The Studio@620 invites you to experience The Autonomous Art of Antarctica. Antarctica is a land of environmental extremes that is owned by no one…living largely in nature’s own autonomy. The continent is home to an incredible ecosystem with ever-changing borders of land and ice, setting the canvas for natural artistic opportunities, and with imagery never to be seen the same way again. To enjoy a piece of Antarctica you are invited to join us for a walk among the artistry of Paul Suprenand’s landscape and animal imagery that will be wrapped along the walls of Studio@620 from February 24th-March 5th.

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

Baby, it's cold outside.

We're at our last stop, Joinville Island, and it feels like winter - Antarctic style. Even though we are at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which is our northernmost point beginning our science ops, it is far colder here than anywhere else we've been. The wind is coming out of the south off the ice. And the local ocean current is bringing cold water and big icebergs up from the coast of the Weddell Sea to the east of us. The combination has given us temperatures of minus-4 Fahrenheit and a wind chill of minus-40.

The ocean is at freezing temperature (28 degrees) and, particularly at night, ice has been forming right before our eyes. New, rapidly forming ice often forms little extrusions known as "frost flowers" that will coat the sea surface in meadows. We've seen penguins running across newly formed sea ice.

Along with the cold water, the Antarctic coastal current has brought us silverfish from the Weddell Sea, where they are still plentiful. Our silverfish team will be able to compare them with the fish we captured at Charcot Island and Marguerite Bay to see how closely related they are.

Our investigation is near an end. We will be departing within 24 hours to once more brave the waters of the Drake Passage. I will try to get one more report to you before we leave the ship. We're also bringing home a video report. Limited bandwidth prevents us from sending it along until we get back to the States. Look for it in a couple weeks on tampabay.com.

In the meantime, it has been a pleasure to bring you along with us.

A moment to reflect, April 27. ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

We have left Croker Passage for our last trawling station on Joinville Island. The verdict of our investigation? Silverfish are very rare here, if not completely gone. We caught one silverfish in more than 24 hours of continuous sampling.

In 1983, colleagues caught dozens of silverfish in the Croker Passage at the same time of year, and they were using a much smaller net. We even trawled the bottom to see whether we could find silverfish below our normal sampling depths, but no luck.

When we get to Joinville Island, we will be strongly influenced by the cold waters of the Weddell Sea to the east of us (the Weddell Sea is the southernmost portion of the Atlantic Ocean). The Antarctic coastal current curves around the tip of the peninsula, most likely bringing lots of silverfish with it.

Our transit from Palmer station to Croker Passage took us through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. We allowed everyone not on watch to visit the Palmer base for a few hours. I was in the store when who should happen by but my USF colleague and Antarctic veteran, Bill Baker. Pretty small world.

It is a time-honored nautical tradition to recognize the crossing of important global landmarks while you are at sea, and we passed a big one on this cruise: the south polar circle at 66 degrees 30 minutes south latitude.

At this latitude, the sun does not rise above the horizon for part of the winter and doesn't sink below it for part of the summer.

If you haven't previously crossed a polar circle or the Equator, you are considered a pollywog and must be initiated into King Neptune's realm. The initiation can be ugly, and the details can't be revealed lest I feel the wrath of Neptune. Suffice it to say that all of our pollywogs were strong of heart and have been welcomed into Neptune's court.

RV Palmer at night, April 21. ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

Gravity and ship motion have been high on our awareness list for the past couple of days. I'm here to tell you that the Drake Passage does not have the corner on high winds. It was blowing 60 knots for much of Saturday night; for a while, it was like an amusement park ride. For those of you who have not experienced a squall at sea, imagine riding a fast elevator in a tall building – but the elevator is moving rapidly up and down in a twilight zone between, say, the 12th and 15th floors. Add in a couple cups of roll, a pound of pitch, and a dash of yaw (you'll have to look that one up), and shake vigorously. Then you have the feel. In the end, some gear was damaged, but with our backups we are okay.

In our transit north from Marguerite Bay (see map), we stopped briefly at Rothera Base to pick up some cargo and have a quick tour. Then we made our way to Renaud Island for sampling.

Our investigation thus far has revealed that silverfish pretty much stop at Marguerite Bay. There were none at Renaud, but they were fairly abundant down south at Charcot and in Marguerite Bay. They were formerly quite abundant in our present location, near Palmer Station, but we have now sampled in three places (and the penguins in many more) and the silverfish are just not here.

Why does it matter that one fish seems to be disappearing over part of its range? It's just one fish, right? It matters because in the vast majority of the coastal Antarctic, the silverfish is one of only two fishes that spends its entire life in the pelagic realm: the "midwater" between the surface and the bottom. The only other pelagic fish is quite large – it gets to 3 feet or so.

For a contrast, in Florida coastal waters we have several species of sardines and anchovies alone.

Think of the silverfish as the Antarctic sardine, and then think of it as the only fish available for seabirds to eat in most of the coastal Antarctic. It is a staple of seals as well.

When an important food source like that disappears, its predators suffer. The Adélie penguins near Palmer have declined by well over 50 percent in numbers over the past 25 years. Coincidence?

As we have moved north, the surface ocean has warmed considerably, from 30 to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. The air temperature has varied from 28 to 35 – balmy by Antarctic standards for this time of year, but still cold when working in it.

Our next stop, Croker Passage, is important because we know from a netting survey that there was a healthy community of silverfish there in 1983. Will there be silverfish now? We'll see.

Antarctic landscape, April 17. ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

Avian Island is our study site for Adélie penguins in Marguerite Bay, but this time of year the seals outnumber the penguins.

Seals are important predators in the Antarctic, and where the hunting is good, or where they have easy access to the water (called a seal chute), they can be abundant. The Antarctic has six species of seals. Four are thought of as "pack ice seals," because they can be found far from shore on the seasonal sea ice that forms every Antarctic winter. More on them later.

For now, we'll introduce the seals on Avian Island — the southern fur and the southern elephant seal. They are hugely different in size, habits, and personality.

Fur seals were hunted almost to extinction in the early 1900s. In fact, they were believed extinct until a small group was seen in the northern peninsular area a few years after the hunting was stopped. Since then, their numbers have increased to well more than a million.

Fur seals are the personality champs of the Antarctic seals. They are nearly always in small groups, and one or more will sometimes charge when you walk by them. Intimidating? At four to six feet in length, yes. Most of the time they stop after a few feet, but sometimes you need to shout or bang two rocks together to halt the charge. Waving a penguin net also helps.

Fur seals have visible ears and can move their rear flippers around to stand on them, so they are pretty fast on land. Their growl sounds like a dog: a low, throaty rumble. Like all seals, they are quite graceful in the water. They feed on krill and the occasional fish.

Elephant seals are enormous and don't move around much. A mature male can weigh more than two tons. During breeding season they can be quite active, with a large male maintaining a harem. We are in the "offseason," which is a time for rest and replenishment of body stores. Sleepy as they seem, it's a bad idea to get too close — they move faster than you think. Elephant seals are "true seals," which means their rear flippers can't be brought under the body to stand on, so they have to wriggle like a huge worm. Clumsy and huge as they may seem, the elephants are champion divers among all seals. They feed almost entirely on squid and adult males can dive more than a mile. Their large eyes are equipment for dealing with the darkness of the ocean's depths. Nature never ceases to amaze.

From Marguerite Bay, we'll be stopping briefly at the British Antarctic base just north of the bay, in Rothera, and then it's on to our next site at Renaud Island.

A young elephant seal showing large eyes and front flipper. April 9. ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

We've been riding a roller coaster with the weather. Three good days (winds less than 20 knots and seas less than 6 feet). Then two days of getting thumped (winds of 35 to 45 knots with gusts to 60, and seas of 10 to 20 feet). Fortunately, we've been somewhat protected in our current location, Marguerite Bay.

The penguin biologists (with your narrator able to go along for photos and to provide unskilled labor) were able to go ashore and collect data on penguin diet and general health. Our study site was Avian Island, a speck to the south of Adelaide Island at the northern end of Marguerite Bay. During the breeding season, 90,000 pairs of Adélie penguins live here.

Far fewer birds are around right now (only dozens), and the place would better be named "Seal Island." But more on the seal situation in our next installment. Vital statistics were recorded for each bird: beak length and width, weight, diet, and sex.

Adélies weigh 8 to 12 pounds. They are considered one of the two "high Antarctic" penguins, the other being the Emperor of March of the Penguins fame.

Adélies feed mainly on Antarctic krill and silverfish when they can get them. In Marguerite Bay, some of the birds are finding silverfish to eat, and we are getting some in our trawls as well. Not as many as we had hoped, but some.

Adelie penguin. April 9 ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

Our theme for today is ice. Big ice.

We left our southernmost sampling area at Charcot Island and headed north toward Marguerite Bay, with a scheduled stop in a small bay named Lazarev to look for Adelie penguins and sample for silverfish. We were stopped in our tracks by a fleet of icebergs.

To say that icebergs are a hazard to navigation is severely understating the case; even strong icebreakers like the Palmer would not survive a close encounter with a berg.

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

CHARCOT ISLAND, Antarctica - Welcome to Charcot Island, the southernmost point in our series of sampling sites along the Antarctic Peninsula. It looks and feels much more polar.

Air temperatures are in the low 20s Fahrenheit and the sea is near freezing: about 28 degrees.

Small icebergs (known as bergie bits) and larger bergs surround us, seemingly studying our arrival. The sky is gray down to the water.

Hard as it is to imagine in our highly connected world, few people have come here. If you look at the nautical charts that are available (very few at that), there are almost no bottom depths recorded on them. And very often, the positions of the islands are incorrect. The knowledge vacuum makes our captain and crew a cautious bunch. All in all, it's just eerie here.

Our mission is to visit the Adelie penguin colony on Charcot (pronounced Shar-KO) and get some information on the birds' diet and movements; to catch as many silverfish as we can; and to get some basic data on the ocean itself.

Charcot is important to our study because we believe it closely resembles what the area around Palmer Station was like 50 years ago, well before the midwinter temperatures began to climb.

So, you might ask, did we catch some silverfish? Yes.

The marine life here is what we call "high Antarctic," which includes silverfish and a few characteristic invertebrates.

Ice of all different types is present, from the icebergs I mentioned before to newly forming sea ice, to the glaciers that cover the island. When the ocean is just cold enough for ice to form, there is pancake ice and "miles of ice" type ice cover; it can form over a few hours time. The ice may become old hat after a while, but for now it's exciting.

Our constant companions are the snow petrels in the air and crabeater seals, who appear regularly on ice floes. Early explorers noticed that the scat of crabeaters was red and just assumed that they were eating crabs. But they feed almost exclusively on the abundant and shrimp-like Antarctic krill, with the odd silverfish now and again, of course.

We will be here for another couple of days. The weather has prevented our biologists from visiting the penguin colony here, so we are hoping for a change that will allow them to get to shore. More news soon. In the meantime, see if you can figure out what a "sun dog" is.

Men against ice mountains on March 27. ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

Our cruise's main mission is to map the distribution of the Antarctic silverfish (for you biology buffs: Pleuragramma antarcticum) along the Antarctic peninsula. The silverfish was once abundant along the entire length of the peninsula, but now it seems to be missing from much of the northern half. How do we know? Penguins and other seabirds used to feed it to their fledgling chicks, the time when the young birds need the highest calorie meals to grow quickly. You see, silverfish are fatty, a high-energy food that is just the thing for gaining weight, developing swimming muscles, and growing dense, protective feathers. So, we are on a "quest for silver" as we hunt the elusive silverfish along the entire length of the peninsula. Our main tools in the hunt are scientific nets that allow us to get multiple samples in one tow.

We have been lucky so far. Temperatures have been hovering between minus-2 and 0 degrees Celsius, or 28-32 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind chill feels like 8-10 Fahrenheit. So, yes, it's cold, but not as cold as Minnesota. Winds have been bouncing between 10 and 25 knots and seas have been about 4 to 6 feet. We have been getting a lot of snow, including a hail-like snow that is called grauple.

Putting the nets on the MOCNESS-10 (Multiple Opening and Closing Net and Environmental Sampling System) frame on March 20. This cluster has six nets, each of which is 10 square meters. It looks a bit like a beached whale, but it catches adult silverfish very well. For the MOC 10, each net is attached to two bars. For the middle nets (all but the topmost and bottommost nets) the top is attached to the bottom of one bar and the bottom is attached to the top of the next bar down. In turn, the top of the next net down is attached to the bottom of that bar, and so on. The net is deployed with the very bottom net open and the rest of the bars and nets scrunched up at the top. When we want to close the bottom net and open the next one, we just drop the next bar. That closes the bottom net, but remember that the next net in line has its bottom attached to the same bar that has just been dropped – so it is now open. We open the nets one at a time by dropping the bars in turn, which allows us to sample a series of depths in one tow. [Erica Bortolotto] ... Read more

Dr. Joseph Torres, a University of South Florida marine biologist and a St. Petersburg resident, is the chief scientist on a seven-week National Science Foundation expedition to Antarctica to research the dramatic decline of a key player in the food chain. The Antarctic silverfish has disappeared from a significant part of its range. The suspected perpetrator is global warming. View our Antarctic Special Report, including video, maps and photos.

We made it. The journey from Chile to Antarctica began with a 12-hour trip through the protected waters of the Strait of Magellan, just like the old tall ships did. We popped out into the Atlantic just north of Cape Horn, the tip of South America.

A few hours later, we entered the Drake Passage, the body of water between the cape and the Antarctic peninsula. In the Drake, we would be at the full mercy of wind and wave -- I've experienced 45-foot seas in previous crossings -- but this time we were spared. After a rough start -- 40-knot winds and 25-foot seas -- a high-pressure weather system moved in and flattened the swells.

In a calmer ocean, we made good time. Our vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, is an icebreaker, and it can use more than one engine on each propeller to give it the extra power it needs to get through ice. In the open sea, the extra power means speed. We were hurrying to get into the protected waters near the Antarctic Peninsula ahead of an approaching storm.

Each crossing has its own personality, but there are always spectacular oceanic birds for company. The wandering albatross and the giant petrel, with wingspans up to 8 feet, flew above the waves nearby, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes going around the boat in an an effortless circle. They glided just inches over the water, so close you think they might crash into a swell, then they soared just over the top and into the next trough -- truly masters of the air.

We beat the bad weather to Palmer Station, where we were protected on one side by the Antarctic peninsula itself and on the other by the many islands that lie to its west. We picked up some cruise essentials and dropped off some cargo for the base. Our boat is too large to dock there, so we had to ferry people and cargo using zodiac-style inflatable boats. No visit this time – it will have to wait for our return trip, something to look forward to as we head offshore to begin our science operations.

A visit to Palmer Station via zodiac, with the research vessel Laurence Gould in dock in the background, on March 20. ... Read more