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. ...

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...

On March 12th, we celebrated the third International Polar Day --- Changing Earth in China. We chose three cities as our activity places, which are respectively located in North China, Middle China and South China. The Outreach Board and Poster In Beijing, capital of China, China Weather TV made a piece of news to introduce third polar day to Chinese audien...

On Tuesday, April 8, middle- and high-school students from Fairbanks, Shageluk and Wasilla, Alaska, will join with students from the other end of the globe, in Ushuaia, Argentina, in a live two-hour videoconference that is part of International Polar Year (IPY) activities at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The students will respond to a focus question about the important seasonal indicators in their area (such as budburst, leaves changing colors, or river/lake freeze-up or break-up), and how those indicators may be impacted by climate change. They will then discuss their answers with each other and with several arctic and antarctic scientists who will be on hand. This videoconference, similar to one that was held a year ago on the UAF campus, is part of an Internat...

Antarctica receives almost 50,000 visitors a year, if you count both those who disembark and those who sail or over fly the continent without landing. Is it now for the Antarctic Treaty or the governments involved to regulate Antarctic Tourism? Should we start talking about quotas and/or other measures to protect the most pristine region in the world? Photographer, cruise manager and guide Juan Kratzmaier summarizes a conference talk he gave on the topic at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in ...