Wednesday, September 1, 2010

We're back!



We're back from the park, after a wonderfully productive two days out on the RV Capelin with the CTD and drop camera system. And so the big question - did we find corals? A big....resounding....yes! Yes we did, we found 3 or 4 species of coral deep in the fjords, both in the West and East arms and in the central channel (take a look at the map & timeline tab to see where that is!). The camera operations went like a treat, the CTD data I have to wait until I get to Juneau to download, but i'm sure it'll fill in some questions for me. I'll talk more about our results once i've analyzed and gone through the images tonight, but for now, here are some images from the trip!

Working right up by the glaciers of glacier bay national park. This is Riggs Glacier in the East Arm.
Couldn't ask for a better crew - Stian and Captain Justin Smith rigging the drop camera.

Me in my cave, working out the GPS coordinates for the next deployments. 
The CTD being deployed in the crystal blue glacial water.
Me looking into the tiny video screen as the camera is deployed, searching for those corals, and making sure we didn't hit the bottom! 
The weather wasn't always fantastic, and someone had to be outside hauling and heaving the camera, there was no winch for lowering it! 
But even in the rain, there were smiles all around. 
Especially when we actually found corals! This is not a great picture, and I plan to post better ones up here, but see the fan shaped corals in white right under the time stamp? That is just what we were looking for!  

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