Headed South

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:11:55 +0000

Well, a four month gap between this and my last blog entry will make this slightly confusing. I am not headed South on the Oden, rather we have just left Port Stanley on the RRS James Clark Ross. I will try and put something down here on what the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) experience has been like so far, and what we are doing down here.

Antarctica is not an easy place to get to. Generally, most countries with scientific operations there use staging posts in various southern hemisphere spots - Christchurch in New Zealand for a large part of the US NSF program, Reunion for the French, the Falklands for the British. BAS organise the logistics, and simply issued me with an email to show up at a military airfield in Oxfordshire (Brize Norton) for the MOD flight to Port Stanley.

My vision of jolly RAF personnel serving us tea and biscuits on some vintage propellor plane was rather dashed when I discovered we were on a rather strange-looking charter flight. A large old DC-10, recently re-painted and operated by Omni Air International, with a logo and bland internationalism eerily reminiscent of Oceanic, from the Lost tv series. The flight service was some version of Ryanair set in the 1970s, luke-warm sausage roll, no drinks and a tracker bar for dinner. We flew into a bright and windy Port Stanley, after just a short refuel at Ascension Island.

I thought Stanley quite pretty, a cluster of colorful houses in vaguely Scandinavian style, 5 pubs, 1 restaurant and a bleak, mountain backdrop. Most of the military seemed to be stationed in a large complex of green sheds around the airport; Tornado jets occasionally screamed overhead. By Tuesday, the ship was loaded and we had time for a walk out to the penguin colony at Gypsy Cove. On Thursday afternoon, we sailed, completed some propulsion tests on the ship’s electrical motor, and started to steam south. It will be almost 5 days from now before we reach Antarctica and our first sampling stations, although we will make some CTD casts on the way (CTD stands for conductivity, temperature and depth, the device can also take water samples at various depths).

My role on the ship is to work up polychaete material from the trawls, epibenthic sledges (a special type of trawl sampler) and core samples. I am also going to be carrying on the work we started with the Oden cruise by deploying some wood and whale-bone experiments for later recovery (in 2010) by ROV (remotely operated vehicle, a type of submersible operated from the ship).

I will try and post more news here as it happens, depending on how hectic things get. You can also check out my web gallery, and check our position at this ship tracker site.

Loading the icebreaker Oden

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:23:42 +0100

I have just got back from a trip to Landskroner, Sweden, with my collaborator Thomas Dahlgren and PhD student Helena Wiklund (pictured). We have a joint project working with the Swedish Polar Secretariat and their icebreaking ship Oden (also pictured) to study chemosynthetic ecosystems in Antarctica. Kirsty Kemp will be travelling South with the Oden in November this year, on a voyage from Punta Arenas (Chile) to McMurdo base on the Antarctic continent. She will be deploying our experiments along the West Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf, which we hope to recover on a cruise with Prof Craig Smith in 2009, with the National Science Foundation vessel Laurence M Gould.

News from the world of deep-sea whale-falls, polychaete worms and Antarctica

Headed South

Loading the icebreaker Oden