Yesterday Skipper Wilson rounded Cape Horn, one of the trickiest areas of the ocean to navigate. Share his excitement at rounding The Horn, as sailors call it, by reading his log here.

Cape Horn is at the very southern tip of South America. It’s part of Chile, located in the region called Tierra del Fuego. That’s Spanish for “Land of Fire.” Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago, which is a chain of islands, often created by volcanoes. (Hawaii is another example of an archipelago.)

Cape Horn itself is rather bare and can only be reached by helicopter. It has no trees, but does have an unmanned light tower to mark its existence. On a nearby island, the Chilean Navy has a lighthouse, a station, and a memorial to honor sailors who died in the waters nearby.

Share the excitement with Skipper Wilson in the video he shot to record the event:

The people Skipper Wilson talks about are famous explorers who also sailed around Cape Horn. These adventurers went on to find important water routes and to explore areas that weren’t known in the countries they came from. But they didn’t start out by finding something big. They started out small, right in their own backyards and then kept moving outward — right across the sea.

Explorers are always on the lookout for what’s around them. They ask lots of questions. “Why?” and “How?” are two of their favorite questions. They want to understand how things work and figure out how things can be done faster or better or to learn what’s beyond the next corner. In the olden days, people who asked questions like that became sailors and explorers. Today, they become astronauts and deep sea divers. Or they become scientists and explore things like cancer in their laboratories.

You can be an explorer, too. Start out close to home. Look under rocks and in holes. Ask questions. Hunt for answers. Who knows what you’ll find!

It’s hard to imagine, but did you know it’s possible to die of thirst at sea?

The reason for that is that the ocean is made up of saltwater, which can be poisonous to the human body if you drink it in any but the smallest quantities. Salt is processed in your body by your kidneys and is perfectly healthy in small amounts. Normally, if you have a little too much salt in your food, your kidneys use the liquid you drink to help flush the salt of your body when you urinate. When your body has more salt in the bloodstream than it can handle, it starts pumping water out of your other cells to help flush the salt out of your system. Seawater, however, has a lot of salt in it — way too much for your kidneys to handle. If you don’t drink more freshwater to help replenish the water that comes out of your cells, eventually your kidneys can’t handle it anymore and shut down, and your body’s cells start to die.

Because you need water to live, Skipper Wilson and other sailors use what’s known as a desalinator, a tool that removes the salt from sea water, making it safe to drink. He uses this tool to change seawater into drinking water, which he then stores in the Great American III’s 88-liter freshwater tank. You can read more about it here and here.

People have been interested in removing salt from seawater for a long time. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote a report about desalination back in 1791!

Sailors use this technology so they don’t need to haul lots of water with them on their voyages, but some places remove the salt from seawater for drinking water for their land-based populations, too. The Middle East, which is made up of lots of deserts bordering the sea, has a lot of desalination plants that produce close to 9 million gallons of drinking water from seawater a day!

(The title of this post comes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)

If you’ve been following Skipper Wilson’s progress in the Vendée Globe, you’ve probably noticed that periodically he talks about having to go through an ice gate.

An ice gate isn’t a gate at all. In fact, it’s not even an actual thing. Instead, it’s an imaginary line drawn between two points 445 miles apart. At each of these imaginary lines, the boats must pass north of at least one of these endpoints. (You can see in this image the different ways a boat can achieve this goal. The different colored lines are possible routes around the ice gate, which is the solid black line connecting the two circles.) The race creators came up with the idea to keep the sailors and their boats safe from icebergs.

Staying north of these points help keep the racers away from the dangerous southern waters, where summer temperatures are warming the freshwater glaciers and ice shelves. This causes pieces of them to break off (in the same way that an icicle might fall off a snowy roof as the weather warms up), drop into the ocean, and float away in the ocean’s currents. These pieces are called icebergs.

Icebergs range in size from relatively small (less than 16 feet long or high) to the huge (some are more than 250 feet tall or 660 feet long). Obviously sailors can see to stay away from something really big, but smaller icebergs pose bigger problems. This is especially true because although icebergs float, a lot of their mass is below the surface of the water. In fact, only 1/8 of an iceberg is visible above the surface of the water. So while an iceberg might look small and like a boat could move around it easily, it could stretch out quite a ways under the water, where a boat could crash into it.

Scientists monitor where larger icebergs can be found using satellites, buoys, and radar. Because ice can melt and break up, though, race organizers want to keep the sailors far from where icebergs are likely to be found.

Captain Murray Lister, a friend of Skipper Wilson, writes a little about icebergs in this week’s essay on sitesALIVE!

Skipper Wilson is approaching the final gate, the Eastern Pacific Gate, of the eight that the Vendée Globe officials announced for this year’s race and should pass through it this weekend or early next week. Read his latest log here.

Before Skipper Wilson started preparing for the storm he’s sailing into, he wrote an essay about the sea animals he’s encountered. You’ve read about some of them before (albatross and flying fish, for instance), but the latest critters that have come his way are tiny: shrimp.

If the only time you’ve ever seen shrimp is on a plate at a restaurant, you might wonder what kind of animal it is. Shrimp, which are shellfish, have an exoskeleton. That means that their skeleton is outside their body instead of inside like yours. They have ten legs they use for walking, as well as ten shorter swimming appendages and six eating appendages, and can be found both in saltwater and in freshwater.

Shrimp eat tiny plants and animals found in the water. They also serve as food for larger fish, birds, seals, whales, and people.

There are 1,900 different species of shrimp. The shrimp in the picture lives in saltwater, is often found in home aquariums, and is about three inches long. It’s the same type of animal as what Skipper Wilson has been seeing, but is much bigger. (It’s kind of like the difference between a husky dog and a chihuahua. They’re both dogs, but don’t really look like each other.) The kind of shrimp Skipper Wilson has been finding are tiny. They’re about one centimeter long — the length of your pinky finger nail.

(By the way, have you ever heard of sea monkeys? They aren’t really monkeys at all, but are actually a type of brine shrimp.)

What kind of wildlife can you find in your neighborhood? Ioannis Miaoulis, president and director of Boston’s Museum of Science has some ideas about the things you might learn from them.

We, here at Science NetLinks, join everyone involved with the Vendée Globe in breathing a deep sigh of relief at the safe rescue of Skipper Jean Le Cam from his boat, which capsized late yesterday. Skipper Le Cam was below deck when the boat tipped, leaving him trapped inside the boat (but not underwater).

This afternoon Skippers Vincent Riou and Armel Le Cléac’h (as well as an oil tanker that was close by) reached the VM Matériaux, which was lying on its side in the water, as you can see from Skipper Riou’s video above. Skipper Riou called out and could hear Skipper Le Cam shout back — a relief for everyone! Skipper Le Cam worked on getting into his rescue suit (which insulates you against the cold water and helps you stay afloat) and in breaking open the escape hatch in the bottom of the boat, while Skippers Riou and Le Cléac’h came up with a plan: They would take turns circling the boat so they could rescue Skipper Le Cam when he broke through.

When at last he did, Skipper Riou, sailing the PRB, tried to throw him a rope. Three times it missed. Skipper Le Cam clung to the rudder for 15 minutes while Skipper Riou battled the seas to get closer. He succeeded and finally was able to reach his stranded friend with a rope, which he used to tow him to safety. Unfortunately, to get close enough to get the rope to Skipper Le Cam, the PRB came just a bit too close to the capsized boat and was damaged by it. Everyone is safe, though, and Skipper Riou and Skipper Le Cam are aboard the PRB and sailing toward Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the successful rescue. We’re so glad you’re all okay. To the rest of the sailors at sea (and especially to Skipper Wilson, who crossed the International Date Line to return to the Western Hemisphere yesterday), please be careful. We’re thinking of you.

Albatross are sea birds — and some of the largest fliers in the world. Most of them are really awkward on land, so they spend most of their time gliding in the air or floating on the water of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans. (Only three species of albatross live north of the equator.) Because they are always in the air and because of their large wingspan, albatross cover a lot of territory. Some have even been tracked flying up to 550 miles in a single day!

In addition to flying and floating, albatross also hunt squid and schools of fish for food. Because they spend all their time at sea, they drink salt water (which would kill many other mammals!). Albatross have a special type of beak called a “tube nose.” Inside either side of their bill, the birds have long tubes, their nostrils, which help to filter the salt out of the water. The salt then drips back out, which can make an albatross look like it’s crying. Their long nostrils also give them a very good sense of smell, which helps them with their hunting.

Once they leave their nest as young birds, some don’t return to land for up to ten years, when they land to mate and bear young. Albatross tend to mate for life and lay a single egg in a season. Young albatross can take 4-10 months to leave the nest, which is a long time in the bird world.

There are 20 species of albatross, and 19 of them are threatened. While years ago they were prized for their feathers, today it is more the problems of pollution and commercial fishing that harm the birds. When not threatened by manmade problems, albatross can live a long time — some more than 50 years.

Sailors in the olden days considered albatross good luck when they followed a boat, because their presence meant that there was a good wind. So, it’s timely that they have arrived to help Skipper Wilson say farewell to 2008 and to welcome the new year.

You can read Skipper Wilson’s most recent log here.