By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey The last few days we have been searching for suitable coring sitesand coring for the geologists for the BAS CACHE-PEP-G program. This focus of this program is to investigate the last 10, 000 years of Earth history and specifically how the Antarctic climate has interacted with the global climate. The program uses ice cores, lake sediments and marine sediments to build up this picture. Photo: Corethron criophilum, a diatom. On this cruise, the geologists are trying to find marine sediments that have built up over the last 10,000 years. Marine sediments are b...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Although the majority of the trawling is now completed for the biologists on board, the work has not stopped! There is still plenty of activity in the laboratories and computer rooms to process all of the samples. Steffi, Dave and Adrian have been spending a lot of time looking down their microscopes sorting the animals that were caught in the Epibenthic sledge (EBS). The animals caught in the EBS typically range in size from 7 mm to 70 cm, although it must be said that some of the largest animals we caught were also captured in the EBS, including a sea cucumber at least 50 cm long! We are lucky that we have a number of taxonomic experts on board to sort the animals. We have experts on polychaetes (Adri...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Tonight we did some trawling on one of the Marie Byrd sea mounts in an attempt to sample some corals for the geologists on board. The geologists were hoping to collect some corals to look at past carbon dioxide levels held within the coral structure. Deep sea corals had been previously discovered in the Amundsen sea region and initial analyses of them showed that some of them were alive during the last ice age! (between 12,000-24,000 years ago). The biologists were also interested in any other fauna that we could collect from there as very little is known about sea mount biology and so anything we would collect would be of interest. Trawling in potentially rocky conditions at depth is greatly increases ...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey I am a molecular phylogeneticist at Cambridge University (funded by a Lloyd’s Tercentenary Foundation Fellowship) and I am investigating the molecular evolutionary history of Antarctic and deep sea octopus. I am therefore on board to sample any octopus we catch in our trawls for later DNA sequencing and also to preserve them for later investigation and identification. Specifically I am using octopus as model organisms to test the hypothesis that the Antarctic has acted as a centre for evolutionary innovation and radiation and as a source of taxa that have invaded the deep sea. I am also interested in investigating how past glaciation in Antarctica has effected octopus speciation, and also at the effect of the Antarctic Circumpolar...

By Jan strugnell, British Antarctic Survey We have been incredibly lucky that the ice conditions have allowed us to enter Pine Island Bay, (in the Amundsen Sea) to carry out the BIOPEARL sampling programme as planned. In many previous years, Pine Island Bay has been inaccessible, due to a thick ice sheet, and so we are very fortunate that it is open at this time. Literally nothing is known of the benthic fauna of the Amundsen sea, south of latitude 66° south, because no one has sampled here previously. Therefore anything we find here is a new record of a species in this area! Phot...

By Dr James Smith, geologist on board James Clark Ross. The purpose of our visit to ‘Unnamed Island’ was to follow up to a trip made by one of our colleagues at BAS, Dr. Jo Johnson who visited the island in 2006. Jo, then on the German research ship RV Polarstern, was busy collecting rock samples from around Pine Island Bay to date the thinning history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet since its last glacial maximum (about 18,000 years ago). Photo: Adelie Penguins from the Un-named island in Pine Island Bay (Amundsen Sea). BAS This work forms part of the GRADES-QWAD programme at BAS, which i...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey We were incredibly lucky today to have a pod of Minke Whales accompany the ship as we made our way through the ice into the Amundsen Sea, on our approach to Pine Island Bay! Around 10 whales spent a few hours at the bow of the ship to the delight of the scientists and crew who were huddled at the bow together in the cold watching them. Some of the scientists and crew who have spent a lot of their working lives at sea said that they had never seen whales so close before! We were so incredibly close to the whales that as they came to the surface for air we could hear them breathe and even smell their fishy breath at times! ...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarcitc Survey Today was an exciting day for the biologists as we had our first day of trawling in the Bellingshausen Sea as part of the BAS core BIOPEARL project. We deployed the Agassiz trawl to sample the benthic marine communities and did 2 x 15 minute trawls at 1500 m depth, 3 x 15 minute trawls at 1000 m depth and 3 x 10 minute trawls at 500 m depth. The spirit of international collaboration does not just extend to the variety of different nations’ scientists on board, but no sooner than a tiny sea spider had been caught, was it photographed and sent to an expert taxonomist in Spain who was then able to confirm its identity to species level back to the ship in the same day. Meanwhile new photos of benthic species had already...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Four different scientists with very different research interests have been collecting samples of seawater from the water column using the CTD. The CTD is an instrument used for measuring a number of parameters from the water column (including Conductivity/salinity, Temperature and Depth) and can also be used for collecting water samples from a number of depths throughout the water column. For this weeks diary entry I had a chat to each of them about their science. National Oceanograpy Centre/University Southampton and BAS PhD student, Rachel Malinowska has been collecting water samples for her PhD using the CTD. Rachel is taking a depth transect from 10 depths (from as deep as 4500 m) from 6 sites around the Bellingha...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Before reaching Rothera Research Station (a British Antarctic Surveybase) on the Antarctic Peninsula we ran three short Agassiz trawls to collect live animals from a depth of 200 m for the marine biologists at Rothera. The two wintering marine biologists at Rothera, Alison Masseyand Birgit Obermuller, are studying seasonal physiology of a number ofanimals. They are investigating how much oxygen they use and how thischanges with temperature as well as changes in their seasonal processingof food. We still know very little about how animals cope with the most of strikingly seasonal of environments. ...