AESOPS APFZ - Process I Reports 12/02/97 - 01/03/98

Visit Chief Scientist Dick Barber's Antarctic Journal Web site

• R/V Revelle Sails from New Zealand from Jon Alberts, December 2, 1997

Weekly Progress reports from Dick Barber, Chief Scientist:

• Week 1 dated December 9, 1997

• Week 2 dated December 17, 1997

• Week 3 dated December 24, 1997

• Week 4 dated December 30, 1997

• Week 5 dated January 2, 1998

And from Bob Anderson, this note dated January 1, 1998

Dear Dick,

Thank you for your report describing the exciting findings of the first AESOPS process cruise in the APFZ. The conditions you describe, where intense stratification caused by a low-salinity surface layer located between the Polar Front and the ice edge leads to accumulation of high levels of phytoplankton biomass, sounds very much like the conditions inherent in the classical paradigm of Antarctic ice edge blooms developed by Smith and Nelson a decade ago. That paradigm was challenged, to some extent, by the findings of German and British JGOFS Southern Ocean studies, so it will be of interest to compare AESOPS results from the SW Pacific with those of the British (SE Pacific) and German (Atlantic) JGOFS programs to better constrain the physical and chemical factors leading to "bloom" development.

Please extend my congratulations and New Years wishes to all aboard the Revelle.

Bob Anderson

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