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.