It’s been a few days since anything really happened. There was the New Year, which was ushered in with much hilarity and scotch, and the helo-hanger party where the blue grass and rock bands from Ice Stock played again. And there was the visiting members of Congress that we had to talk to, and several fire drills, but conspicuously there wasn’t much work to be done. Weather has not been our friend, and we have had some logistical knock on effect from the plane crash that our group was involved in earlier in the season (Google "Antarctica Basler", to read-up on it, if you are so inclined). I’m writing this from the belly of a LC130 ski-equipped Hercules aircraft. Four of our team, myself, Brian Bonnet, Don Voigt and Thomas Nylen (yeah him again) are l...

Friday, 11 January Hi, it’s me again, Nils. I wish I could report about something special or exciting. But I can’t. From my point of view, nothing remarkable happened today here on board of Polarstern. We benthologists (investigators of the seafloor) do not have a station right now, which means we are not deploying any gear into the water. There is very little practical hands-on work to do. So I got up this morning, had breakfast and then went to my lab. My small room is not only my laboratory, but also my office. I do everything there. We investigate the communities on the sea floor wi...

Submitted Thursday, 10 January 8 January 2008, 5 p.m: We are sitting in our cabin, working at our computers. An announcement comes through the speakers, as it does many times a day. Usually people are called to the phone over the speakers, nothing special. But this time I recognise Bram’s voice immediately. Bram is one of our Dutch top predator specialists. His calling is to investigate birds, seals and whales. And normally Bram can be found in his outdoor cabin on the upper deck unless he is counting animals from the helicopter. So, now Bram is at the microphone and speaks the following short and snappy words: “Hi, this is Bram. There are Orcas in front of the ship. Killer Whales ahead!” “Hallo, hier spricht Bram. Orcas vor dem Schiff. Schwertwale vor...

Wednesday, 9 January Besides all the spectacular events of any journey to the Antarctic, there is the everyday life of “normal” working days even on a research vessel. As was already mentioned in previous logbook entries, I belong to the benthos team. Which means, I deal with animals restricted to the sea floor. To be more precise, I am a specialist for deep-sea bristle worms (relations of the lugworm), and I am also familiar with deep-sea isopods. When I talk about these animals to non-benthologists, my enthusiasm is seldomly shared by them. However, these two groups not only constitute more than 50% ...

Monday, 7 January Finally the conditions are perfect for a game of Boccia! There is only a soft breeze, and we are in open water surrounded by a broad band of sea ice which keeps the swell from the open ocean from hitting us. The Polarstern is fairly stable in the water, so we started our boccia game at 6 a.m. We play with four copper balls, the smallest of which is about as big as a hazelnut, and the largest the size of a tomato. Now in our game the goal is not to bring the balls together as closely as possible, but rather to get them into a target area under the ship. This area, 15 m under th...

Sunday, 6 January If it weren’t for the fact that the Christmas tree has disappeared from the messroom, we would not notice at all that today is Epiphany. The CTD just came back to the surface with 23 bottles of newly collected seawater (actually, it was supposed to be 24 bottles, but now and again number 20 is somewhat less than reliable...). The water samples will keep Craig busy for about nine hours. He and I take turns at the instruments to measure CO2 and alkalinity (a parameter to describe the difference between negative and positive ions in seawater). I will not have to worry about the new samples because my shift is from Midnight until noon, so now it’s my time off! Typically we get new water samples three or four times a day, and as the water does not only conta...

Tuesday, 8 January My alarm clock rings at seven, like almost every morning, and before I get up I try to guess whether we are standing or travelling, as I do almost every morning. Did the krill people finish the calibration of the echosounder? Yesterday afternoon it still seemed like a very big task... But no, a glimpse out of the window tells me that we are quietly sailing through the polynya which surrounds the ship as calm as a little mill pond. The shelf ice edge is shimmering magically in the distance even under the overcast sky. During the morning preparations start to accommodate the 33...

Sunday, 6 January If it weren’t for the fact that the Christmas tree has disappeared from the messroom, we would not notice at all that today is Epiphany. The CTD just came back to the surface with 23 bottles of newly collected seawater (actually, it was supposed to be 24 bottles, but now and again number 20 is somewhat less than reliable...). The water samples will keep Craig busy for about nine hours. He and I take turns at the instruments to measure CO2 and alkalinity (a parameter to describe the difference between negative and positive ions in seawater). I will not have to worry about the new samples because my shift is from Midnight until noon, so now it’s my time off! Typically we get new water samples three or four times a day, and as the water does not only conta...

Saturday, 5 January Yesterday I received an email with exciting news - Time Magazine had recognised Antarctic biodiversity research in its Top 10 scientific discoveries for 2007. At that moment, I was muddy and tired after working through the night with our team processing the animals from the Agassiz trawl. This news put a new perspective on the day! The discovery was reported in a Nature paper on biodiversity and biogeography of the Southern Ocean deep sea published in May 2007 by a team of 21 biologists. Right now, four of them are here at sea on RV Polarstern: Angelika Brandt (lead author), Brigitte Ebbe (polychaetes), Saskia Brix (isopods and molecular biology) and Dorte Janussen (sponges). They come from the University of Hamburg and the Senckenberg Inst...

Friday, 4 January Is today yesterday or already tomorrow? Hard to tell sometimes. It is daytime, isn’t it? Anyway, some time in the evening the first box corer brought a nice piece of sea floor onto the deck. A quarter of a square meter of a sandy something garnished with a few brittle stars. Could be from any place, but isn’t: in front of us is the first sea-floor sample from the plateau below the summit of Maud Rise, a solitary mound rising some 3,000 m from the Weddell abyssal plain. Still 2,000 m below the surface. An island in the vastness of the deep, so-to- speak. And possibly an oasis of life? The sand turns out to be a foraminiferan graveyard. Foraminiferans are single-celled animals with hard shells which can accumulate to thick sediment layers. And in it there...