There's a changed mood on board now the frantic pace of the CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) circuit has abated. Work continues along with the CEAMARC trawls but it seems as if people have been absorbed by the ship.

I have a kind of holiday - a reading blitz, and have just finished reading about the explorer Hubert Wilkins.

Wilkins grew up on a property on the wrong side of the Goyder line in South Australia and saw the Federation drought of 1901 destroy the family farm. His remarkable exploration expeditions to both poles were driven by a certainty that understanding the climate of the polar regions was the key to predicting weather and that understanding climate could alleviate human suffering.

When he set off for Antarctica with Shackleton on the Quest in 1921 his hope was to find the best sites for a ring of meteorological stations around Antarctica and he regarded each expedition that followed as a chance to realize his dream of an international Bureau of Meteorology.

In 1931 he led a group of scientists to the North Pole in a submarine salvaged from the US Navy scrapheap. During the controversial and ill-fated voyage the Nautilus lost both rudder and diving planes before reaching its goal and none on board expected to return alive. Wilkins however was determined the voyage not be wasted and with oceanographer Dr Harald Sverdrup, took deep-sea observations from a pressurised diving chamber and laboratory 1500 metres below in the deep Arctic basin.

'They carefully lowered a metre long steel encased glass tube to the bottom to sample the undersea surface. Even in these ice covered seas they could watch its progress for hundreds of metres before it disappeared in to the velvet black depths below. These were the first records ever made of the deep polar waters and they would be just part of the rich mine of information collected on the voyage."

These measurements included salinity, currents, temperature and depth.



Twenty six years later this data was carried on another mission under the ice to the North Pole. The nuclear powered submarine USS Nautilus was proving marine dominance to the Soviet Union in1957 but lost the use of its compass while it was in the deep uncharted waters that the Wilkins submarine had worked in. It was Dr Sverdrup's old charts and tables fortuitously brought with him by the ice pilot that helped them find their true position and make their escape into open water.

In 2008 we are plugging through the Southern Ocean taking CTD samples from the deep and measuring the great Antarctic circumpolar current. This information will be added to an international data-base which is beginning to answer some of the pressing questions about climate.

On the horizon today we see L'Astrolabe, another science research vessel similarly plying the ocean near the French station Dumont d'Urville. Both ships are contributing to International Polar Year's 200 projects involving thousands of scientists from over 60 nations.

A century after he articulated his dream, Wilkins would be gratified.



"The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins - Australia's Unknown Hero." by Simon Nasht, published by Hodder 2005.

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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).