Antarctic whale expedition at half way mark

Video transcript

Expedition leader, Dr Nick Gales:

Well it’s all part of a bigger picture, I suppose, of understanding whales in the Southern Ocean. In the International Whaling Commission, in which Australia and New Zealand play a very major role, there's the ongoing important debate about whaling.

Expedition leader, Dr Nick Gales:

Well, we’ll confirm, after a discussion with Andrew and Hully with the weather and conditions if that effectively we should be ready to be operational this afternoon.

Voyage leader, Anthony Hull:

We've just had a briefing this morning with the science crew and we're making serious preparations. Hopefully we might even launch some small boats this afternoon and try to do some sampling work on the whales, so yeah, it's getting pretty exciting and everyone’s really keen to start work.

Whale researcher, Dr Mike Double:

So this a biopsy sample that we just took off the humpback whale. It’s nice to get a sample so we can now sex the whale as well, and also we’ll use it for genotyping too.

Expedition leader, Dr Nick Gales:

Most of these whales were taken down to very tiny numbers and are now recovering, and so we want to know where they’re recovering in the Southern Ocean – it’s a big area. These are big questions for the whole Southern Ocean ecosystem that we can at last start to contribute through these non-lethal tools.

[end transcript]

Nick Gales – Southern Ocean Research Partnership

Video transcript

Nick Gales - leader, Australian Marine Mammal Centre

I’m Nick Gales. I head up the Australian Marine Mammal Centre, which is part of the Southern Ocean Ecosystems Program in the science branch at the Antarctic Division. I’ve been here for about nine years.

This summer, we’re starting off a very large program. It’s called the Southern Ocean Research Partnership and what it is – it’s through the International Whaling Commission. Virtually all of the countries involved in whale research in the Southern Ocean are getting together to work on one very large collaboration answering the important science questions in the Southern Ocean and this year, this summer, will be our first research voyage. We’re using the New Zealand research vessel, the Tangaroa, and conducting a whale research cruise to the south of New Zealand and Australia.

We’re focusing on looking at the movement of whales on their feeding grounds around the Antarctic pack ice and so we’ll be covering a large area of ice edge focusing on humpback whales and Antarctic minke whales and blue whales and deploying a large number of satellite tags which will give us a lot of animal movement data, collecting biopsy skin samples to look at their genetics and the way the populations are structured in the Southern Ocean, as well as sighting surveys and some use of acoustics listening to whales and looking at whale densities.

This is really focused at answering sort of the knowledge gaps. So, we’ve gone through very strategically and worked out what are the parts we don’t know very well. For some of the species that migrate north and breed in waters around Australia and near land masses, we know quite a lot of their winter activities during the breeding season. We know from other cruises in Antarctica where whales have been sighted as part of other larger research projects but actually we know very little about the way the animals behave down there as a focus and then how they link back to their breeding grounds to the north. Some of the animals that breed still out at sea, we don’t even know where those breeding locations are, so we’re really trying to address some of those questions this summer.

[end transcript]

Diving at Davis station

Video transcript

Jonny Stark - benthic ecologist

There’s three main objectives to the Environmental Impact Assessment. The first is to look at the nature and extent of impacts, if there are any, associated with the outfall. The second is to look at the dispersing characteristics around the outfall site, so how the sewage plume is being dispersed and whether it’s a good dispersing environment. The third part of the EIA is to look at ecotoxicology of sewage, so to assess how sensitive some of the local animals and plants are to sewage, and also to come up with some dilution factors so that we know roughly how much the sewage needs to be diluted to not have an impact on the local environment.

The main research tool we use is diving. Diving is a fantastic method for getting really detailed marine science done. You can do so much more when you’re in the water than you can from floating above it. So we operate a dive program. We’ve been running one for about 10 years now at Casey, but this will be the first time we’ve operated it at Davis. We use surface-supplied diving, otherwise known as Hookah. So we have a bank of air on the surface and that’s pumped down an umbilical to the divers. The divers wear specially designed dry suits for use in cold water – a thick vulcanised rubber. Underneath that, we have several layers of insulating clothing, so we’re actually very comfortable and warm when we’re diving. We also use a full face mask, which the air comes into, and we have two-way communication, so we can talk to the dive supervisor on the surface; we can talk to each other.

In terms of the types of impacts we’re expecting to see, it would depend on the type of habitat that is around the outfall site itself. If there’s a lot of rocky habitats, we expect to see a large amount of algae, so a large amount of seaweed. We might expect to see some changes of the types of communities that we use in those sediments. Marine sediments are a very rich and diverse habitats – hundreds of thousands of animals per metres squared; a whole range of crustaceans and worms. So we might expect to see, if there is an impact at the outfall, a shift in this community that we find in sediments, whereby there might be a loss of biodiversity, there might be dominance of one or two species which can tolerate extra nutrients or extra organic material that you find in sewage.

So there’s a whole series of different projects that sort of cover a broad scope of research, and in fact, this is probably the most comprehensive Environmental Impact Survey of a sewage outfall that’s ever been done in Antarctica. 

[end transcript]

Life under the ice

Video transcript

Dr Ian Allison - research scientist

I’m Ian Allison. I’m a research scientist studying mostly ice and I head up the Antarctic Division’s Ice, Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Program.

The ice shelves are the area of Antarctica that is changing the most. We now know that the Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass to the oceans and that’s occurring because ice shelves are thinning or collapsing. So, we really need to know what’s going to happen in the future. It’s the largest uncertainty in what global sea level will do in the next hundred years, is understanding how the ice sheets and the ice shelves will behave.

The ice shelves fringe about 44-45% of the Antarctic coast. Most of the ice that drains out from the interior goes through floating ice tongues or ice shelves. Now, if those ice shelves melt, and there’s been a number of them have along the Antarctic Peninsula, they don’t themselves raise sea level but they act as a bit of a cork to the ice behind so, if the ice shelf disappears you get more rapid drainage of the ice behind them and that does lead to sea level rise.

We’ve got a finalisation of the large program looking at the Amery Ice Shelf. The main thing we’re doing is putting holes through the ice shelf. We use a hot water drill, basically melt a hole through the ice shelf, 600, 700 metres, and then deploy instruments into the ocean to look at the ocean’s circulation, the structure of the ocean, how it changes seasonally, how much of the ice shelf is melting from underneath.

The surprising thing was that, even under the ice shelf 200 kilometres back from the very front, there’s living organisms. There’s things swimming in the water column, there’s things living on the sea bed in pitch darkness, obviously fed by nutrients that are swept in in the ocean, but we didn’t really expect to find life there.

As well as this work we do in the field, we do satellite remote sensing to study the larger picture and we also develop models, computer models, the interaction of the ice and the ocean, so we can use those to predict the future.

[end transcript]

Aerial whale research

Video transcript

I'm Natalie Kelly and I am a post-doc research fellow with CSIRO, but I work with the Australian Antarctic Division to research minke whales in Antarctica. Minke whales are the smallest of the baleen whales in the Southern Ocean. They're approximately seven to nine metres in length. They're the most populous as well. Estimates put them at around 500 000 individuals for the whole of the Southern Ocean.

I lead an aerial survey in Antarctica, or East Antarctica, to study minke whales in the sea ice. Over the last three decades or so, the International Whaling Commission has noticed a decline in minke whale numbers. Those numbers are derived from boat-based surveys, but those boats aren't ice-strengthened so they just skirt around the edge. One of the theories is the minke whales are actually moving into the sea ice, away from where the boats can count them, so therefore their numbers are going down.

We're looking at an aerial survey to go over the sea ice and to see whether the whales are in fact in the sea ice. So this is the third year that we've been going down to work with this aerial survey programme. The first couple of years have been a test phase. On a day-to-day basis the aerial survey involves using the CASA 212 aircraft. Now, they're the turbo-prop fixed-wing aircraft that the Australian Antarctic Division uses, more or less as a cargo and personnel moving platform, but we stick observers on the aircraft, on each side, and we just go up and down among the sea ice looking out for whales and counting them as we see them.

This season we've got a much longer survey period. We're going for a nine week window, and we're moving our survey area further west, so hopefully we will be able to detect any pulse changes in the population over that time, and whether they're changing geographically as well. This research is important now because it allows us to be more precise about the population estimates themselves, which the International Whaling Commission needs for more appropriate management.

[end transcript]

Giant iceberg heading towards Australia

Video transcript

Neal Young - glaciologist

Latest image we have is just two days ago. It’s about 140 square kilometres. When it left Antarctica, it was about 400 square kilometres, and within several months it had split into a couple of sections and the biggest piece remaining was 200 square kilometres. It’s very rare to get such a big iceberg up at these sort of latitudes. They do happen from time to time, so I say it’s not unusual, but it’s very, very rare.

Here’s a map of observations taken from ships, of icebergs, where the observation’s typically limited to about 56-South latitude. Now, that’s not because they didn’t take any observations; they just didn’t see icebergs, typically, north of that. Yet this position is up here, way out of the zone. I think it’s probably the combination of ocean currents and weather systems that have come past that have given maybe a prevailing southerly wind that helped it on its way.

B17B calved from in there. Other big icebergs came out of that the same time from in here. They came around the coastline, past the Mertz Glacier, right round to here, then from there up towards Australia. It’s still 1,700 kilometres away, so it’s quite a long way away, and it’s not really on our doorstep yet, but it’s been heading steadily towards us, towards the southern coast of Western Australia. It’s very, very rare.

[end transcript]

Tracking emperor penguin chicks

Video transcript

DR BARBARA WIENECKE

In Antarctica I study sea birds but the emphasis of my work is on emperor penguins at the moment. In this season, we are hoping to deploy some electronic tags that we haven’t deployed on emperor penguins yet. These, these tags are very interesting and exciting because they will tell us the location of penguins which is something that we have been doing in the past but these instruments will also give us some information about diving activity. We are planning to find ourselves some volunteers amongst the juveniles so that we can actually learn how they develop their diving activity on their very, very first time when they have to hunt for themselves. The tags work in the manner, we obviously have to attach them to the birds so we do that very carefully of course and they are satellite linked. That means that every time the tag makes contact with the satellite then we’ll be able to find out where the foraging areas are but also how the food demands do change with age. In terms of climate change, there are predictions that the frontal areas may be shifting south. If that were to happen, there is a potential that the foraging areas of the emperor penguins could be changed and, clearly, if something as massive as that happens it will have very, very far reaching implications. What fascinates me about emperor penguins is, it’s very hard to describe. They are such an unusual species. You wonder why anyone on Earth would want to do it as tough as these guys. Yes they are extremely well adapted to living in the ice but when you are down there with them, you see what a very, very fine line they’re actually walking and it is an extreme environment. There is no two ways about it so I really wonder A. What drives them? And how do they do it? How do they manage to be that successful?

[end transcript]

Mike Craven – Mawson

Video transcript

Mike Craven - Station Leader, Mawson

Hello, I’m Mike Craven. I’m from Margate, five acres down the road here, and I’m heading to Mawson this summer and staying for the 2010 winter. I’ve been going south since 1982. I first decided to go when I was waving away the perspiration in Brisbane on a real hot day with The Courier Mail, and saw a full-page ad for Antarctica and I’ve been hooked ever since.

My very first trip was actually to Macquarie Island and what I felt there was the noise, the hustle and bustle of the animals in summer, because there were just millions of seabirds and seals and things along the beaches, and it just seemed to be a hive of activity. It was just nature just running rampant. It was a really great feeling to be part of it; to actually have the privilege to sit amongst those animals and just enjoy and share what they do throughout the day.

I was attracted to Antarctica by talking to people who’d been before. It struck me as a place that had a freedom to it. It’s a cashless society, it’s a place where people work for each other. Yet, the challenges in Antarctica are the same as ever in terms of environment. The main part of Antarctica’s very cold and is going to be that way through the winter, anyway. The isolation becomes quite extreme when the sun disappears, but communications these days are extremely good.

I think as station leader, my main role is going to be making sure the community acts in harmony and work together for a common purpose, not just in the job that you go down to do but for the entire group, to make sure everybody works well together. Then I guess on another level, from an administrative point of view, it’s just the safety and compliance, making sure everything happens in a manner in which the whole season goes well together.

From my own personal point of view, I really want to go and see the emperor penguins at the Oster colony again. I think it’s one of the wonders of the world.

[end transcript]

Mike Woolridge – Davis

Video transcript

Mike Woolridge - Station Leader, Davis station

Hi I'm Mike Woolridge. I'm off to Davis, as a station leader for the summer, and I'm from Blackmans Bay in Tasmania. I came to work for the Antarctic Division in 1993. I can remember vividly walking through these front doors as an expeditioner and by the end of the day I knew I wanted to work here and I would like to go back, and it's always been a goal of mine to manage a station as a station leader. The attraction of Antarctica is basically the passion you build up for having been there. For people that haven't been there, it's usually this mysterious place at the end of the world. Once you've been fortunate to go there, you just realise what it has to offer and what a great place it is. I probably spent two years of my life at Davis station already. But the challenge of working with the community and managing the program for the season is going to be really exciting. Davis has a really big season ahead of it. We're in the middle of constructing a new living quarters, so we have a big building project team going down there to finish construction and fit out over the winter. We also have a treaty inspection coming down. Our director will visit Davis and from Davis they will fly to our neighbours. I would have said local, but they will be quite some way away. We have Russians, Chinese, Japanese stations, in that area of East Antarctica. And we will be conducting treaty inspections. There's going to be a dive program at Davis and that's going to be exciting. And a lot of boating programs.

Davis does have wildlife like most spots in Antarctica, it's significant to that area and you get what you're given. We have penguins, different types of penguins. It's not very far to an emperor penguin colony. We have local Adélie penguins. Davis is lucky in that it also gets elephant seals, there's a wallow there. So towards the end of summer, elephant seals are going to come back to that wallow and expeditioners get the chance to see wildlife like that. And an amazing array of birds. 

[end transcript]

Narelle Campbell – Casey

Video transcript

Narelle Campbell - Station Leader, Casey station

I'm Narelle Campbell and I'm heading off to Casey station for this coming season. We arrive on station in December 2009 and will be leaving some time December 2010 or even through to January 2011. I'm originally from Wingham and Taree on the north coast of New South Wales. I've always wanted to go to Antarctica and I don't know why. It's just something that's been in me ever since I was a child. Maybe I watched a couple of documentaries when I was younger but there was something about the isolation of Antarctica, it's going back to pure nature. It's one of the most untouched environments in the world. So all that has interested me and also working down there with a group of dynamic and unique different individuals in a very small environment. That's what's attracted me to it. The challenges you'd get down at the Antarctic, which is very different to working back here on the mainland, is the environment, the harshness of the environment, the blizzards, the cold and you've got to be mindful of people's safety. The other challenge is people being away from their families, friends, loved ones for a long period of time and it's providing that support for those individuals to be as comfortable as they can. The highlights are the expeditioners themselves, watching people enjoy the environment so much and watching a group of people enjoy that small community and helping each other out. That's the bit I love, the wildlife, the scenery the whole thing. The whole thing is a great experience. You know in reverse too, it's what are the things that I don't particularly look forward to, there's nothing, you know. I love it, each day is different and you can't expect the same each day and that's the part I like about it.

[end transcript]