Thursday, 24 January and Friday, 25 January The computers on board are working overtime. The tasks are to prepare posters and presentations for the reception on 5 February and to start with the cruise report. What can we report about the things we wanted to find out? Not too much. We all have had to limit our research activities a lot, and we have done so in the spirit of community. Now the shadow of an upcoming storm is hovering over everything. It is going to unfold its force exactly during the days that we wanted to do the only station revisit still left in the proramme, trying to find out wheth...

28th January 2008 We’ve been back in McMurdo now a week. Unfortunately we’ve not been anywhere near an aircraft. It’s the end of the season here in town, and things are supposed to be winding down. The weather, which has been marginal, to put it mildly, all season, has not really improved much and our project is getting pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back. The crash that our team was involved in earlier in the season is eating up a lot of resources, with a camp and mechanics out in Marie Byrd Land feverishly trying to put humpty-dumpty, sorry – I mean the Basler, back together again before the weather changes for the worse. Unfortunately that’s sucking up resources here, which means that our weather window is moving back and back into the autumn. ...

Saturday 26th January 2008 Just look at the latitude! We will be back in Australian waters tonight and arriving at the Hobart wharf early tomorrow morning. Everyone’s focus is on home now and those who can have been losing themselves in movies or sleep, willing the hours to pass. Emails from managers are flying around the ship thick and fast. Quarantine paperwork is being finalized, the labs are packed up and cleaned, project reports are being written. The day is mapped out for us. We have our Australia day morning tea at 1000. After lunch our last shipboard seminar will be a screening of a DVD of Jeff Hoffman’s work on the Sorcerer 2 yacht voyage with Craig Venter. (Jeff’s pitch is the great travel footage, but I know there’s also fanta...

Elevation: Close to sea level Maximum and Minimum temperatures: -55 °C (estimate at midnight during the flight from McMurdo to Christchurch) & -2 °C It was time to leave the continent. Our C-17 flight was delayed several times so we were mostly stand-by in McMurdo from lunch and onwards. The morning was used for final interviews with PolarPalooza. At 6 p.m. the transport to the Pegasus airfield took place. At 9.30 p.m. we were airborne and at around 2.30 a.m. on the 26th January we landed smoothly in Christchurch. For the first time in three months it was dark outside! This will be the last diary...

Friday 25th January 2008 John, Kim, Ashley and Lyn are at the front line when it comes to safety at sea. They have ensured that we all added an extra layer of fat to keep us safe in the event that we found ourselves exposed to the extreme Antarctic elements for any length of time. We were warned at the outset that the first precaution before heading outside is to have a hot meal, the second being to dress appropriately for the cold. I have been meticulous in following this advice and feel confident that if I was stranded outside for any length of time I’d do nearly as well as an elephant seal....

Elevation: Close to sea level Maximum and Minimum temperatures: -6 °C & -2 °C In the morning we had a teleconference with NSF in Washington D.C. to prepare next year’s season. Further, we gave a brief summary of our experiences from this year’s season. In the afternoon we had a guided tour to New Zealand’s Scott Base (see photo). It was with excitement we visited Sir Edmund Hillary’s room from when the station was built, i.e. during IGY in 1957. Thereafter, PolarPalooza showed us the podcasts they have prepared from our expedition so far. The quality was excellent; now we really hope they can obtain acc...

Thursday 24th January While some on the ship have got what John in the galley called 'the channels' and slipped into a kind of lethargy and listlessness associated with nearing home, the oceanography lab is pumping. Some background first: Three quarters of the Earth's surface is water but it's this vast frontier of ocean that we are only just starting to discover. The future, it seems, is microbiology. As recently as 2004 a report in Science astounded the scientific community. It described the microbial diversity in water samples taken in the Sargasso Sea by the Venter Institute. This sea was selected specifically because of its low nutrient levels but remarkably, of the 1.045 billion base pairs sequenced from the water sample...

Wednesday 23rd January 2008 We are crossing the mid-ocean South-east Indian Ridge. An email from Rob bobbed up yesterday inviting me to check out his maps which show how the great plates dividing the planet affect the ocean floor. At around -54 South and 143 East you can see the suture line that separates the great Australia plate from the Antarctic plate. I can see on the echo sounder where we have been traveling. It's a very flat and deep area to around 5000m. This is Old Earth. Suddenly bumpy hills several hundred metres high start to appear. The ground continues to be rough and then the clear line of the axis shows where the earth has literally torn apart. This is where we cross into New Earth, a landscape of undersea volcanoes, basalt and larva, which ha...

Wednesday, 23 January This is what I always thought the Antarctic summer should be like: the sun is shining out of a blue sky, the unfathomable water has a beautiful blue colour, and we are surrounded by icebergs displaying a high variety of shapes. So I am standing on the work deck at 7 o’clock in the morning, waiting for my turn. The CTD with 24 water bottles, each closed at a different depth all the way down to the seafloor which here lies more than 5,000 m below the surface, is a sampling device in high demand among oceanographers and biologists. I personally take samp...

Monday, 21 January The mood on the ship is changing. In the stairwell there are sheets of paper on the walls with a red page-size exclamation mark which are very familiar to those who have been on Polarstern before. They announce deadlines for packing and delivering the packing and freight lists. Oh, yes, the packing lists, now where did I put them... After 54 days at sea, some realities of life have vanished into the background as we live in our own small world, despite emails and daily news from the internet. The gods of the weather have been kind to us, the Polarstern is swaying very ge...