Friday 11th January 2008 It is heresy to say this out loud when our key projects are dependent on being in open water - but I do enjoy being in the ice. We have shared the company of many large tabular bergs as well as some scattered bergy bits today. I have learned about the ship sinkers - the growlers, and correctly identified brash ice. I've seen pancake and fused and rafted, know a bummock from a hummock, and have seen frazzle, and grease and slush. It was Toby that pointed out an odd feature in the distant sea. He had his binoculars straight onto it. "It's black... sticking up out ...

Thursday 10th January 2008 I woke to the jolting and whoosh of the ship going through pack ice. We are working the CASO grid south again but the ice has forced a change, so we head westwards to skirt the pack and come in on a parallel that offers open sea. Icebergs and floes are the habitat of the beautiful, pure white Snow Petrel. It is hard to say which of the Antarctic birds is the most captivating but this small bird is a striking sight against sea or sky. The Cape Petrel (someone called it the 'magpie' of Antarctica) has careless splodges of black and white across its wings while...

Wednesday 9th January 2008 The emergency stations muster signal is seven long and one short sounding on bells and whistle. The ringing alarm today marked the passing of another week on the 'Aurora Australis'. These musters are held regularly so that everyone on the ship knows exactly where to go, how to get there and what to bring. On hearing the bells I scramble into the freezer suit, stow the first aid and field manuals in my pocket, lace the big Canadian Sorell boots, drag the lifejacket over my head and grab the red survival bag with warm clothing. Now at twice my normal size, I make a clumsy beeline for my muster station starboard side of the helideck. ...

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." ...

Contents: 1. St Petersburg SCAR/IASC Meeting, July 2008 2. Other impending conference deadlines 3. IPY Science Day: Changing Earth, March 12th 2007 4. APECS update 5. Videos on IPY.org Report no. 9, January 2008 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1. Joint SCAR/IASC Open Science Conference, 8-11 July 2008 Arctic and Antarctic Perspectives in the International Polar Year St Petersburg, Russia Information about this conference can be found at: http://www.scar-iasc-ipy2008.org/...

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...

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.' ...

Press Release from RV Polarstern 04.01.2008 Antarctic biodiversity research hits Time magazine’s “Top 10” scientific discoveries for 2007 Time Magazine has recognised Antarctic biodiversity research in its Top 10 scientific discoveries for 2007. The discovery was reported in the journal Nature in May 2007. The researchers found over 700 new species of organisms, including isopod crustaceans, carnivorous sponges and giant sea spiders on the seafloor of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, at bottom depths from 700 m to 6,000 m. The Nature paper on biodiversity and biogeography of the Southern Ocean deep sea was published by a team of 21 biologists. Right now, four of them are at sea off Antarctica on the German icebreaker RV Polarstern, conti...

Press Release from RV Polarstern 04.01.2008 Antarctic biodiversity research hits Time magazine’s “Top 10” scientific discoveries for 2007 Time Magazine has recognised Antarctic biodiversity research in its Top 10 scientific discoveries for 2007. The discovery was reported in the journal Nature in May 2007. The researchers found over 700 new species of organisms, including isopod crustaceans, carnivorous sponges and giant sea spiders on the seafloor of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, at bottom depths from 700 m to 6,000 m. The Nature paper on biodiversity and biogeography of the Southern Ocean deep sea was published by a team of 21 biologists. Right now, four of them are at sea off Antarctica on the German icebreaker RV Polarstern, conti...