Arrival at the Marine Science Station

We reached the Israel-Jordan border about 30 minutes before closing so we were the only people there. This made it much easier to cross than I had expected. We basically paid the fee, got our passports stamped, walked to the Jordan side, put our stuff through an x-ray machine that no one was watching, got another stamp, and then got in the van to go to the marine science station. One part that was different was in the no man’s land between Israel and Jordan there was a fenced in area where we were walking and outside of the fence there was an active mine field with sniper towers on both sides of the border. That was something that you don’t see in the states. We were all pretty tired after a couple of long days of traveling so we essentially dropped of our stuff at the MSS, then went to get some food, and then went right to bed.

The next day we had a tour of the MSS. You could tell that the buildings had been built in the early 80’s and I don’t think that much have been done with them since then. With that said it will work for the kind of research that we are doing in our month long trip. Following our tour and lunch we were able to go for a snorkel of the marine protected area around that is owned by the MSS. The reef all along the shore is known as a fringe reef. There are several types of coral reefs; patch reef, fringe reef, barrier reef, and atoll. A fringe reef starts at the shore and goes out. Patch reefs are small isolated reef areas that are not connected to others. Barrier reefs start as patch reefs but as they continue to grow towards the sea the inner parts of the reef start to die and eventually you end up with sea, coral reef, open sea/lagoon area, and then land. The final one an atoll is when you start with a reef area that grow out circular and eventually the middle dies and you have a large circle that sometimes have land right inside it and water in the middle. I don’t have any under water photos yet but here is one of the reef from a small hill on the shore. Where it is darker the water gets deeps. Where it is really light is where the reef is. There are two light patches a little of shore, those are patches of coral reef. The Gulf of Aqaba where we are is like the end of the African rift valley so it gets really deep here. It is 400 meters in the middle and farther south where Saudi Arabia and Egypt are on either side it goes to 800 meters. Directly across from where we are is Eliat, Isreal and just south of that is Egypt. We are also about 10 km from the Saudi boarder so it is so you can essentially see 3 other countries from here.



As the week went on we had several guest lecturers come in and had workshops on different scientific techniques. In the afternoon we work on our individual research projects. My project requires me to tag and measure all of the anemones in the site as well as catching all of the anemonefish, bringing them to the lab to weigh, measure, photograph, and fin clip so my work is pretty much all diving which is nice. It is also a lot of work, especially with everyone one else working on their own projects. To find, mark, and tag an entire site takes a long time so it will probably take me the whole month to measure the anemones and the more I think about the fish stuff the more that I realize that it is going to be very hard to do in this short a period of time without much help. But I guess well see how it goes.

In Islamic culture Friday and Saturday are the weekend because Friday is the holy day so this Friday and Saturday we’ll be going to Wadi Rum which is basically a big park, I’ll have pictures a story about that soon.

Peace out