Arrive Antarctica Penninsula

The Drake Passage

Between February 5 - 14, 1994, phycologists María Eliana Ramírez (Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago, Chile) and Suzanne Fredericq (then a Mellon Foundation postdoc in the Botany Department at Duke Univiersity,North Carolina) and dive master Juan Rodríguez (Santiago, Chile) were stationed at Base Frei (Chilean Territory) on King George Island, South Shetland Islands off the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. They collected benthic seaweeds manually by scuba diving at 10-20 meter depths, as well as in the intertidal, and drift macroalgae. The video clip shows J. Rodríguez explaining the ins and outs of a dry suit (traje seco), preparations for and diving with a dry suit (Fredericq) and wet suit (Rodríguez) in Bahia Colins. M. Eliana Ramírez and S. Fredericq explain the scientific mission of the Antarctic trip, i.e. collecting specimens for a morphological and molecular systematic study of the economically important carrageenophyte red algal families Phyllophoraceae an Gigartinaceae (Gigartinales) from the Antarctic Peninsula. They preserved formalin-fixed wet material for morphologicaly studies, as well as dried in silicagel for comparative molecular DNA sequencing studies. Herbarium specimens were also made. They discuss how they started to collaborate on various projects related to red algal systematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in the lab of Max Hommersand). The scientific trip was funded by grant 001/93 from the Instituto Antartico Chileno (INACH) through Daniel Torres and Patricicio Eberhard.

Filmed by Victor Villanueva
Edited by S. Fredericq, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Video update from an expedition exploring undersea volcanoes around Antarctica

a whale skeleton on the shore