13th June, 2011 – Back in Punta Arenas

On 11 June the wonderful endeavour of NBP11-03 came to an end. We arrived back in Punta Arenas, and spend a last day with hard work packing up all our gear, cleaning the labs, and unloading the ship. In the evening we then had the well deserved ‘end-of-cruise-party’. Everybody enjoyed a few drinks after five weeks of abstinence  (yes – the Palmer is a dry ship, with zero alcohol policy).

I would like to finish this blog with the facts list from our official cruise blog site:

 …we travelled approximately 2800 nautical miles… …

the biologists collected 1124 samples, representing 13 phyla, 11475 individuals, 1634 octocorals and 649 solitary scleractinians!!! …

the paleoceanographers collected 14398 solitary fossil corals (592 of which were subsampled on board), 106 kg of fossil stylasterids, 512 sponge samples, 418 live bivalves and 2159 fossil bivalves… …

we recovered 6 sediment cores comprising 333cm of mud… …

4210 km of multibeam bathymetric data were logged… …

723 bowlines were tied … …

we ate 100kg bacon, 330kg beef, 3600 eggs, and drank 500 pints of milk… …

we sent 6 GB of e-mails…. …

… and we posted 35 blogs, and 180 photos on our official cruise blog website … (check out http://antarcticcorals.blogspot.com/)

 It’s been a fantastic cruise – team work, hard work, wonderful people and quite a bit of luck with the weather has meant that we’ve had both a successful and really fun time. Now everybody goes on the long travel back home and start the research on the numerous samples we collected.

Group picture of the science party and the Raytheon staff onboard the cruise NBP11-03.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *