Update 1

The tourship "Explorer"

Jenny and I have had a busy week since completing our base training. We found one abandoned colony to excavate on an island near the base. However, yesterday the U. S. science ship was here from Palmer Station and we had a chance to go on board for the day, visit with other Americans, and go to an Adelie penguin colony on a small island just offshore from the south end of Adelaide Island.

This small island, Ginger Island, has a colony of about
1000 penguins and we took the opportunity to collect sediment samples from the middle of this colony. The sediments not only will tell us what these penguins have been eating, but also how long the colony has existed here (by dating the bones). This trip provided a chance to sample a site that we otherwise could not get to without ship support--it's too far from Rothera to go by zodiac. So, I was pretty pleased that we got there.

We placed a 1x1 m pit in the colony (see photo) with penguin chicks forming creches (gatherings of chicks) all around us. Many of them were curious and came over to see what we were doing--they got bored quickly and moved on. We had to scrape down through the modern guano accumulation to excavate the pit. Then, we dug the pit in 5cm deep levels until reaching the bottom. The pit went down 57 cm before hitting bedrock.

We screen wash all the sediments to recover all the bones and diet remains. We did some screening using seawater there, but most of the sediments were put in bags for removal from the island. We brought them back to Rothera for processing there. Overall, it was a stinky job--penguin colonies and guano do not smell that good!

We had about six hours on the island, but we needed to rush at the end. Sea ice was moving in around the island (blown in by south winds) and too much would prevent the zodiac from picking us up. In that situation, we would have to spend the night on the island until the ice blew out, so we had all necessary equipment to camp just in case. Fortunately, we got out just in time and got back to the ship and the base at midnight.

Now we are processing (washing) the sediments from this colony and will start digging the abandoned colony that we found near the station sometime within the next week. For the next update, I'll let you know what we find.

Questions, Comments
email David Hughes, djh6183@uncwil.edu
Last updated February 29, 2000