I’ve been in Lyttelton, New Zealand (port town close to Christchurch) the past few days during our port call. The science party typically boards and moves onto the JOIDES Resolution (the JR) during port call to begin getting familiar with the ship, the labs, the people, and more before we actually depart. Meanwhile, the crew for the ship is offloading cores (and other freight) from previous expedition and preparing for the new expedition. All this typically takes a few days, which allows the scientists to get off the ship in the afternoons/evenings.

We set sail in just a few hours and it will be an ~8-day transit to our first coring site in the Ross Sea. During this transit we will continue to work in our lab groups (more about all that in a subsequent post) and get ourselves ready for the first core on deck.

Being able to get off the ship also allows getting a view looking back at the JR from off the ship, which is something we won’t be able to do for two months. What a beauty!

Finally, just wanted to point to this very nice story by the College of Science communications team that was posted on Virginia Tech News the other day. This is a wonderful overview of the objectives of the expedition.