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1. Drake Passage

2. RAF fighter jet accompanying us to the Falklands

From: Gerard McCarthy
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:12
Subject: Arrived

Hi,
First of all let me introduce myself: I'm Gerard - a PhD student at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton. I'm here as part of a six person team to study the Drake Passage in the Southern Ocean.

The Drake passage is a very important part of the ocean, between the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula and the southern tip of South America. This geography constricts the ocean's flow and forms what we oceanographers call a choke point. This is even more important here as the largest current in the world, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, flows through the Drake Passage. The flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is so large that it is around 600-700 times larger than the flow of the mighty Amazon river. That's a lot of movement under the waves.

Before we could begin our study, we had to reach our ship. Our ship is called the James Clark Ross and we were meeting her in the Falkland Islands. This meant travelling to the other side of the globe! We left the northern hemisphere winter behind and headed for the southern hemisphere summer on Tuesday 20th November. We flew with the RAF and you can see a picture of our plane on the left..... Yes, that's the wing of our plane, and that other plane is the fighter jet that accompanied us into landing on the Falklands.

We reached the ship on Wednesday evening but were given some bad news. Our sailing would be delayed. That did give us more time to get our equipment set up. Marko and myself, with the help of our technician Sevelod, began setting up the CTD. The CTD is the main piece of apparatus that we will be using. 'C' stands for conductivity which we use to measure how salty the ocean is; 'T' gives us the temperature and 'D' gives us the depth.

With our equipment set up, all we need is to set sail...

Gerard