Submitted April 6 by By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey We’ve just spent the last few days at Rothera research station. Rothera is in a really pretty setting on Adelaide Island off the West Antarctic Peninsula. The base is covered in snow and is dotted with Adelie penguins, fur seals and a few elephant seals. The ice in the bay is really beautiful - lots of it is brilliant blue in colour and other pieces are completely transparent - and many of them are really spectacular shapes too. The icebergs are truly an astonishing variety of colours and shapes. We’ve mostly been working unloading cargo for Rothera and loading up lots of their cargo to take back to Stanley and the UK, including live animals for back at BAS and waste from the base to be dispos...

By Jan Strugnell This evening the geologists did their first bit of coring of the seabed as part of BAS’s QWAD (Quaternary Western Antarctic Glaciation) project. Geologists with a piece of the core. To determine the consistency of the sea floor they send sound waves from the ship to the seafloor using a piece of kit called TOPAS. The sound waves bounce back to the ship where they are received. Some of these sound waves penetrate the sediment and allow a profile to be built up of the sea floor. This allows the geolo...

By Jan Strugnell Today we set sail for Antarctica at 5pm. Everyone was very excited to finally get going and we all climbed up on the monkey deck as we sailed out from Stanley and started to cross the Drake Passage. There were some seals playing in the water and they were as interested in us as we were in them! It is pretty windy (about 35 knots) and so the ship is rocking a bit, but not too badly. I've managed to avoid seasickness, but have been quite sleepy (a symptom of sea sickness) and so have been sleeping very well despite the rocking. Today we have been getting ready for trawling, which will start in a few days time. Everyone is pretty excited to see what we will catch as very little trawling has been done in this area and there wil...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Today we all joined the RRS James Clark Ross (JCR) at Port Stanley, Falkland Islands, to get ready for our cruise! The JCR is almost 100m long and seems enormous when it is docked at Stanley. The hull is painted bright red and the words ‘James Clark Ross’ are written in large white letters at the front. The JCR was named after Admiral Sir James Clark Ross, R.N. (1800-1862) who discovered the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. During 1840-43 he also made three voyages to Antarctica in an attempt to reach the South Magnetic Pole, and to undertake a range of scientific studies of the region. The JCR can hold 80 people, and for our cruise we have 24 sc...