Next Cruise, on a South African Icebreaker!
Stock photo of Agulhas II . It's unlikely that we'll see ice, we're only going south to abo ut 48 ° Hi, my name is Melissa Miller and I'm a marine technician at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I'll be aboard the next cruise that is deploying SOCCOM floats. The cruise is a resupply run to Gough Island and Inaccessible Island, barely habited places (by humans at least, seabirds live there by the thousands!) in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. The ship is an icebreaker called Agulhas II , named after an important ocean current that runs along the coast of Southern Africa. I've done this before. In March and April 2016, I lived and worked on the Australian research vessel Investigator running nutrient samples and deploying SOCCOM floats. You can read my blog post from that trip here. Boxes of equipment left Scripps a few weeks ago, with the floats themselves being shipping from Seattle. So what does it take to prepare for a cruise like this? Well, prob