Written Tuesday 18th December 2007 By Margot Foster I am fragile this morning and take a simple breakfast of toast and vegemite. I find that keeping busy is the key so I head for the bridge and a chat with the ship’s master. Captain Ian Moodie has made dozens of trips into the ice. These conditions, ‘pitching in a 3 metre swell’, as he notes in the ship log, are perfect. We are very lucky to have such ideal conditions for the deployment of moorings. The crew on the exposed trawl deck man-handle large and heavy equipment into place for deployment into the sea assisted by winches, ropes and chain. Perfect conditions indeed. But why do I have the queasy creep? I think it’s because we are sloshing around in the swell; at time...

Written Monday 17th December 2007 By Margot Foster A queasy start. How can it be? We are rolling around in the swell because we are dead slow in the water deploying a mooring. One vomit and two tablets is the scale of my disaster. I should never have boasted about my last trip and my capacity for kippers at breakfast and the joyrides on the bridge in heavy seas. Scientists excel at providing acronyms. Today’s included ADCP - the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler. Work on the device delayed our departure by three hours but it’s now tested in the water and providing data to depths of up to500-700m. I watched the laying out of the PULSE mooring - a trial surface mooring. Three kilometres of line hold data collecti...

Written Sunday 16th December 2007 By Margot Foster V3 finally left the Macquarie wharf in Hobart at 7:00pm after a delay of some hours. We are sailing along the south-east coast of Tasmania. I spent some time on the bridge watching the coast slip by and houses thin out into the bush. It's now nearly ten at night and this is the last glimpse of land until we hit the Antarctic continent, pretty well due south. This trip is all science and climate change. There are 52 on board involved in a range of projects. There are scientists from all over Australia, from France and the United States. The teams are setting up labs on the ship and running through gear because the first mooring deployment takes place tomorrow. I ha...

Written 22 Dec 2007 3670 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: - 28 to - 36 °C With general coordinates of the abandoned station determined by satellite images of the long-buried packed snow runway, today we stopped at Plateau Station. This was the site of a US science camp from 1966-69, but had not been occupied or visited by any US field team since then. No one could tell us what evidence of the abandoned station may still exist above the drifting snow. Immediately visible upon our arrival was the tall meteorological tower, still standing solidly above five smaller towers and the top of a flag mast. To our delight, on closer inspection, also immediately visible at snow level was the clear dome of the aurora tower and the top ...

22 December 2007 Westhaven Nunatak, Antarctica. The goal of this field season is to deploy GPS systems on bedrock, so we can understand how the bedrock is moving. These systems are meant to be “permanent”, in that they will operate year round. We get to these sites by helicopter, and a twin otter (a type of fixed wing aircraft). When we are within 200 km of McMurdo, the U.S. base station, we use helicopter support to reach our sites. Unfortunately, weather has been bad this year. A lot of low pressure systems, which means low-hanging clouds, which means no helicopter work. We had an opportunity last week where weather was good, so we took advantage of it and flew both during the day and the night (it’s light here 24 hours a day in the summer). We ...

Written 21 December 2007 3619 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: -27 to -36 °C One morning everybody woke up at Plateau Station due to a dramatic sound that appeared to be traveling through the camp. This was a very scary episode for the personnel that did not know what had happened. After the noise had died down, they realized that it had been a firn quake. In very cold conditions large snow crystals grow and they are very loosely bonded. Thus, this weak layer in the snow can suddenly collapse. The personnel at Plateau Station figured that the surface lowered about 1 cm duri...

Terrestrial ecosystems in ARctic and ANTarctic: Effects of UV Light, Liquefying ice, and Ascending temperatures. (TARANTELLA, IPY project no. 59) IPY project page TARENTELLA website Predicted changes in climate and ozone concentrations in Polar regions, make it critically important to understand how changes in key environmental factors influence Polar terrestrial ecosystems via the modification of their individual but interconnected components. Observational and experimental research on the effect of climate change and ozone depletion is affiliated to international research programmes to t...

Report no 10, 16-20 December The weather is now stable and clear. We are heading eastwards along the ice divide. On the 17th we reached Kohnen station, which is maintained by Germany for the European deep ice core project EPICA. The station is unmanned at the moment, but a crew will get there later in the season. From Kohnen we have travelled more or less along the 75th latitude and are now at 9 degrees east at an altitude of approximately 3300 m. The air pressure is about 650 mb, which means that all physical work is hard. The air temperature varies daily between -20 and -30C, which is cold of course, but does not hinder any outdoor activities. Along the route we are measuring data on standard meteorological parameters, ice surface elevation, i...

Written 20 December 2007 3619 meters above sea level Maximum & Minimum temperatures: -29 to -36 °C Today, at the traditional Christmas lunch at the Norwegian Polar Institute, Einar received the price “The Employer of the Year.” Congratulations Einar! It is very well deserved. The nomination committee especially emphasized Einar’s efforts on numerous expeditions in the Arctic and in Antarctica. Einar is going to celebrate his seventh Christmas in eight years in Antarctica in a few days. Also, his high standards for field safety and work for the union were highlighted by the committee....

The site progettosmilla.it has an aim of explaining to the Italian students (with a target of 14 years old) and teachers, the ANDRILL project and the basic geographic features of Antarctica. In the various sections of the site, users can find detailed descriptions (made by a teacher of the educational project of ANDRILL with the supervision from ANDRILL scientists) of all the phases of the research viz. objectives, methods, instruments and results. The idea is to involve as many as possible students and teachers in the scientific process and adventure of the ANDRILL research. In order to support this, the site further contains: multimedia material (1450 photos, 20 videos and 10 audio), blogs, interactive a...