The first quarantine
Since I am the only person in our crew that does not live in the US, I had to fly 4 days earlier than the rest because of the strict COVID19 protocol that NSF is enforcing to keep Antarctica SarsCoV-2 free. A small sacrifice that is about to change as everybody else arrives tomorrow (yay!). I mean, we’ll still be in quarantine in individual rooms, but at least I won’t be the only one.
Quarantine these three days has been about sleeping a lot (getting over the jet lag), watching lots of TV (enjoying several nature documentaries) and working on things that are way overdue. There is not much to do as we are staying at a hotel at the San Francisco airport, and the view from my room is the uninspiring network of freeways in front of SFO (can’t even see the planes landing/taking off ). There’s also no real chance to enjoy a bit of greenery outside, as there is none. But the room is pretty spacious and comfortable, so it’s not really bad at all!
View from 30,000 ft above the sea ice between Greenland and Canada. Photo by Luis Huckstadt
The flight between London and San Francisco was pretty good, and I had the opportunity to fly over Greenland and Hudson Bay in NE Canada, areas which, just like the western Antarctic Peninsula, are experiencing incredible high warming rates due to human-caused climate change. The sea ice between Canada and Greenland has already started breaking up. This is the time of the year when pack ice Arctic seals, like the hooded seal, are breeding (giving birth to their pups and mating), which heavily depends on the availability of sea ice for them to haul-out. So, the disappearance of sea ice will dramatically affect the success of these species, among many other changes caused by the accelerated warming due to human activities. Crabeater seals, along with leopard, Weddell and Ross seals in Antarctica, are also “ice seals” and they are been affected by climate change just like their relatives in the Arctic.
Crabeater seals hauled out on an ice floe. Photo by Logan Pallin
Our team, B-038-N, is heading to Antarctica precisely to study how the change in environmental conditions due to climate change, is affecting crabeater seals. We will be studying their at-sea distribution, feeding behaviour, physiological status, and ultimately their population, to better understand how the entire ecosystem is responding to this unprecedented environmental change. Tune in to read more reports from the field and learn with us about the crabeater seals and the Antarctic marine ecosystem!
