Last night on the Pelican

Tonight is the last night on the Pelican, and the research is winding down. Everyone is excited to start packing up, but we still have one sampling station scheduled for early tomorrow morning -- the sampling is planned to start at 5:00 am. Then, it's a few hours of steaming to get back to Lumcon where we will offload all our gear and head home.

Alan Shiller's trace metals sampling group has a relatively short drive back to the Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi where USM's Department of Marine Science is located. Kyeong Park will drive a little farther, back to Mobile Alabama. Jim Krest's group has the longest distance to travel, back to St. Petersburg, Florida.


But first, Dr. Krest and his group are planning to head west a little ways to get another sample of the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City, Louisiana (image from US Army Corps of engineers, and downloaded from Wikipedia). Dr. Krest is concerned that the samples collected during the cruise might not have been far enough up the river. His big concern is that there might have been some influence of the salty water from the Gulf of Mexico, and wants to make sure that he has a good representation of the river's chemistry.

Then, Krest's group will head back towards St. Petersburg, stopping for the night in New Orleans before the final drive home. Dr. Krest hopes to grab some Mississippi River water from near Jackson Square and then grab a cup of coffee and some beignets (French doughnuts) at Cafe Du Monde before starting the long drive back to St. Petersburg.

New Orleans

(Panoramic image of New Orleans taken by M. Lamar Griffin, Sr. with permission granted by the author to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts; downloaded from Wikipedia).

We should have some time to answer more questions tomorrow morning while we steam back to LUMCON. Just in case we don't, we want to give a shout out to the students at Campbell Park Elementary School, Palmyra Macedon Central School District, and Belcher Elementary School and Lakeview School. Unfortunately, we had some technical problems that prevented some of the schools from accessing the blog, and we also were late in notifying other schools so they did not get a chance to participate. We promise to work out the details better for our next cruise in November, MAGMIX-2. In the meantime, we plan to keep updating this blog as we process all of our samples over the summer. Stay tuned!