Our departure from Palmer was delayed by more than a day, due to bureaucracy. The National Science Foundation wanted the vessel to pick up two full containers of hazardous waste and take it…somewhere. Haz waste is very heavily regulated and there is a time limit for how long it is allowed to be on the continent (or below 60 south latitude). Some of the Palmer haz waste was reaching its expiration date and leaving it there would be a big treaty violation. Why it came to the last minute for this is anyone’s guess, but let’s say poor planning and logistics.

The principal investigator (scientist)had to adjust her plan to accommodate this failure. I hope it works out for her studies, but it may not. In the end we took away a couple of barrels of haz waste, presumably the stuff that was going to go past its expiration date. After we left I heard that alternate destinations were discussed, meaning throwing the science to the wind. Maybe we would go back to Chile, though Chile won’t take our haz waste. Or to McMurdo, because they will. New Zealand will certainly not take it, so those barrels may stay on the ship for many months before they can be offloaded.

We entered some pack ice after a couple of hours. The lab assistant came around to tell everyone that krill was being thrown up onto the floes as we broke through. She has not seen this before and she’s been on a fair few cruises. The vessel upends ice floes and the krill have been feeding on the bottom of the floes and up they go with the wash of the seawater.

The knitting oceanographer came up with a Halloween costume. She has some blue paper arrows taped to different parts of her body. I guessed she was the ocean biological pump. No, she was the Ekman spiral.