30th December 2007
I’m looking carefully at my map of sampling stations because today we come closest to the continent and the Mertz glacier. We have been tantalized by the awesome and mysterious continent but have not been closer than 9 or 10 nm.
Station 47 takes us to a depth of 1200m while at 49 we will sample at 180m, the shallowest site.There is great interest in what these different habitats will reveal.
At 47 I watch Rob guiding his deepwater video camera over the seabed. He explains how the shape of the sea-bed reflects the ancient drift of the Mertz glacier. It’s rough country down there, the gouged and scoured valleys are scattered with rock carried by the ice. Life in the abyss is sparser but how wonderful it is to observe this neighbourhood in action.
Martin reports: “The epibenthic sled is being modified slightly with the hope that we can use it to skim some animals from this boulder-strewn bottom… The glass sponges, so-called because they have skeletons (spicules) made of fine strands of silicate, looking exactly like glass-fibre, have been the outstanding feature of the last few sites”
News on the whiteboard sends a ripple of excitement around the ship. Station 49 has been replaced with 49a, taking us further east and even closer to the glacier. Plus an extra station has been added - “CTD Mertz” which brings us to within 400m of the ice edge. This means hours of hugging the coast and a chance to see the striations of the icy cliff and into its glowing blue fissures and caves.
A quiet fell on the ship as we motored directly towards the glacier. People came onto the decks. The sun shone brilliantly in another blue sky and the horizon was filled for 180 degrees by a massive ice cliff 40 metres high, shearing up from the sea and stretching eighty nautical miles in a long tongue. Just ice. The guess is around 400 metres thick because that corresponds with the depth of the sea-bed scours which follow the glacier’s ancient course over other areas we have been sampling. Under the Mertz there is 1000m of water but at land and the farthest edge north it is lodged on the sea floor, forming a kind of massive ice bridge.
The Aurora ticked along beside it, its awesome majesty compelling everyone to stay and stare until eyes ached and faces burned in the all-day Antarctic sun.
Margot Foster is a journalist currently on board the Australian Aurora Australis, an Australian research vessel currently participating in the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML, IPY project 53). She works with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
