February 1, 2008: Hello! We are graduate students from the Department of Oceanography at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. We are participants in the CLIVARI6S Repeat Hydrography Research Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation as one of the many activities of the International Polar Year (IPY). Professors Kevin Speer, William Landing, and Thorsten Dittmar, Post Doctoral Researcher Angie Milne, and Associate in Oceanography Peter Lazarevich will direct us, and we graduate students, Kati Gosnell, Katy Hill, Juliana D’Andrilli, Jun Dong, Ji-Young Paeng, and Austin Todd, are looking forward to a lot of invaluable hands-on experience. In Durban, South Africa, our port of departure, a fifth student, Loic Juillon, will join us, ...

January 30, 2008: Today the Tangaroa, New-Zealand's Antarctic research vessel, departed from Wellington and is heading due south to undertake the New Zealand IPY-CAML project. New Zealand is conducting a major biological survey of the Ross Sea, in the Antarctic, as part of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML) and International Polar Year (IPY). Forty four people including 24 scientists and 18 crew will take part in an eight-week voyage aboard RV Tangaroa from January 30th to mid March 2008. The data collected will provide baseline information from the Southern Ocean and Ross Sea environment that can be used to help monitor the effects of climate change in the Ross Sea region. With a biodiversity focus, the voyage will collect samples of...

Tuesday, 29 January On my way to breakfast I meet a smiling Svenja. “Looks like a benthic station today!” she exclaims and disappears in the stairwell to the labs. My heart skips a beat. How wonderful! We start around half past ten, I run a multicorer, the winch control room is humming with happy busy people, outside a bright blue sky spans over a sea of a like colour. The mighty foam-crested swells look beautiful in the sunlight and are not the least bit unnerving anymore. Together with Annika I lower the gear gently on the sea floor (actually, it is Otto at th...

Sunday, 27 January What an exciting day! Not only because of the storm, but especially because of the amphipod traps which we had almost given up on and left on the sea floor for two months. Today we got them back. This was due to the Captain´s great expertise, the board electrician´s genius and a good portion of luck, with the storm allowing us a little time before it pushed the wave heights over 7 metres. It was not easy. When we worked on our first station near the beginning of this voyage, the traps did not respond to the ship’s signals. At that time, they had been on the ground for some 12 hours. There was nothing we could do, time was in short supply, and we proceeded without retrieving the trap. We had planned from the very beginning to revisit thi...

Please consider presenting your research results at the Special Session described below on the ASLO Summer Meeting to take place at St. John\'s NewFounland, Canada, 8-13 June, 2008. ABSTRACT DEADLINE FEBRUARY 28, 2008 For more information: http://www.aslo.org/meetings/stjohns2008/ SS34. Impacts of Climate Warming on Polar Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems Organizers: Carlos M. Duarte, IMEDEA, CSIC-UIB, Mallorca, Spain, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; Susana Agust, IMEDEA, CSIC-UIB, Mallorca, Spain, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it The 4th International Polar Year (IPY, March 2007 - March 2009) is taking place at a time when climate warming is clearly affecting polar regions. Warming rates and the associated ice loss appears to be accelerating i...

Saturday, 26 January Hi, and good morning. Yaaawn... it’s me again, Nils. Yaaaawn... We had a long night here on board FS Polarstern, followed by a cold, wet and stormy morning. Now it is 11 a.m., I am frozen to the bones, my stomach is unhappy about the waves, and I have been on my feet for 27 hours. Well, about that long. I should tell the story from the beginning. We are on our way home, at a station at 52° southern latitude. Two months ago we have already been here once to take samples. Now, on our way back, we are taking samples again at the same spot to see if anything has change...

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...

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...

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....

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...