This morning, just 62 years ago, Byrd and his Ice Party members, including Yours Truly, sailed up the Bay to the D.C. Navy Yard... So wrote Dr. Alton A. Lindsey to the author on May 10, 1997 — he had turned 90 only three days before. In the early years of the Great Depression, he was at Cornell University studying for his doctorate in biology, when he interrupted this pursuit to serve as the Vertebrate Zoologist on the Byrd Antarctic Expedition II (1933-35). While the interior of the continent was canvassed by dog sled, tractor and airplane, Lindsey studied penguins, seals and other animals on the coast. ...

6th February 2008 Last week was a blowout when it came to using the twin otters — until Thursday. Then we split into three teams. Two teams managed to get a seismic site and two GPS sites in on Thursday while Abel, Mitch and I went north on a helicopter to do a tie on Brimstone Peak on Friday night. As a night flight things got a bit colder and we were dodging low clouds all the way up through Victoria Land, passing flights of raised beaches on the way. We landed in a swirl of cloud and snow on the south side of Brimstone, and lugged our gear over to the tie. The tie will mean that old data from a ...

In our previous post we wrote that we’d enter the Agulhas Current, a western boundary current, about 4 hours out of Durban. Here are some interesting facts about western boundary currents, and the Agulhas in particular: They originate from equatorial waters flowing westward in response to easterly winds. Where westerly equatorial flow meets a continental shelf, the equatorial current turns and becomes a western boundary current, earning its name. In the Northern Hemisphere, they veer right, flowing north; in the Southern Hemisphere, they veer left, flowing south. Along the western edges of ocean basins, they move warm water from equatorial latitudes toward the poles. Their warm-water transport mitigates, to some extent, the incoming solar energy difference ...

February 3, 2008: After a couple of days in South Africa, we’re adjusting to our new time zone. All participants are here now, and we’re setting up our shipboard labs. The vessel has 4,000 square feet of lab space shared among several projects. View the ship’s webcam. Our thoughts are focused on our teamwork, and we are practicing our CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) operation, which involves deploying and retrieving a large array of water collection bottles mounted on a room-size framework. The sample bottles are set up to open at a specified depth. We’ll have to be prepared to do this under harsh conditions. A front is...

PRESS RELEASE New book from the Natural History Museum Surviving Antarctica by David N. Thomas Foreword by Ray Mears “In this fascinating book David Thomas takes us to Antarctica in a very personal way...” From foreword by Ray Mears. In a land of terrifying winds, fearful cold and icebergs the size of London, survival is everything. Journey to the end of the Earth and discover how life survives some of the most extreme conditions on the planet in Surviving Antarctica. This timely book provides an invaluable insight into the lives of all beings living and working in this hostile environment. Find out how scientists prepare for an expedition, how male Emperor penguins use their feet to protect their...

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...

29th January 2008 Wow, I know that last entry was a bit of moan-fest, but hey – as they say ‘round here, it’s a harsh continent. Today was better, actually quite a bit better. We managed to get a bunch of our gear out to the site at Lonewolf Nunatak (my vote for windiest place on the planet) and also built a new GPS station at an old NASA GPS site in the Kukri Hills just to the west of McMurdo. There’s nothing like a bit of productive work to lift morale a bit. It was a warm(ish) day with no wind on the mountain, just a little snow now and again. We finished the guts of the station pretty quickly, the drilling of the monument took a whole lot longer than expected though. Even so we ended up with a good install and had time for a bit of a walk. ...