SIPEX-II Update, from 15 Nov

Last post from aboard the Aurora Australis as Molly, Jess, Rob and Sarah wrap up their time as part of SIPEX 2012.

 

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15^th Nov

We finally got out of the pack ice on 11^th Nov, and suddenly started moving really fast towards Northeast. The entire day traveling in the MIZ, the scene outside was splendid. There were still plenty of ice floes with thick snow on it, but the blue ocean was everywhere to see. Plenty of sea birds (mainly snow petrol and giant petrol) were flying and sliding behind the heli-deck. People were all out with their fancy camera lenses to capture some real photos of those lightning-speed birds. We had an outdoor BBQ on the trawl deck under the last late-night sunshine to celebrate the joy to return home.

I start to grow into deep sadness when the sun sank into the skyline at 11pm. This will be last sunset we see beyond 60^oS. We have been travelling with 16knots the entire day and night, and when midnight passed, all the ice disappeared in our sight, only left the wild ocean with swell and waves.

Last night was the Aurora night. Barry, our rocket scientist, has his contact based in Hobart to pass the information to predict Aurora. About 10pm, anyone still awake stood under the sky and looked up. There were still clouds gathering around, so at the beginning we couldn’t really tell if the light bits were only the sky or the real aurora. The real aurora does not appear as bright green as we normally see on the picture. After about half an hour, the sky started become unbelievable and incredible. I have never seen something like this. The pale green light appeared on the sky with a rhythm. It was like the wave washing the black sandy beach and left all the patterns on it. Sometimes it was more like a painter spread out all the watercolour paints randomly to the black paper. And the next moment everything was suddenly washed out. What happened on the sky was not really describable by words. I was just standing there and gazing the sky for more than half an hour. The only words came out was “WOW….”

We will arrive Hobart tomorrow.  There are still so many stories need to tell. Although we have only been on the ship for two months, I had the feeling it’s been a year. All the people on board appear to me as a big family. Our science group is a mix of experienced scientists, engineers, early scientists and students. It is fascinating for me to meet all these awesome people with passionate of their work. They are also incredible professional.

The best part is all the science nerds at the same time maintain a high level skill on something else. Ted, Peter and Polly are crazy Scrabble/bananagrams machines with words come out their brain every second. Jono and Peter are fantastic guitar players, who usually play as our bed-song singer and after-dinner entertainment. There are more than one great photographers who capture all the amazing scenes along the way. Ernesto and Maria are good Ping-Pong players. We also have Anne-Julie as our Belgian-French painter who is able to make very fine oil painting.

This will be last post for us from the Aurora Australis. The Aurora email system will be shut down as soon as we reach the port tomorrow. APECS-Oceania will follow up some great photos and videos and some post-voyage stories soon afterwards.

SIPEX-II Update, from Oct 8

8th Oct
Stn 4
Position: 65o 08 S, 121o 01 E
Wind: 15 knots
Temperature: -15oC
 
Another nice and warm day on the ice, work goes along as usual. All
the groups are busy occupied with measurements. This site is full of
biological activity. At the back of our ship, in the small open water
area, looks like a temporal penguin paradise. Five emperor penguins
were swimming, diving, and hanging around there for the whole day.
They usually dived from the same spot together and stayed in the
water for couple minutes; then they suddenly appeared on the surface
and chirped to each other for a while, then dived in again.
Frequently they jumped on to the ice and walked all the way to the
scientists to peep what we are doing. We had penguins around us the
entire day. 
[Emperor swim] 
Dinner on the ship at 6pm, suddenly someone spotted a black line was
passing by about couple hundreds meters away from the port side of
the ship. We all rushed out and saw a magnificent march of Adelie
penguins. 
[Adelie march]
 
Personally I am more excited to see Adelies than elegant Emperors.
Adelie are hilarious animals to watch. They walk like they are going to fall
down at the next moment. With their wings open up behind them like a
cape, they rush around with short legs until falling on the ground,
then they start to slide on their tummy with legs and wings. Those
who have seen “Frozen Planet” from BBC, you must remember the amusing
scene when one Adelie tries to steal stones from another one when the
hard-working one is building his love nest to attract females.    
[Adelie single] 
 

SIPEX-II Update, from Oct 6

6th Oct, 
Position: 65o 06 S, 121o 21 E
Wind: mild
Temperature: -15oC
 
Muster on the heli deck
We have an emergency training every week, or every time when we leave
a station. When the ship starts to ring the emergency signal,
everyone responses properly to dress up with warm clothes and life
jacket, bring the red survival bag and get on to the heli deck. 
 
The first time was really exciting. It was back to 12 days ago before
we got to any ice stations. First time to try all the gears on and
the air was getting to the point of frozen. In addition, we had a bit
snow on the deck to make a snow fight.  
 
But after 3 or 4 times, to fully dress up for half an hour and change
back to summer clothes is not that exciting anymore. The bonus to
standing in the chill wind was, we could see all sorts of creatures.
So far, we saw a crabeater seal right behind the ship, then a penguin
family with 5 or 6 members, and some snow petrels, and some more
penguins, and surely, some amazing sea ice. 

SIPEX-II Update, from 3 Oct - 4 Oct

A good wrap up of some fieldwork in this update!

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3rd Oct, Day nineteen 
and 4th Oct, Day twenty
POSITION: 64o 52 S, 120o 58 E
Wind: mild
Temperature: -15oC
 
Station 3! Yeay!
Helicopter out, and they brought back news for three possible ice
floes for a good ice station. We approached to the 1st one, and broke
it when we tried to moor the ship.
 
Later afternoon, we finally arrived at our Ice Station 3! Horray! 
 
We were all really happy that we could finally go out for a walk or
do a bit work. Especially when the weather was really gentle to us,
nice sunshine, almost no wind, and it’s really warm, only -15oC. 
 
We plan to stay in this ice floe for today and tomorrow only, so all
groups rushed out for work as soon after all the flags out. 
 
Our on-board engineers repaired krill pump for us. They are AWESOME!
More like magicians to me, I would like to call them men of
“everything is possible” (we would have a story for them shortly). We
set on a spot very close to the ship (about 10m away). Then everyone
discovered the difficulties on this ice floe. It is really THICK!
 
This ice floe has a heavy snow cover with an average of 1m.
Underneath, the ice all packed and rafted, with an average thickness
of 1.5m. 
 
The trace-metal team had a lot of troubles on this station. They
needed to walk a long way to their site with all the heavy gears, the
corers, and the survival bag. On the morning of 4th Oct, they walked
all the way to the site, dug through one-meter snow, and finally saw
the sea ice. But when they start coring, the ice core frozen inside
the corer, and they had to march back to the ship, use milli-Q water
(get it down dripping down from the milli-Q machine, take a long time
to get one bucket) to clean the gear to get the ice out. And this
happened TWICE in one day! In the dinner everyone from trace-metal
looked exhausted and frustrated. Thanks to Klaus, our chief
scientist, trace-metal team started their journey AGAIN after dinner
under Klaus’s company, and finally successfully got samples back
before the sunset.  
 
Time to talk about our 2nd krill pump. The giant monster flew from
the States, and was originally designed for fish farms. Now we
modified some parts of it and use it to pump krill from the water. It
sits in a blue container and pumps with long pipes. Each pipe needs 7
people to carry. Each time to set it up involves efforts from many
people. 
 
[krill pump operation 1 & 2]
 
Unfortunately, all the ice cores we are taking were crystal clear,
did not show much biological accumulation. Also because it is so hard
to cut a hole on the ice, we started to put our net down from “trawl
deck”, the back of the ship where we deploy all the big instruments,
like AUV, CTD, TMR etc. 
 
[Patti taking net samples]

SIPEX-II Update, from 30 Sept - 2 Oct

Some long awaited news from Molly, still on board the Aurora Australis with Rob, Jess, and Sarah..

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30th Sep, Day sixteen
 
1st Oct, Day seventeen
 
2nd Oct, Day eighteen
It’s remote, wild and cold down here. All sorts of problems appeared
on the ship. The equipment failed because of low temperature;
helicopter couldn’t fly due to the bad weather; we can’t break the
thick ice since the ship engine has tiny troubles to start etc. 
 
When come down to 64oS, the most common thing happening to us is
stuck in the ice, or just hanging around without spotting a good
location to settle down. 
 
It’s been three days since we departed from the last station. Our
plan was to find the 3rd station yesterday morning, but it’s
afternoon today, we still not sure what will happen in the next 24h. 
 
Everyone grew a bit grumpy when there is not much to do. We finished
all the sample analyses, well prepared to be going out anytime.
Meanwhile, we almost played all the games we could play. 
 
Our assassin game already came to the end. Since I was killed by my
mate 5 minutes after the game started, I completely dropped my
interest for this game!
 
We have a new table-tennis competition started from a week ago. I was
really amazed how good-skilled people are! Although a Chinese I am,
I’m suck of table tennis. I played more ping-pong game on this ship
than altogether in my life. 
 
Talking about games on board. We have a full collection of board
games, including all board games you can think about. Chess,
Monopoly, Domino, Spicks & Specks, Cluedo, Pictionary, Ticket to
ride, Sorry! (The game of sweet revenge), Scrabble, and the cute
version of Scrabble – Bananagrams, etc. Apparently now, Bananagrams
became the most popular game between the dining room and the library.
Consequently, the dictionary became one of the most popular books
recently.    
 
Also, our sweet social committee came up many brilliant ideas to
amuse everybody. Jess, one of our APECS member, with Hugo (our
brilliant British mood-maker) started a series of games for every
second night. The game named Winner-Winner-Chicken-Dinner. Jess will
write something really fun about Winner-Winner soon. 
 

SIPEX-II Update, from 27 September

Molly has supplied some more stories from the SIPEX-II voyage. As you can imagine it's a very busy period (hence the delay in receiving these) but the updates are worth the wait!  Due to data limits on messages from the Aurora Australis, photos follow separately.  So we'll get them posted once they're received.
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27th Sep, Day Thirteen
64o26’S
Wind: 0.2 knots
Air temperature: -15

First successful ice station! (or the 2nd official ice station)

After one day drifting from the last ice floe, we finally settled
down on another good size, good condition ice floe. The Stationing
started!

Followed by the safety check by Klaus and Psycho, all groups with all the fancy equipment set feet on the ice. It is very interesting to see, within this small area with a thickness of 35cm wind pack snow covering on 100cm thick sea ice, scientists on board found all their interest from different perspectives.

The 35cm snow served physicist for their research interest on snow
thickness, snow density, albedo of snow, and carbon evidence of
atmospheric pollution within the snow, and the snow-wind interaction. The sea ice underneath was more interested by biologists. (Exception: One group of physic statists are interested how fast brine comes into ice) Lots of ice core taking, accompanied with incubation of sea ice community. The sea ice biologists/ecologists are trying to find out how the sea ice structure, and how this structure related to the biology community living in the sea ice.

[picture: taking ice core]

There is also a trace-metal team focusing on the trace metal in the
snow and sea ice. They need to travel a long distance to be far away
from everyone to avoid contamination. We will leave their story until next time.

Water column is interested by a mixed group of biologists (I’m one of them) and physicist. We have two expensive fancy “toys” on board to investigate what the underwater world looks like beneath the sea ice.  They are ROV, Remotely Operated Vehicle, and AUV, Automotive
Underwater Vehicle. These two vehicles travelled around under the
ice, and brought back high-resolution images and videos of the world
hiding underneath our feet. Sure they are scientific equipment more
than just an under-water camera; please move to Wendy’s blog to read
more about their science objective.

We biologists are planning to discover how the under-ice community
structured and how it works. All those amazing creatures we could
see, like whales, seals, penguins and fish, are living on the tiny
plankton in this ecosystem. It is another amazing world in the
plankton community. Please be patient for some great photos of the
plankton world coming soon. Today we are going to focus on people on
the ice.

[picture: tripod]

We dig holes on the ice, and put equipment, nets and pumps under
water in hope to grab as much information as we can from the water.
Three of our zooplankton and phytoplankton boys set up a 3m tripod on the ice for deployment. We also have two pumps, one flied from
Germany and one from U.S., specially designed for krill pumping. The
pump from U.S. was purchased by Australian Antarctic Division and
most of the setting up was designed by Rob King, our great brilliant
krill biologist.


Krill pump explosion

[picture: krill pump]

The reality crashes into our brilliant plan, as the old saying. We
found a really nice spot for krill pumping. It took us more than half an hour to set up everything. The German pump started pumping with all of our hope. Half way through, we stopped the pump to check what we got, and 5 min later, started again, and suddenly it EXPLODED!!!!

The seawater froze in the pipe and stuck, and the pump vacuumed all
the air from the little chamber, and this is the reason for the
little explosion.

Luckily no one hurt, but pumping for today became impossible. The
krill group is facing some unhappy situation.
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More information about SIPEX-II is available through the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre website.

And the blog of Dr Wendy Pyper, science reporter for the Australian Antarctic Division, who is covering the expedition.

Antarctica New Zealand Conference Report

Sira Engelbertz and Lorna Little have provided the following report and photos of APECS Oceania activities at this year's Antarctica New Zealand Conference.  Thank you both for your work organising, and also to all others who made the event the success it was.

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APECS Oceania @ 2012 Antarctica New Zealand Conference, 4-5 October, Christchurch:

APECS workshops at the annual New Zealand Antarctic Conference have become an integral part of this conference’s program over the past years. This year APECS Oceania (formed in May 2012) organised a session for this conference. Instead of the usual workshop or panel discussion, as has happened in previous years, APECS Oceania tried something new this time: Speed-Meet-A-Geek, a speed networking game.

The rules were simple. First, quickly find someone in the group to talk to. Then, you get three minutes to exchange information about yourself, your research, your further interests, etc. When the time is up, you move on to another person in the group and talk to him or her for another 3 minutes, and so on. BUT, to make it a little more challenging, participants also had to find a matching pair of Flakes, Blobs and Bubbles!

The Flakes, Blobs and Bubbles were taken from an art project and education & outreach flagship activity for the Fall 2012 International Polar Week. Pairs of images of flakes, blobs or bubbles – all drawn by kids at IceFest, the New Zealand Antarctic festival in Christchurch – had been handed out to participants at the beginning of the session. The task was to find the person with the matching image while networking at speed.

There were fantastic prizes for the first three matching pairs, kindly sponsored by COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs).All participants received a free drink, generously provided by Antarctica New Zealand. To make a long story short, there were many reasons to be part of Speed-Meet-A-Geek and none not to! Over 40 conference attendees (out of around 80) including students, early career scientists, mentors, APECS members and non-members (but potentially future members…) made Speed-Meet-A-Geek at the 2012 Antarctica New Zealand Conference a great success!

Apart from the Speed-Meet-A-Geek event, APECS Oceania presented also its poster to introduce the new joint Australian and New Zealand branch of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists.

Special thanks to: Ed Butler, Michelle Rogan-Finnemore, and Heidi Roop for all their help leading up to the event, Melissa Idiens for helping run the session, Igloo Bar for hosting APECS Oceania Speed Meet A Geek, and all conference attendees participating in the game!