Monday March 17th was a very happy day for the European Space Agency (ESA): the first of a new family of ESA satellites - called the Earth Explorers – successfully lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia, 800 km north of Moscow. The new satellite’s name is GOCE - Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer – although it has been dubbed « the Ferrari of the space », for its stylish shape that reminds you of a formula one car. Greeted by ESA General Director Jean-Jacques Dordain with the words «Go, GOCE, go!», GOCE-the-Ferrari-spacecraft sped away for a 24 months long...

Three new stamps featuring Antarctic landscapes have been issued by the Republic of San Marino on November 18th to celebrate the fourth International Polar Year. San Marino is one of the oldest republics in the world (it was created in 301 AD) as well as one of the smallest (61 Km2, with a population of 30,000). It is landlocked between the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Marche, in Italy. The Philatelic Bureau of the Republic of San Marino was created in 1981, but the republic issued the the first stamp back in 1877. The three IPY stamps were designed by Marco Mussoni, with photos taken by Lucia Simion, professional photograher and science writer specialized on Antarctica and the subantarctic. The three new stamps' dimensions are 30 x 40 mm; they feature Mount Melbo...

My name is Lucia Simion, I am a science writer and a photographer, specialized in the Antarctic. I love that continent because I always liked snow, it’s a magic element of nature, like wind, fire and ice. All these elements are to be found in Antarctica. But there is another reason too: As a child I used to live close by the home of Commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, explorer of the Antarctic as well as the Arctic. One year ago, in November 2007, I was deployed to the Ice to cover the ANDRILL SMS international project. ANDRILL stands for Antarctic Geological Drilling and SMS for Southern McMurdo Sound; the project has dr...

By Lucia Simion Far away from traffic jams, polluted cities and rat races, one thousand people are getting ready to live a fantastic adventure on the most remote continent of the world: They are the over-wintering population of Antarctica. Inhabiting some 35 different permanent stations scattered across a continent twice as large as Europe, they will be alone on the ice, where they will experience the polar night, the austral auroras, the blizzards, the solitude and the confinement. They will be more isolated than the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as it is very hard to be evacuated from Antarctica during the polar night. One of these stations is Concordia, where the overwintering began on February 1, 2008 for a crew of thirteen people fr...

He recalls that his passion for the extreme probably began when he first saw the snow, during a school holiday at New Zealand's Tongariro National Park, at the age of sixteen. He was a young teenager living in the countryside and he had never seen the magic of snow. Since that day, Sir Edmund Hillary has spent a great deal of his life amid snow and ice, blizzards and storms, high snowy peaks close to the sky and turbulent rivers flowing down to the sea. In May 1953 he was the first to reach the summit of Mt Everest – with Tenzing Norgay. Thanks to that success another great adventure would keep him close to snow and ice for almost two years: the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE), a joint-venture between Great Britain and New Zealand that aimed to cross Antarc...

Very few places on Earth are lucky enough to be nicknamed "Gateway to Antarctica". They can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Hobart in Tasmania; Ushuaia in Argentina; Punta Arenas, overlooking the Straight of Magellan in Chile; Cape Town in South Africa and of course Christchurch, in New Zealand. It is from these locations that intrepid explorers and navigators have set sail to the Great Unknown, in search of the Terra australis incognita and beyond, to the magnetic South Pole and to the geographical South Pole. In those times there were no satellite images to tell you how the path would look like. In Antarctica, no native people could give clues to the explorers, nor help them with their own experience of survival, as with the Eskimos in the Arctic. Among these few...

"Never give up your dreams". Jean-Louis Etienne — the French doctor and explorer — knows more than anyone what these words mean; for four years he has been involved with the Total Pole Airship project, which aims to fly a blimp over the Arctic ocean and the North Pole, measuring the thickness of the sea ice with an instrument designed by the Alfred-Wegener Institute. Last Friday, October 12, Jean-Louis Etienne could finally smile. The expedition blimp was inaugurated during a ceremony in Marseille — it was christened Total Pole Airship, after the sponsor Total. The blimp arrived in France from Russia (whe...