We were at sea today. We had two lectures in the morning, one on the birds of S. Georgia and the other on iPhone photography.
They showed the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the afternoon. I watched it because it was a good opportunity to finish the vest I have been working on.
That afternoon, Rick was able to get pictures of birds that were drafting off the ship. One is a giant petrol and the other is a wandering albatross.
The ship participates in four citizen science projects. These are data collection projects for scientific researchers. The projects are:
- Bird surveys – we counted the numbers and types of birds at specific times and locations
- Happy whales – we uploaded picture of humpback whales flukes. Happy whales then tracks the whales around the world. We did the same thing for weaddle and leopard seals.
- Clouds – To help NASA, we observed and recorded cloud coverage at the same time as satellites were flying overhead. This allowed the scientists to “look” down and up on the clouds.
- Measuring the convergence – We crossed the convergence of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern ocean. The ocean temperature, salinity, etc changes at the convergence. The convergence is not at a specific location, rather it moves. So we measured the water conditions and provided this info to scientists.
We watched the third installment of Chasing Shackleton with Seb that evening.