Background From 1999-2003, I attended Mary Washington College, now known as the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I'm originally from New York. After graduating high school in 1999, I was anxious to get out of the state and try something new. I was spoiled rotten at MWC because they opened up a brand new science center my first fall semester and had state-of-the-art facilities and equipment. I had four passions in college: music, art, theatre and chemistry. I did my best to satisfy them all through classes and extra-curricular work but ultimately decided to ...

Submitted Feb 17: Among western boundary currents, the Agulhas flowing south along East Africa is 2nd only to the Gulf Stream in strength. It carries hundreds to thousands of times the water volume of the Mississippi River. Opposing waves generated by storms off Antarctica can be anomalously large. In meeting the thrust of the Agulhas Current, anomalies can be magnified to produce “rogue” waves of enormous proportions. Any given western boundary current’s volume is appreciably exceeded by that of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), also called the West Wind Drift (WWD). It circles Antarctica west to east and dominates the Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean.The ACC is the granddaddy of surface currents and the only major surface current having the geogra...

The photo you see here was taken at the dock in Durban during cruise preparations. Two students are working from the "man basket" to get the trace metal rosette system up and running. Our first week of cruising is drawing to a close. We have ridden the Agulhas Current, pushed by its southwesterly flow, sometimes in excess of 2 meters per second, boosting our ship’s speed to more than 16 knots, well above its rated top speed of 15 knots. On Tuesday, our second evening out, the powerful current with 2-3 meter opposing waves posed a challenge to the ship, but skillful maneuvering kept operations smooth and successful. An op...

In our previous post we wrote that we’d enter the Agulhas Current, a western boundary current, about 4 hours out of Durban. Here are some interesting facts about western boundary currents, and the Agulhas in particular: They originate from equatorial waters flowing westward in response to easterly winds. Where westerly equatorial flow meets a continental shelf, the equatorial current turns and becomes a western boundary current, earning its name. In the Northern Hemisphere, they veer right, flowing north; in the Southern Hemisphere, they veer left, flowing south. Along the western edges of ocean basins, they move warm water from equatorial latitudes toward the poles. Their warm-water transport mitigates, to some extent, the incoming solar energy difference ...

February 3, 2008: After a couple of days in South Africa, we’re adjusting to our new time zone. All participants are here now, and we’re setting up our shipboard labs. The vessel has 4,000 square feet of lab space shared among several projects. View the ship’s webcam. Our thoughts are focused on our teamwork, and we are practicing our CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) operation, which involves deploying and retrieving a large array of water collection bottles mounted on a room-size framework. The sample bottles are set up to open at a specified depth. We’ll have to be prepared to do this under harsh conditions. A front is...

February 1, 2008: Hello! We are graduate students from the Department of Oceanography at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. We are participants in the CLIVARI6S Repeat Hydrography Research Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation as one of the many activities of the International Polar Year (IPY). Professors Kevin Speer, William Landing, and Thorsten Dittmar, Post Doctoral Researcher Angie Milne, and Associate in Oceanography Peter Lazarevich will direct us, and we graduate students, Kati Gosnell, Katy Hill, Juliana D’Andrilli, Jun Dong, Ji-Young Paeng, and Austin Todd, are looking forward to a lot of invaluable hands-on experience. In Durban, South Africa, our port of departure, a fifth student, Loic Juillon, will join us, ...