Salt Water 03

It’s been a (long) while since the last Salt Water. I intended to write about the end of winter, how the elephant seal breeding season was looming, but in the meantime spring has come and gone, as have the elephant seal females. Winter let go of the island reluctantly and we had heavy snowfalls well into October. But the island was humming with animals - feathered, finned and flippered, adult and hours
old - by then.

Download from Issuu.

Salt Water 02

Around 08:15. Sunrise. But only barely. The sun will describe a low arc through the sky before disappearing behind the western horizon eight and a half hours later. The days are short and the light low, but Marion doesn’t share the extremes of the high latitudes which have near or complete darkness for most of the winter.

Download from Issuu.

Salt Water 01

These ‘newsletters’ (I’ve used the plural, but don’t count on too many) will let you know I’m alive and will let me share a few words and images from Marion Island - my home for the next year.  I blame my procrastination in writing on the creative dead end I initially encountered when trying to think of a title for these newsletters.  I’ve chosen ‘Salt Water’ because of the following paraphrase from Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Deluge at Norderney’:  the cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  Its inscribed on the first page of our Sealer work plan and describes well what we’ll experience through the year.

Download from Issuu.

CAPESTORM supports the Marion 68 Sealers

A typical Marion day. Image by Chris Oosthuizen.Marion Island is cold, wet and windy.  Situated in the infamous "Roaring Forties," gale force winds (greater than 50km.h-1) occur on more than 100 days per year; about 2,000mm of rain falls annually and on average the mercury reads just over 5oC.  The hyperoceanic, sub-Antarctic climate makes it an extremely challenging environment to work in, and the Mammal Research Institute's "Sealers" - who venture out on every day of the year to collect data - need good quality protection from the elements.

CAPESTORM has therefore generously donated some excellent clothing to help keep us warm and dry in the 2011/2012 field season.

King George Island Expedition

Bull southern elephant seals in a moulting aggregation at King George Island.Southern elephant seals are among the oceans' supreme pelagics.  They spend most of their lives beneath the surface: between briefly "hauling out" on land to breed and moult they spend months at sea, travelling thousands of kilometres and diving up to 2 kilometres in search of their squid and fish prey.

To study their at-sea movements and behaviour, data logging instruments are attached to individuals and these relay information via satellite when the animals surface.  Through the instruments they carry, the animals also collect masses of precision oceanographic data - used to model our climate and oceans - from areas difficult to reach using traditional methods.  These aims are encapsulated in Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) and various other projects.

We have been deploying such instruments on elephant seals at Marion Island for a number of years (as part of MEOP in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute [AWI] in Germany) and many of these results are presented in the recent paper "A lifetime at depth" by Trevor McIntyre et al.

Last year Nico de Bruyn and I, together with Horst Bornemann and Jochen Plötz of the AWI, travelled to King George Island/Isla 25 de Mayo off the Antarctic Peninsula to deploy satellite tags on 15 adult male elephant seals.

Our unofficial newsletters - "Met Eish" - can be seen at Issuu:
www.issuu.com/ryanreisinger

The following companies kindly supported us with brilliant cold weather gear:
DUNLOP Protective Footwear
TAIGA Climate Protection Systems
CAPESTORM Outdoor Apparel