Life Beyond the Beaker

The wildlife is amazing here, on Christmas eve Michelle, John, Ben and I went on the Skua survey. Ben was holding a flag to mark our territory against the skewers as we needed to measure eggs within their nest, as very territorial birds it can be quite a challenge to get close. John was logging our position on a GPS, while I was using binoculars to get the tag information. Living on an airfield is a dream since I was younger, so moving away from Usk Gliding club which is only a few fields away from my house in Wales, to then living at Lasham this summer as a tug pilot and now I'm here at Rothera watching a Dash-7 and twin otters taking off everyday is amazing!! I also feel spoilt with the chance to dive here, the wildlife is so diverse. It's also mind boggling that I would much rather be in the ice covered water than above it, as the air is so much colder! This is me collecting sediment samples for a microplastic project that I am studying. Anna ...

Merry Christmas to you all!!!     We are celebrating Christmas a day early here with a 7 course meal as the James Clark Ross is arriving on the 26th which means that we have a lot of unpacking to do as it has all of our supplies for the next year on it. Before that we are having a movie night on sheep skins and a projector in Fuchs house and an evening of carols with mulled wine and mince pies!    

This is home for the next few... months!! The end of last week was slow as brash ice didn't allow us to get out and CTD or dive, until Saturday! We work Saturday mornings here! Saturday was a good dive, we were marking if a grid of small square cement blocks had been hit by an iceberg, we then replaced the old blocks with new ones - the aim of this study is to look at the impact of disturbance of icebergs on community structure. It's a hard job to do underwater as you need to be properly weighted so that you do not hit the sediment that you're trying to sample whilst carrying around concrete blocks. Saturday I skidoo-ed a lot !!!! We got to the caboose which is at the bottom of the mountain called Vals, the caboose is a hut used for warming up and making yourself a cuppa tea after getting towed up to the top of Vals to then ski down! I did lots of the skidooing up to Vals and then I took some Nordic skis and skiwalked to the skiway where the twin-otters land if...

A PENGUIN!!!! Finally a photo of a Penguin for you all, taunting the seals! Elephant seals have invaded our base... This week as flown by so fast - we've crammed so much training and fun things into such a short time. However, these past few days have been too windy or too much brash ice built up in the bay to allow us to dive or collect water samples from the boat - rather frustrating! After our first CTD, Sam and I spent the next two days in the lab processing the water to extract ammonia concentrations and fractionated the chlorophyll for our long-term plankton studies! The next mission was to get me checked out by the current dive officer Emily, with my first dive in Antarctica just off the warf so that we could stay shallow - it was INCREDIBLE! I didn't even get cold which really surprised me! There is also so much life down there, we saw; a jellyfish, sea lemon (that was one of my first missions to see), starfish and sea urchins. The life down there is v...

Living at Rothera means that you are constantly busy...especially as a new arrival. From 8 am my day is filled, from breakfast to weather briefings and then conducting job or site specific training which is then interrupted my smoko (which I will tell you more about later on in the season), lunch, second smoko and then dinner! On Monday we trained in crevasse rescue where Kate and I were attached, she then jumped off the side of the snowy hill .. I then had to use myself as an anchor, whilst making a new anchor to convert the energy to. IN order to do this we used a metal pole and hammered it into the ice, then attaching a carabineer and prusik transferred the energy using a jumar, that meant that I could move and walk over to the side of the hill to check she was alright - as this was a training exercise she German style walked back up the hill by kicking her crampons into the side of the hill and using her ice axe if needed. The ice axe is also useful if you do fall then t...

First mission was to make a snow angel....and no I actually did not fall over doing this!   As I write this blog I am sat in my new off-ice (office) that over looks the runway and sea oh and mountains... however, at the moment all I can see is snow, as the snow is built up and covers the window!                                                                                                            ANTARCTICA!!!!!! My view out of my bed...