30th December 2007 I’m looking carefully at my map of sampling stations because today we come closest to the continent and the Mertz glacier. We have been tantalized by the awesome and mysterious continent but have not been closer than 9 or 10 nm. Station 47 takes us to a depth of 1200m while at 49 we will sample at 180m, the shallowest site.There is great interest in what these different habitats will reveal. At 47 I watch Rob guiding his deepwater video camera over the seabed. He explains how the shape of the sea-bed reflects the ancient drift of the Mertz glacier. It’s rough country down there, the gouged and scoured valleys are scattered with rock carried by the ice. Life in the abyss is sparser but how wonderful it is to observe this ne...

Saturday 29th December I worked through a CTD shift with Esmee. What an insight into the nature of research it offered; a water sample is much more than a bucket over the side. The CTD equipment stands as high as your shoulders and holds a 'rosette' of vertical cylinders within a metal frame. Each cylinder can be opened individually at a nominated depth. Data from several electronic devices bolted to the frame indicating salinity and fluorescence, and temperature and depth is assessed during the CTD's descent and the optimum sampling depths identified. A crew winches the equipment out the side hatch of the CTD room, while nearby in the instrument room the descent is guided down and back 'firing' the cylinders electronically to open and fil...

Friday 28th December All day we sail parallel to the continent. The day stayed sunny, an azure zenith reflecting the deep blue sea. The bergy bits dotting the water may have been tinnies out for a day's fishing, while the distant rise of the continent took on just enough of a hue for it to look at times like our own droughty, denuded landform. It feels like summer and with temperatures up to just below freezing, we are in shirtsleeves. Through binoculars we can see the rocks near the site of Mawson's hut.. For some reason it is satisfying to know that it was precisely this bit of the endless icy fringe that the explorer used as his base. We all peer out. "Where?" "There - just to the right of the tabular berg." There...

Written 29 Dec 2007 3689 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 32 to -38 °C Originally, seven countries made claims in Antarctica. These were Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and United Kingdom. One region of Antarctica has not been claimed by any nation. Argentina, Chile and United Kingdom have overlapping claims at the Antarctic Peninsula. Norway’s claim has an undefined border both in the south and in the north, spanning from 20 W to 45 E. Norway claimed Dronning Maud Land in January 1939 to protect its whaling interests. We left Dronning Maud Land today and will be in the Australian sector on the remaining time of the expedition. ...

Written 30 Dec 2007 3710 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 29 to -37 °C The ice in Antarctica holds two thirds of all freshwater in the World, including lakes, rivers, groundwater, glacier ice and moisture in the atmosphere. While the average ice thickness is around 2000 meters, the deepest ice has been measured to 4776 meters. Still, large parts of Antarctica are not well mapped with respect to ice thickness. This figure is important for estimating Antarctica’s role with respect to global sea level. Thus, on the traverse we use low-frequency radar to measure ice thickness alon...

Thursday, 27 December We are happy. Happy about our successful first step on the way of teasing secrets out of freshly caught deep-sea isopods from 3000 m depth. Which means, we have extracted DNA and after the first successful runs prepared extractions all day long, highly motivated. How we got there: After META, our epibenthic sledge, had brought the samples for us on deck, we divided the sample immediately by weight and live-sorted one-half in the cooling container at 0°C and preserved the other half in precooled alcohol at –20°C. While live sorting we got a first impression of the creatures that awaited us: bristle worms (Polychaeta), amphipods, several forams and, among many other taxa, our target group, the isopods. (By then we were exhausted but ha...

Thursday 27th December 2007 We can see icebergs again. There is sunshine and blue sky and the continent appears as a ribbon of white satin with a hem just starting to fray at the edges. The trawls are back in action at double time, completing three stations between midnight and lunchtime. The whiteboard is rotating through a series of ticks, and shortening the average time for each trawl. The Sitrep trumpets success: “We have so far caught and documented about 28 different species of fish from the trawl samples. The fish assemblage appears to be quite different from that found at the coastal sites off the French research station, Dumont D'Urville, about 40 Nm west southwest of our current position. Many of these fish are new records for the ...

Written 28 Dec 2007 3672 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 26 to -35 °C We have selected site 33 as a science stop for a chance to have a closer look at some unusual scenery. That there is immense variety in the details on this uniform, white plain does not mean that we do not appreciate the unusual. On this location the satellite images show a series of large-scale ripples in the snow, and we have been curious about their origin. High in expectations we stopped here last evening. Sure enough, some kilometers out west we could see a long shadow under the horizon. A slope! Two of us went out to have a closer look and take some radar profiles, and found the ripples to be several elongated rises, up to 5 kilometers long, runn...

Written 27 Dec 2007 3672 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 25 to -37 °C One of the more common questions we get is if we don't get tired of looking at the same unchanging scenery day after day, the same endless and level whiteness? No, we don't. One reason is that studying subtle differences in the snow surface is one of our reasons for being here in the first place. But there is more to the snow than just crystal size, permeability and density. The surface is carved and shaped by relentless and ever changing winds, and takes on an immense variet...

Written 27 Dec 2007 3672 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 25 to -37 °C One of the more common questions we get is if we don't get tired of looking at the same unchanging scenery day after day, the same endless and level whiteness? No, we don't. One reason is that studying subtle differences in the snow surface is one of our reasons for being here in the first place. But there is more to the snow than just crystal size, permeability and density. The surface is carved and shaped by relentless and ever changing winds, and takes on an immense variet...