Tuesday January 8th, 2008 The whiteboard has a message: "Textas in reading room. Bags will go down this arvo.get cupping." Our international friends struggle with the cryptic advice, understanding neither 'arvo' nor 'textas', but cotton on when they see people decorating polystyrene cups with marking pens, stuffing them with paper towels and putting them in the net bag in the instrument room for dispatch to the abyss. Martin points out in the sitrep "CASO is a major multinational project for the International Polar Year involving scientists from 18 nations and is led by Australia." ...

Expedition Diary January 7, 2008 3500 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 24 to - 35 °C Never a uniform white blanket on the ice sheet, the character of the surface snow takes on many different forms. On the microscale, different crystal forms tell stories of their arrival to the surface as gently falling snow, wind-battered hard pack, or deposition as surface hoar through condensation events. To a traverse train of vehicles, generous amounts of gently-fallen snow represent “snow swamps” in which the treads sink and dig their way in, sometimes preventing a vehic...

Expedition Diary January 7, 2008 3500 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 24 to - 35 °C Never a uniform white blanket on the ice sheet, the character of the surface snow takes on many different forms. On the microscale, different crystal forms tell stories of their arrival to the surface as gently falling snow, wind-battered hard pack, or deposition as surface hoar through condensation events. To a traverse train of vehicles, generous amounts of gently-fallen snow represent “snow swamps” in which the treads sink and dig their way in, sometimes preventing a vehic...

January 7th 2008 I am halfway through my sojourn at sea and loving the perpetual motion of the ship. We are moving through an endless ocean in apparently endless circles. Not having a 'destination' is quite a nice thing. There is nothing on the horizon for 360 degrees. There's no ice to be seen, not even a growler. We are nearly 200nm north of Cape Denison on the Antarctic continent, adrift on a lonely sea. In fact we do have a purpose. This is the CASO (Climate of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean) sampling area. We must cover 31 stations in six days making CTD drops of around 3,600 metres to sample the cold, dense, Antarctic bottom water that drains from the Mertz Glacier. We are working over the skid marks on Rob's Gondwana map that show the seabed cany...

Sunday January 6th 2008 A clatter of footsteps in the stairwell is a sure signal to grab the camera and follow the mob. I raced up to C deck and saw a distant spouting. The CTD door was open to the sea so I ran back down to E deck. The CASO crew was riveted, watching a pair of humpbacks curving and spouting. They moved aft and we all jumped like fleas across the trawl deck to watch them coast and roll and play in a large drift close to the ship. I scurried up to the mezzanine, craning over the ship’s rail on the way, keeping them in sight, then made a dash up the stairwell and back onto C deck. Rail spac...

Sunday January 6th 2008 A clatter of footsteps in the stairwell is a sure signal to grab the camera and follow the mob. I raced up to C deck and saw a distant spouting. The CTD door was open to the sea so I ran back down to E deck. The CASO crew was riveted, watching a pair of humpbacks curving and spouting. They moved aft and we all jumped like fleas across the trawl deck to watch them coast and roll and play in a large drift close to the ship. I scurried up to the mezzanine, craning over the ship’s rail on the way, keeping them in sight, then made a dash up the stairwell and back onto C deck. Rail spac...

Written 6 January, 2008 3608 meters a.s.l. Maximum & Minimum temperatures: -29 to -35 °C Nearly all the way from Troll Station to the Pole of Inaccessibility we have driven along the crest of the continent. On this last leg towards the South Pole we have left the ridge and will gradually be descending to lower ground. This implies different patterns of winds and snow accumulation. We are starting to see the effects of this in the shape of rougher snow drifts and more sastrugi, so the ride is getting bumpier. However, there are positive side effects to this. One is that it is much easier for the drivers to...

Saturday January 5th 2008 Collecting the pole compass early today marked the completion of what we are calling the 'eastern' CEAMARC sampling stations. The central and northern reach of our grid marks out the 'Climate of Antarctica and Southern Ocean' (CASO) stations which we will work through over the coming week before another CEAMARC burst to the west off Dumont d'Urville on the continent. As well as CTD sampling, the CASO team is gathering information on the speed and direction of water currents from polynya moorings. These Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers are deployed some 135 miles from the South Magnetic Pole but still fall within its influence, so a special "pole compass" is used as a kind of calibrator to correct their data. ...

Friday January 4th 2008 Four stations were sampled overnight and it's the Big Polychaete that has people talking around the breakfast table, as Martin reports: 'This magnificent bristle-worm (a polynoid or scale-worm) was about 9 inches (230 mm) long, 3.5 inches (90 mm) across, with scales more than 1 inch (24 mm) in diameter and weighed about 330 gm - at just three to the kilo this is by far the largest polychaete seen by any of the benthic ecologists on board.To top it off, the bristle-worms arrived complete with their own over-size parasitic nematodes (up to 4 inches long) infesting the space under the scales.' ...

Written 4 Jan 2008 3730 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 28 to - 38 °C The work at the Pole of Inaccessibility has been running smoothly. The weather has been very favourable with almost no winds and reasonable temperatures. What remains now is to install thermistors in the 90 meter bore hole and to drill another 30 meter ice core. It turned out that the satellite transfer of data from the automatic weather station does not work properly. Fortunately, the weather station collects data locally. - Jan-Gunnar Photo: Expedition members enjoying a visit t...