Tuesday, 1 January First day of the year, welcome in 2008! This morning on the ship, the eyes were a little bit swollen, the features looked drawn, movements a were little bit slower than usually… Yes, on the Polarstern, as beautiful as the party might be (and it was!), the respite is short and the scientific work doesn’t wait very long. So, at 10 o’clock this morning precisely, the scientific activities started again. As far as I am concerned, I am lucky: the foraminifera, microscopic marine protists affectionately called “forams”, allowed me to sleep a little lo...

Written 2 Jan 2008 3730 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: -29 to -38 °C Now, meteorological data from the Pole of Inaccessibility is sent via the Argos satellite system and will be available on the internet soon. This is the second Automatic Weather Station that we have installed for the University of Utrecht at this traverse. Also, drilling of the third 90 meter core is well underway. The drilling team passed 40 meters depth last night. We have been communicating with at Chilean traverse team, currently at the South Pole and heading towards the Pole of Inaccessibil...

The 3rd International Conference on Polar and Alpine Microbiology will be held in Banff, Alberta, Canada from May 11 - May 15, 2008. The meeting sessions and official accommodation will be at The Banff Centre. Register for the conference will be via the Banff Centre Information on the conference program, travel and other activities are available on the conference web site Abstracts should be submitted through the conference web site. We hope you will be able...

Tuesday 1st January 2008 The day is overcast and sleety. Winds are at 40 knots, gusting to 50 and snow whips across the bridge windows. The ship is hove to, riding out the weather and the decks have been closed since 0900. Post party it’s a quiet morning. I have a lesson in marine geology. There’s a revolution going on in this field. We now have the tools to map the entire seafloor in the way that Geographic Information Systems have mapped the land. This is Dr Rob Beaman’s area. To show why this matters, he constructs a computer map of Voyage 3’s ocean section. Prior to the voyage he gathered data to construct maps of the ocean around Antarctica. Tables of geographic information, such as latitude, longitude and depths from the ...

Sunday, 30 December Lecture room, 10 a.m. “Can you deploy the corer a bit faster?” – “Sure, we try! One point five down is ok.” Time is in short supply, we are nearly at the northernmost point of our western transect at 62°S. To make good use of the workfree period on New Year’s Eve, we would like to steam eastwards during that time. That was a few days ago. The urgent requests of the expedition leader have worked wonders in the meantime. At the end of today, we are several hours ahead of schedule. The switching between the different plankton nets is running like clockwork, and w...

Monday 31st December The Mertz has vanished in cloud and snow storm and we can feel the motion of the sea again. The decision to sample the additional site close to the glacier has been rewarded, as Martin reports: ‘The scientific highlight of this site was the discovery on the high definition photographs of highly pigmented patches on the sediment surface. The colour is very like the patches of photosynthetic microorganisms found on sediments in shallower places but at this depth (1300 m) no light penetrates and so photosynthesis is not possible. The most likely explanation is that they are caused by organic material from the upper waters that has sunk to the bottom fast enough to retain photosynthetic pigments. This explanation is consistent...

Written 1 Jan 2008 3730 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: -31 to -39 °C In the morning we reached the Pole of Inaccessibility, a milestone of our traverse. We are at the last long science stop, at the highest point of the route and have passed two third of the total distance. It is the least accessible point on the continent. But for us it also represents an important milestone being the third long science stop en route. We arrived at noon after a long night of driving and we have thus mostly been resting up today. Our camp is situated 4 km from the ...

Written 31 Dec 2007 3730 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 30 to - 38 °C The kilometers we logged today, the last day of 2007, brought us near to the Pole of Inaccessibility, which is the place on the Antarctic continent that is farthest from any coast. As 2007 came to a close, we reminisced about our journey, which started a month and a half ago from the Norwegian Troll Station near the coast of Dronning Maud Land. On this traverse so far we have drilled three deep ice cores and many shallow ice cores, in search of clues to our changing climate. We have worked toge...

The IPY exhibit at the Exhibition on Earth observations during the Ministerial Summit of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) 27-30 Nov 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa was well attended by ministers and visitors. Dr Pierre Cilliers from the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory and Mr Michael Nxumalo, professional officer of the Souith African IPY office at the National Research Foundation set up and attended to the stand on behalf of the International IPY office. The stand also featured several posters on topics related to the South African IPY programme. The themes of the posters were among others "The Hermanus Magnetic Observatory, Contributions to Global Observations of the Earth's Geomagnetic Field", "The Hermanus Magnetic Observatory, Space Weather Observation for disast...

The Swedish part of the Japanese-Swedish Antarctic Expedition, JASE: Report no 14 The Japanese traverse group left on December 30 for their journey towards Syowa station. The Swedish group will take off at January 1. During the stay here we have had social exchange and performed maintenance of vehicles, snow studies and radar, GPS and radiometer studies at the site of a subglacial lake. During this stay we have also had an exchange of scientists. Two Swedes are now joining the Japanese expedition and we now have two Japanese members in our team. The temperature has now dropped somewhat and varies on a daily basis between -25 and -35 degrees C. The annual mean temperature at this site is -55 degrees C, so winters must be tough here. Tomorrow we h...