Wednesday, 9 January Besides all the spectacular events of any journey to the Antarctic, there is the everyday life of “normal” working days even on a research vessel. As was already mentioned in previous logbook entries, I belong to the benthos team. Which means, I deal with animals restricted to the sea floor. To be more precise, I am a specialist for deep-sea bristle worms (relations of the lugworm), and I am also familiar with deep-sea isopods. When I talk about these animals to non-benthologists, my enthusiasm is seldomly shared by them. However, these two groups not only constitute more than 50% ...

Monday, 7 January Finally the conditions are perfect for a game of Boccia! There is only a soft breeze, and we are in open water surrounded by a broad band of sea ice which keeps the swell from the open ocean from hitting us. The Polarstern is fairly stable in the water, so we started our boccia game at 6 a.m. We play with four copper balls, the smallest of which is about as big as a hazelnut, and the largest the size of a tomato. Now in our game the goal is not to bring the balls together as closely as possible, but rather to get them into a target area under the ship. This area, 15 m under th...

Sunday, 6 January If it weren’t for the fact that the Christmas tree has disappeared from the messroom, we would not notice at all that today is Epiphany. The CTD just came back to the surface with 23 bottles of newly collected seawater (actually, it was supposed to be 24 bottles, but now and again number 20 is somewhat less than reliable...). The water samples will keep Craig busy for about nine hours. He and I take turns at the instruments to measure CO2 and alkalinity (a parameter to describe the difference between negative and positive ions in seawater). I will not have to worry about the new samples because my shift is from Midnight until noon, so now it’s my time off! Typically we get new water samples three or four times a day, and as the water does not only conta...

Tuesday, 8 January My alarm clock rings at seven, like almost every morning, and before I get up I try to guess whether we are standing or travelling, as I do almost every morning. Did the krill people finish the calibration of the echosounder? Yesterday afternoon it still seemed like a very big task... But no, a glimpse out of the window tells me that we are quietly sailing through the polynya which surrounds the ship as calm as a little mill pond. The shelf ice edge is shimmering magically in the distance even under the overcast sky. During the morning preparations start to accommodate the 33...

Sunday, 6 January If it weren’t for the fact that the Christmas tree has disappeared from the messroom, we would not notice at all that today is Epiphany. The CTD just came back to the surface with 23 bottles of newly collected seawater (actually, it was supposed to be 24 bottles, but now and again number 20 is somewhat less than reliable...). The water samples will keep Craig busy for about nine hours. He and I take turns at the instruments to measure CO2 and alkalinity (a parameter to describe the difference between negative and positive ions in seawater). I will not have to worry about the new samples because my shift is from Midnight until noon, so now it’s my time off! Typically we get new water samples three or four times a day, and as the water does not only conta...

Saturday, 5 January Yesterday I received an email with exciting news - Time Magazine had recognised Antarctic biodiversity research in its Top 10 scientific discoveries for 2007. At that moment, I was muddy and tired after working through the night with our team processing the animals from the Agassiz trawl. This news put a new perspective on the day! The discovery was reported in a Nature paper on biodiversity and biogeography of the Southern Ocean deep sea published in May 2007 by a team of 21 biologists. Right now, four of them are here at sea on RV Polarstern: Angelika Brandt (lead author), Brigitte Ebbe (polychaetes), Saskia Brix (isopods and molecular biology) and Dorte Janussen (sponges). They come from the University of Hamburg and the Senckenberg Inst...

Friday, 4 January Is today yesterday or already tomorrow? Hard to tell sometimes. It is daytime, isn’t it? Anyway, some time in the evening the first box corer brought a nice piece of sea floor onto the deck. A quarter of a square meter of a sandy something garnished with a few brittle stars. Could be from any place, but isn’t: in front of us is the first sea-floor sample from the plateau below the summit of Maud Rise, a solitary mound rising some 3,000 m from the Weddell abyssal plain. Still 2,000 m below the surface. An island in the vastness of the deep, so-to- speak. And possibly an oasis of life? The sand turns out to be a foraminiferan graveyard. Foraminiferans are single-celled animals with hard shells which can accumulate to thick sediment layers. And in it there...

Thursday, 3 January In between a lot of research on board of the R.V. Polarstern which is focussed on very small animals like nematodes, amphipods and all kinds of (epi) benthic and planktonic life there is the group of the Dutch Wageningen Imares Institute located on the island of Texel which is also working with animals up to 50 tonnes in weight. These are whales which roam across the Southern Oceans and the Lazarev Sea where the R.V. Polarstern is now finding its way through the pack-ice. My name is Bram Feij, 37 years old and living on the island of Texel. But for about 2 months, together wi...

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...

Wednesday, 2 January Today is the second day of the year, it is cloudy and the sun isn’t shining. It’s really a grey day... But I don’t mind!! Because I’m on one of the best scientific ships, the Polarstern, making my dream reality. This is my first cruise... and for me everything is new and exciting. I meet people from different countries, discover the German customs, get used to life on the ship, and of course learn all I can about my work!! On board I’m working with the AgassizTrawl (AGT), a spectacular gear that provides samples for people that work with severa...