1-7-06 Saturday

Here are three more underwater critter pictures.





The class has started its first full day at the station with a non-stop session of training videos and instructions courses on how to stay alive out in the cold. The science doesn't really start until tomorrow when we will take them all out to the fish hole by the station to do some practice plankton sampling and CTD casts.

We also started the installation of the first DNA sequencer/analyzer to show up on the Antarctic continent. It was a somewhat inauspicious start that consisted of four of us having to pick the thing up by hand and carry it to its new home on the lab bench. Applied Biosystems sent down a representative with our group to help set up the machine. When the course is over it will get shipped back to California to continue its life as a demo model. It's a 16-channel 3130XL Genetic Analyzer if that means anything to you. It means nothing to me.