I can’t and don’t want to try and describe the horror we are now facing.

Vis-a-thon number three was to say what we do and what we use to do it. The PI said whatever she does and said she uses a mass spectrometer. Someone else is a diatom taxonomist and uses a light microscope. The middle school teacher said she uses her voice. We then had to go find materials and build an instrument of some kind, in 40 minutes. Someone went to the shop and made a flat out amazing set of wind chimes with scrap metal. The teacher made 3 little megaphones with different characteristics out of paper cups and a paper plate. Again I was very impressed by these grantees. I made a binary calculator out of paper.

A couple of people wanted to spend the few hours of dark up on the bridge. They wanted to see it go from light to dark and then back again. We have about four hours of darkish time, between about 11pm and 3am. I came to work at midnight and went up there to see the sights. The ship has some big searchlights pointed to the front, which makes for beautiful patterns with the ice, water and snow that comes and goes. The snow flowing through the lights is mesmerizing, with occasional prismatic effects. We are really far away from everywhere but there are still birds out here. When they fly through the lights they flash very bright white. It was peaceful up there in the dark. We could see the ocean swells lifting up the ice areas, rising and falling. The view from the bridge is probably 330 degrees, you can see great distances when it’s light out. It was overcast so there was no dramatic sunrise, just the gradual lightening of the gray, blue and white.