be in for a very rocky ride for the next
3-4 days! We’ll see what tomorrow brings…
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