Polar Passport

A Study Tour to Antarctica

I've been guiding voyages in the Arctic and Antarctic for a few years now, and the passengers are (almost) always great people. They love the outdoors, are curious and willing to learn anything they can about whatever new environment they find themselves in, and often have a particular passion to feed: history, birdwatching, or sailing, for example. But this next trip will be a new experience for me.

I'm sailing this afternoon on the 'Professor Molchanov', completely chartered by a study tour from Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, where I first studied geology and made my first trip to Antarctica. The university has been doing research in Antarctica for 50 years, mostly coordinated by the Antarctic Research Centre.

In 2007 there was a reunion of old expeditioners, and now a couple of us are acting as guides to share our experience with a group of interested people from the wider university community. The ARC has a strong history of research into the history of climate change in Antarctica, most recently leading drilling studies to study the history of the ice sheet, such as the ANDRILL programme.

The 46 participants are well prepared, having had a series of lectures on antarctic history, science, and law before leaving Wellington. Now we're sailing off to see the real thing, and they're hungry for information to enrich their own experiences! As with the last trip, I expect to be too busy working to write blog reports, but a journalist on board, Stephanie Gray, will be maintaining her own Slice of Ice.

Who knows exactly what we'll see? You can never be sure, making a trip into a total wilderness. But I'm sure it will be both interesting and fun!

ciao from Ushuaia,

Dan

Back to the South

The field work in New Guinea went well, and after a holiday in Tasmania I am now doing what I like best: sailing to Antarctica.

I'm not involved in the International Polar Year activities with the Australian Antarctic Division in the 2007-08 summer. Our solar-powered remote GPS stations, which I installed and maintained last summer, woke from their hibernation in the spring when the sun returned, and have been sending back data by satellite.

While they are doing their work in Australian Antarctic Territory, I have taken a few weeks leave from my job and flown to Argentina. From Ushuaia, the world's southermost city I will sail with the beautiful Barque Europa, a sail training vessel which makes voyages of three weeks to the Antarctic Peninsula.

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There are 16 crew, and 40 trainees who learn to sail an old-fashioned square-rigged ship while seeing some of Antarctica's most spectacular scenery. I am working as one of the three guides on board, who arrange the programme, ensure the safety of the passengers, and keep them informed about the wildlife, science and history in the places we visit.

Ushuaia is a beautiful city at the southern end of the island of Tierra del Fuego. A safe harbour on the Beagle Channel (named for Charles Darwin's ship, which spent a long time in this area in the 1830's) is surrounded by dense forest and steep mountains, snowy even in the middle of summer. About 30 000 tourists will visit Antarctica this summer, and most of them will be on board ships leaving from Ushuaia.

This evening there is no wind, but after we leave tomorrow we will sail for four days across the Drake Passage, south of Cape Horn, where the wind and waves can be among the wildest in all the world's oceans.

We will spend two weeks sailing on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. This land extends further north than the rest of the continent, and attracts a rich array of wildlife - many species of penguins, seals, whales and seabirds come here in the summer to breed or feed. Over recent decades it has also warmed faster than almost anywhere on the planet, which is already having noticeable effects on the glaciers, plants and animals.

Email from the ship is possible by short-wave radio or satellite, but I think I will be too busy working to update this blog in the next three weeks. If you want to know what we are doing, you can read the regular “log book” reports on the ship's own website. When I return I will update this site with my own impressions, and answer any questions that have been posted.

Happy New International Polar Year,

Dan

The Sepik River

After working for a week close to the coast around Wewak, we moved further inland.

With my colleague Sylvester, from the University of Technology in Lae, we set up a station in Maprik, an agricultural town in the foothills of the coastal ranges, on the edge of the Sepik plain. Important crops here are vanilla and cocoa, but the markets are not very good: a few years ago when the crops in Madagascar were failing, vanilla was bought here for 850 Kina per kilogram, and the town grew rich (one PNG Kina is currently about 40 Australian cents). Now it’s down below 5 Kina, and many plantations are being neglected.

I wanted to get to Ambunti, on the Sepik River, which has no road access. I had planned to get a small plane, operated by the Mission Aviation Fellowship, who support hundreds of small villages in PNG that have a grass airstrip and no other access apart from several days walk on a jungle track. But MAF were having their annual pilots’ meeting last week, so I left Sylvester in Maprik, and took a PMV truck down the dusty road to Pagwi, on the bank of the Sepik River. There I found a motor canoe going the 50 km upstream to Ambunti, and joined a few other people going the same way.

The motor canoe is a dugout canoe, made from a single tree trunk, like traditional river canoes here. But unlike those, which are double-ended, it has a transom at the stern where an outboard motor if mounted. It’s about 10 m long, about 1 m wide at the stern and tapering forwards, and the hull A 30 hp motor took 12 passengers and cargo upstream at 20 km/h, so the journey took about 2.5 hours, and I arrived at dusk in Ambunti.

The Sepik is the largest river in PNG. After it leaves the mountains, it winds slowly more than 1100 km to the sea. It’s what earth scientists call a ‘meandering river’. It is so ‘flat’ that gravity doesn’t pull it straight downhill. Instead it winds from side to side in large bends, which grow wider and wider until they are cut off, leaving the old channel as a ‘ox-bow’ lake on the plain beside the river. There are more than 1000 of these lakes alongside the river’s path.

There is very little development along the whole of the Sepik Rver. There is no mining or forestry activity and there are no major towns, so the river and the catchment are still in their natural condition.

After setting up my GPS equipment in Ambunti, I had time for a look around. At the top of the nearest hill, I visited a new telecommunications tower. It would be almost impossible to lay telephone cables through the jungle and swamp, so radio towers are the best solution. In a town with no road access and only a grass airstrip, fuel is expensive, so this transmitter is solar powered. My GPS gear uses one portable 35 watt panel to charge that batteries, so I was very impressed by 144 panels, each producing 75 watts!

At the end of my stay in Ambunti, MAF were flying again, and a single-engine Cessna 206 took me back to Wewak in 45 minutes, compared to the outward journey of about 5 hours in trucks and 2.5 hours in a canoe.

lukim yu,

dan

A Day in a PMV

It's been a busy few days.

On Friday we installed one GPS receiver at Wewak airport, and arranged batteries and transport for the other sites.

The equipment here is quite similar to what we were installing in Antarctica: a GPS receiver and antenna, powered by batteries and a solar panel. But here the antenna is on a tripod, not bolted to the ground like in Antarctica, because it only has to stand a few days, and because we are measuring the horizontal movement of the earth, and not the vertical (it's hard to measure the height of a tripod accurately enough to measure vertical positions). And we don't need to transfer the data
by satellite here - we just download it from the receiver every day or two.

On Saturday we made a trip along the inland road east from Wewak about 120 km, to the town of Angoram, on the Sepik River. We installed two more sets of equipment on the way, in Angoram and the village of Tring, both on survey markers that have been measured several times in previous years. We leave the equipment in a small tent to shelter it from the Sun and rain, and ask the local people to take care of it until we come back again.

The sites are left to make measurements for four days, but today we went back to check them. When we don't have all the gear to carry (each site weighs about 80 kg in total), we don't need to have our own vehicle. I prefer to travel by PMV, or 'Private Motor Vehicle', which are the private transport services operating all over Papua New Guinea. They vary from small vans in the towns, to trucks in the countryside, and 4WD vehicles for the mountain areas with rough roads and river crossings. It's a good way to travel and talk with the local people, and see where they are going and what they're doing.

Today our PMV had bad luck, with several flat tyres to be changed and fixed along the way, but we checked both sites, which were operating normally. Due to the travel delays, we got back to Wewak after dark, but the apologetic driver dropped us at our door. And it was nice coming back through the hills at dusk - the road deserted compared to daytime, the smokey smell of cooking and the glow of small fires in the jungle across across the valley, at huts invisible in the darkness.

Better luck next time,

Dan

Svalbard

June 21 was the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere - midwinter, the shortest day of the year. At Antarctic stations, people celebrated the middle of their polar night: halfway to the welcome return of the Sun. In Canberra, it was a cold sunny winter day, and I was busy preparing to travel. Two days later, I was standing in the midnight sun in the high arctic: the islands of Svalbard far to the north of Norway. Here, the Sun won't set below the horizon until September.

I've come to the arctic for two reasons: in August, I'll be doing some geology field work in southern Greenland, a joint project between Swedish and Australian scientists. But before that, I've taken some time away from university work. What does a polar scientist do with his holidays? You won't find me lying on a tropical beach! I'll spend five weeks leading small tourist groups around these arctic islands, working on an old sailing ship, the Noorderlicht.

Like writing this blog, taking tourists into the arctic is a way of sharing my enthusiasm for science and nature. And at the same time, I enjoy travelling in the wilderness on an old-fashioned sailing ship.

Svalbard is a fascinating archipelago; a group of islands about 300 km long, only 1000 km from the North Pole. Half of the land area is covered by glaciers, and in winter the islands are completely surrounded by frozen ocean. In summer, vast numbers of birds come to breed here, joining the polar bears, reindeer and arctic foxes which stay all winter. The plants and animals are wonderfully adapted for life in a cold climate.

There is also an interesting human history: after the islands were discovered in 1596, they were the site of the first commercial whaling. Between 1620 and 1800, almost all the whales in the north Atlantic were killed, for the oil in their their blubber. After the whales, people hunted the Arctic Fox and Polar Bears for their beautiful fur. And in the 20th century, there were attempts to mine gold, iron, marble, coal, and other minerals, almost all of which failed. It was also visited by many arctic explorers, including several attempts to reach the north pole.

Today, there is still some coal mining, but most people come to Svalbard to see wilderness and nature, relatively untouched by civilisation. We have just finished one ten-day sailing voyage, and leave tomorrow for another. In the next posting, I'll describe some of the things we see and do along the way.

From the far north,

Dan

How I first got to the pole

I studied geology at university, because I liked science and also being outdoors. After three years of university, I had the chance to spend a summer in Antarctica, helping another geologist and doing my own project too. I loved it!

That was seventeen years ago, and since then I've spent eight seasons working there on several different research projects, and with expeditions from several countries.

A few months ago, I started a new job at the Australian National University, in Canberra. They have been working on an Antarctic project since 1999, and this year I'll go south to do the 'field work' part of the research.

Dan