From: Emiliano Ezcurra - Campaigner
14th February 1997
BAHIA PARAISO:
The Bahia Paraiso was an Argentinian flagged ship which was being used as a tourist ship when it sank off the coast near Palmer station in 1991, not long after the Exxon Valdez spill.
On our visit to the US station Palmer the Greenpeace inflatable "Hurricane" left the MV Arctic Sunrise with a crew of 7 to approach the site where the wreck of the Bahia Paraiso lies. We found the ship almost completly covered by the sea surface. As you first see it it resembles a whale or a submarine just merging from under the water.
Eversince the ship sank, and after an extensive process of
cleaning and sucking the oil remaining in that ship carried
out by the Argentinian and Dutch governments, small but
constant drops of oil still reach the surface.
SPECTROPHOTOMETER AT PALMER:
The instrument used by Joe Farman during ten years of research, to announce the existence of the ozone hole in 1985 is still at work in Vernadsky (Ukraine) , ex-UK station Faraday. The new staff at Vernadsky have been trained by British Antarctic Science (BAS) scientists so that they continue with exactly the same programme as BAS did.
Basically, the instrument is used to measure ozone by detecting the absortion rates from UV light. The ucranians have told Greenpeace that at times there is practically no ozone above their heads and they need to take extreme precautions when going out.
The spectrophotometer is calibrated every month and if necessary taken to England for major repairs. It has often been moved to other stations in Antartica so as to take measurements from different positions.
All data provided by the spectrophotometer is then tranfered to Cambridge for BAS scientists to process.