Polar Passport

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

On Board Aurora Australis

Since leaving Davis more than a week ago we've settled into the rhythm of shipboard life again. The food is excellent (and there's too much of it), so most people are using the small gym to work off some energy and justify eating three meals a day. Between meals, people occupy themselves with work (almost everybody has a laptop computer), reading, writing, Scrabble, card games, movies, and guitar practise.

We're moving across time zones and have changed our clocks a couple of times already, so unless you make an effort to keep to a timetable it's easy to confuse your body clock. At almost any hour of the day or night you can find someone in the mess (that's the name for the restaurant on a ship) making tea and a snack, and reading through the bulletins of news from the outside world which are distributed every day.

There are a lot of stops on this trip home. First, we spent a day about 100 km south of Davis with the ship parked up against an iceberg while the three helicopters worked non-stop for four hours flying drums of fuel to the shore. There were 264 drums to move, and the Squirrel helicopters can carry 3 at a time, so there were a lot of trips. The fuel will be used next year for an IPY science project studying the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains - a huge mountain range in the middle of Antarctica that is completely buried by ice. The fuel will be used for aircraft fitted with gravity meters, magnetometers and ice radars that will look "through" the ice to reveal the mountains beneath.

Two days later we were at Mawson Station, Australia's first base in Antarctica. We had a lot of cargo to deliver there, but this year the fast ice around the station never broke away, so we had to stop at the edge of the ice, about 13 km away.

The ice didn't only affect us: it's also very important for the Adelie penguins that live close to Mawson. After their chicks hatch, the parents are busy making trips to the sea to collect food. When the ice doesn't break out, the trip is much longer, so they can't bring back as much food, and more of the chicks die. This year, about 2000 chicks hatched, but they all died. That's sad, but it happens every few years at almost all penguin rookeries. They are living in an extreme environment, and even a small change in ice conditions or food supply can mean the difference between life and death.

Because of the ice, all the cargo to and from Mawson was moved by the helicopters again. It was cold work for some of us on the ship, moving crates and boxes from the shipping containers on the foredeck to the helideck at the stern of the ship. But although the air was cold, the view was magnificent!

To the south, across the frozen sea, we could see the rocky peninsula where Mawson station is built, and clearly see the two tall wind turbines they use to generate electricity. Behind the station the ice sheet rises into the distance, and several jagged mountain ranges poke up through the ice - the ones I saw on the way from Davis to Enderby Land in January.

Beside us, at the ice edge, Emperor penguins gathered to swim in the wash of the propellor behind the ship. Sometimes they would slip out of the water and stand around on the ice - watching us while we watched them. As winter sets in and we head back north, the Emperor penguins will be returning to their colonies to start breeding, and brooding their eggs through the middle of winter.

Icebergs lined our northern horizon, and on calm days there would be a mirage, so they seemed to be floating up in the sky. You don't only get mirages in hot places - what you need is air of different temperatures. Here, most of the air was around -10°C, but there was a 'warm' layer at about -2°C just above the water, which bent the light rays back up and made the mirage.

Leaving Mawson a couple of days ago, we sailed across a large polynya, which is a region where thick sea ice never forms, because winds or currents keep moving it away.

After a few calm cold days, the sea was covered by a thin skin of new ice a few centimetres thick. I was odd to see the skua gulls sitting and walking on the surface of the sea, instead of swimming in it. The ship ploughs through unaffected, scattering spray and ice fragments away from the bow, which skitter and glide across the thin ice until the bow wave catches up and overwhelms them. The evening was clear and the sunset golden, so the ship's bridge was packed as we left the open water of the polynya and re-entered the pack ice. As we went to sleep that night the ship was weaving and shuddering as we forced a way through.

The last two days we've been steaming eastwards in open water, making good time towards Casey. We expect to arrive there on Thursday. In the meantime, there are always a few icebergs to look at, and often seabirds and whales too. So when I've had enough of books, movies, games and work I can always go and admire the view.

Heading east,

Dan

Ice in the sea

The last few days have been very exciting: the sea is full of ice!

South of 60 degrees latitude, the winds are weaker and the waves smaller, so our ride is much more comfortable. First, we started passing more and more icebergs, of all shapes and sizes. Some are like castles, others have beautiful curves, because they have rolled upside down and we can see the parts worn smooth by the sea. The biggest ones are flat on top, with cliffs about 20 m high. They are big chunks that have broken off floating glaciers around the coast of Antarctica.

The icebergs look enormous, but it's amazing to think that most of an iceberg is underneath the water: these ones are 100 or 200 m deep. We saw several big ones, around 2 km long, but they are dwarfed by the one I can see out my cabin window right now: it is 80 km long and 30 km wide! It stretches to the horizon, and is big enough to see in the satellite pictures we use to check the weather conditions (NOAA image, courtesy BoM and AAD).

As well as icebergs, there is a lot of sea ice. This forms every winter, when the sea freezes. In the summer, it breaks up into big flat pieces called 'floes', which drift around, and eventually melt. Where we are now, the floes are large, about 100 m across, and cover the ocean as far as we can see in all directions, with only small gaps of water in between.

The ice is really beautiful, but quite difficult for the ship to travel through: we twist and turn to follow the water leads between the ice floes, but sometimes we have to break through them too. The ship bangs and shakes when we hit a big piece, and the front of the ship pushes up on top of the ice. The weight of the ship cracks the ice, and we push through.

The best place to be when we are icebreaking is right on the front of the ship, where you can feel the shaking and hear the crashing of the ice, but if you want to stay warm, it's almost as good to be inside on the ship's bridge, with big windows looking in all directions.

It's got a bit colder: the air temperature is now about -2°C. The Sun is shining and there's only a light breeze, so it's quite comfortable.

The sea is also colder: it's now -1.5°C. Fresh water freezes at zero degrees, but because the sea is salty, it can get colder, and freezes at about -1.8°C. We've also been seeing some real antarctic animals in the ice: small black-and-white Adelie penguins, larger Emperor penguins, lots of crabeater seals, and a couple of whales, as well as several types of birds flying around the ship: various petrels, fulmars and skuas.

We're only about 200 km from Davis Station now, and will probably be close enough tomorrow to fly there by helicopter. Yesterday, we checked all our clothes and bags to make sure we aren't taking any foreign plants that might grow in Antarctica. It's not likely, but it's good to make sure, so we vacuum cleaned our bags, pockets and shoes.

Next blog entry will be from Davis Station, or maybe out in a field camp!

Almost there,

Dan