Photo Credit - AGAP team There were many times in the last two months where it seemed that the Antarctic Continent would win, keeping hidden the extensive landscape of subglacial lakes and mountains beneath the several kilometers of ice on Dome A. All the advance planning and negotiating with program leaders and logistics groups for enough days in the field to run the airborne geophysics were of little importance once we arrived on Antarctica. At this point we were negotiating with the continent herself, and we learned she can drive a hard bargain! The group at AGAP S camp had anticipated...

In order to move work teams to the AGAP camps we must move everyone through the South Pole in order to acclimatize to the high altitude. This has presented a bottleneck of sorts, and along with other delays is putting the project considerably behind schedule. With equipment calibrated and people antsy to move out of McMurdo the next focus is how to move people through the next short stop at South Pole. A spreadsheet has been made and people have been moved back and forth on the sheet in response to weather delays and changing shifting. For days people have had bags sorted and checked waiting...

Where to begin? I am buzzing.. just buzzing. What a Day,- and half the world hasn't even woken up yet! Today is our sixth International Polar Day, and we are focusing on People in the Polar Regions. Plans for the day have been very experimental, very grassroots, much in line with IPY.. but with that comes that great big unknowingness.... will anyone join in? Will anyone turn up? Last night...

Saturday 26th January 2008 Just look at the latitude! We will be back in Australian waters tonight and arriving at the Hobart wharf early tomorrow morning. Everyone’s focus is on home now and those who can have been losing themselves in movies or sleep, willing the hours to pass. Emails from managers are flying around the ship thick and fast. Quarantine paperwork is being finalized, the labs are packed up and cleaned, project reports are being written. The day is mapped out for us. We have our Australia day morning tea at 1000. After lunch our last shipboard seminar will be a screening of a DVD of Jeff Hoffman’s work on the Sorcerer 2 yacht voyage with Craig Venter. (Jeff’s pitch is the great travel footage, but I know there’s also fanta...

Friday 25th January 2008 John, Kim, Ashley and Lyn are at the front line when it comes to safety at sea. They have ensured that we all added an extra layer of fat to keep us safe in the event that we found ourselves exposed to the extreme Antarctic elements for any length of time. We were warned at the outset that the first precaution before heading outside is to have a hot meal, the second being to dress appropriately for the cold. I have been meticulous in following this advice and feel confident that if I was stranded outside for any length of time I’d do nearly as well as an elephant seal....

Thursday 24th January While some on the ship have got what John in the galley called 'the channels' and slipped into a kind of lethargy and listlessness associated with nearing home, the oceanography lab is pumping. Some background first: Three quarters of the Earth's surface is water but it's this vast frontier of ocean that we are only just starting to discover. The future, it seems, is microbiology. As recently as 2004 a report in Science astounded the scientific community. It described the microbial diversity in water samples taken in the Sargasso Sea by the Venter Institute. This sea was selected specifically because of its low nutrient levels but remarkably, of the 1.045 billion base pairs sequenced from the water sample...

Todays' Sitrep proclaims success. 'CEAMARC sampling officially finished at 8 minutes past midnight. Overall, 82 different sites were occupied during CEAMARC, with samples collected from at least 78 sites; well in excess of the 67 sites we had hoped for.' We are one of three ships working in this part of Antarctica collecting marine life for the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census (CEAMARC). Our focus is on the benthic organisms below 200 metres. We have been looking at biodiversity in a region never before investigated so comprehensively and can now offer another jigsaw piece of information to complete the larger Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML) picture. Our grand tally is 106 trawls and 114 grab or box-corer deployments. The CEA...

Because everything is going so well and we are on target with our sampling, a window of opportunity has opened. We are going to have lunch beside the giant iceberg while the crew in the Fast Rescue Craft (FRC) takes a small party to collect some special water samples. When they return we will have a group photo on the helideck. Looks good on paper. The berg has a name and a history. B-17A calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in April 2000 and appears to have become grounded here in 2006. It's 35 km long. Toby measured its height using the sextant and found it was 43 metres high. From the chair in my cabin the iceberg makes up a strip across the middle third of my porthole. Testing the waters around B-17A is Tank's extra project. He wants to find out if icebergs ar...

The oceanography lab next to the CTD room is a maze of plumbing linking test tubes, flasks, computer screens and electronic devices. It's heart, which never stop beating, is the 'debubbleometer', which provides the lifeblood to many of the research projects underway on the voyage. Surface seawater drawn from beneath the ship is continuously measured by a range of instruments: a salinometer (measuring salt), a fluorometer (measuring fluorescence) a temperature probe and a CO2 monitor. There's a great deal of interest in CO2. People are taking samples to learn more about the relationship between CO2 found in the air and the ocean, which makes the debubbleometer (or air separator) a vital piece of equipment. It's crucial that only the CO2 in the water is measured an...

Anti whaling activities in the Southern Ocean headlined this morning's daily onboard newspaper "Australia Today". The paper comprises four A4 pages printed from News on Board services via TEAMtalk Satellite. Anything from our part of the world, the Southern Ocean, generates animated conversation. Two Sea Shepherd Conservation Society members from the ship the 'Steve Irwin' boarded the Japanese ship the Yushin Maru No 2 to deliver a letter to the captain advising him that he was illegally killing whales in the Southern Whale Sanctuary. They were promptly taken into custody on the ship, where they remain. Notions of law at sea were bandied about at lunch along with the practicalities of regulation, prosecution, anarchy and foolhardiness. Opinion was divided....