Antarctic Bound

One of our senior scientists, Dr. Andrew Westgate, is heading to the Antarctic as part of a team of scientists from the Duke Marine Lab. The expedition will take six weeks and a blog will be updated regularly.

Here is Andrew's email:

Hello family and friends!

Here is a link to a website that Duke has set up to document our upcoming Antarctic field trip. Postings are still up from the 2009 field season, but you can expect new updates soon. You can also see where the ship is on the map.

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/nick-pro/antarctica/

Andrew

The southern hemisphere has been a popular spot for our researchers in the last year. Dr. Rob Ronconi, another of our senior scientists, spent three and a half months in the South Atlantic on Gough and Inaccessible Islands from September to December 2009 where he helped attach 22 satellite tags to greater shearwaters, among other research. Seventeen tags are still operational and we are waiting to see when the birds start their northward migration.

Rob is currently an observer on a research cruise on the vessel, CCGS Hudson, http://www.bio.gc.ca/vessels-navires/ccgs-hudson-eng.htm, on the Laurentian Fan off Nova Scotia and spotted a raft of sooty shearwaters that have already made it back to the North Atlantic from their southern breeding islands in the South Atlantic.

The movements of the greater shearwaters can be followed on the Sea Turtle website: http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/index.shtml?project_id=452.