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Articles
Red heart, red ship
When I was twelve years old, I was head over heels in love with a little red ship, the Danish polar vessel Nella Dan. She worked for the Australian Antarctic Division for twenty-six years, and in the 1980s Hobart was her home away from home.
White day dreaming
We linger together well past bedtime, talking of our children. The sun plays its part by refusing to set, doing an orbit around the horizon and waltzing shadows across the lounge. Below us are about eighty metres of ice floating on the waters of the Ross Sea. Further towards the mainland and buried some sixteen metres down in the ice are Scott, Bowers and Wilson, frozen into their sleeping bags and wrapped in their tent.
Observing life on the edge
I KNOW THESE things. A recognisable and deep clunk as I walk along the cobble beach, its round rocks...
Leading down south
We were using the Italian station as a jumping-off point to inspect some of the nearby stations – the German Gondwana Station and, for the first time, the Korean Jang Bogo Station, as well as China’s temporary station on the site of the proposed new Chinese station planned for Inexpressible Island in Terra Nova Bay. This is a truly remarkable part of Antarctica...
Coming soon to a beach near you
IN THE ROOM with pictures of Antarctica on the walls the scientists sit around the table and talk about...
Understanding interconnectivity
THERE’S NO EXPERIENCE on Earth like diving under the ice in Antarctica. On life support and in an uninhabited...
Audacious visions for the Antarctic
IT WAS EARLY 1984. It started with a phone call: can you do an environmental impact assessment of the...
Inside, and outside
On the ship it’s a mix of hurry up and wait – cabins cleaned, bags packed and stacked in the halls, people standing in cabin doorways chatting – the uncertainty of farewells. Especially the twenty-odd Mawson-bound expeditioners – not knowing who to farewell and when.
Silence is the song
DURING THE LONG winter of 2020, and due to fortunate happenstance, I found myself locked down in a somewhat...
Buried treasure
Over the entire 800,000-year record, atmospheric carbon dioxide has never peaked over 300 ppm. For all of human history, it sat around 275 ppm until about 200 years ago, when we began to dig up and burn coal to fuel the Industrial Age. In 1950, it punched through the 300-ppm historic ceiling. In mid-May, as the forests of the Northern Hemisphere dropped their leaves, the planet exhaled atmospheric carbon dioxide at a new daily record of 421 ppm.
Warnings in the water
The environmental significance of krill extends beyond their role as food. They also play a vital part in the processes that regulate the Earth’s climate.
A subantarctic sentinel
It didn’t take long for this knowledge to spread wider – and for Macquarie Island to become an open-air slaughterhouse. By December 1810, another three Sydney-based sealing gangs were operating there and, within the first eighteen months of operation, roughly 120,000 fur seals had been killed for their fine pelts.
