A group of 27 scientists, led by Dr. William “Barney” Balch of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, boarded the R/V Melville in Punta Arenas, Chile on January 11, 2011, and arrived 36 days later in Cape Town, South Africa after travelling a distance of 7650 miles (12,311 km) across the Atlantic Ocean.
Scientists participating in the Great Belt Cruise conducted the first systematic study of the Great Southern Coccolithophore Belt, seeking to understand more about the species of coccolithophores that make up the Great Belt, factors that affect their abundance and distribution, and the impacts of ocean acidification and climate change on the coccolithophores in the Great Belt.
Whitney King and Annie Warner blogged throughout the cruise on their Colby at Sea Wordpress site. They answered questions from students at Epiphany School (a middle school in Massachusetts) and uploaded pictures and videos. Internet connectivity on the cruise was provided by satellite and bandwidth was limited so members of Academic ITS assisted by making sure blog posts were formatted correctly and comments and questions on the blog were relayed to Whitney and Annie in a timely manner. Most of the video and pictures were captured with smartphones and then either emailed or copied to a shared folder in using the Dropbox service. Video editing was conducted on the cruise using iMovie on Whitney’s Macintosh notebook computer.