Solar Farm at Casey

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TEXT BOX: The first Australian solar farm in Antarctica has been switched on at Casey research station.

MARK PEKIN – INFRASTRUCTURE ENGINEER. We’re installing some solar panels, primarily to help with the power on station and reduce the amount of diesel that we burn.

TEXT BOX: 105 solar panels are mounted on the northern wall of the station’s store.

TEXT BOX: They provide 30 kilowatts of renewable energy into the station’s power grid.

MARK PEKIN: Back in the real world the sun typically goes overhead. Down here at the very low latitudes in the southern hemisphere, the sun typically doesn’t get much above the horizon, so the wall of the building gets more sunshine than the roof of the building.

It’s certainly a lot windier down here than what you’d find when normal solar panels are installed. And that’s another value of having it on the wall. It’s quite snug in there. And the panels are designed for some fairly serious wind loads.

DOREEN McCURDY - ENGINEERING SERVICES SUPERVISOR: Temperature is a big thing as well. The guys are having to do really fiddly little screws and nuts and when their hands are cold they need to take breaks and put their hands in pockets with pocket warmers to warm up.

Each panel takes about 20 minutes to install. When we have cold or really windy days the guys come inside and pull cables or install cable trays.

TEXT BOX: The panels will help cut fuel costs and emissions and boost the station’s capacity at peak times.

MARK PEKIN: There are no doubt some learnings that we’ll get for this and we’ll look at what that can do for some of our other stations as well.

Masdar credit: This project was made possible by Masdar (Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company), a global leader in the commercialisation and deployment of renewable energy and clean technologies in more than 25 countries around the world to address global sustainability challenges.

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Whales, krill, iron & ice

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Text on screen:

The seven-week science voyage to East Antarctica on RV Investigator has been a major success.

Searching 200,000 km² of the Southern Ocean, scientists found Antarctic blue whales by following their calls.

More than 250 underwater listening devices were deployed, capturing over 750 hours of underwater recordings.

More than 300 hours of search effort were logged.

36 blue whales were encountered, and 25 individually identified.

This voyage was the first to also focus on the whales’ primary food source, Antarctic krill.

For the first time on an Australian research vessel, echo sounders built 3D pictures of giant krill swarms.

Several swarms extended over 1 kilometre in length and hundreds of metres across.

Scientists want to learn if iron-rich whale poo fertilises the ocean and helps grow more krill.

For the first time in the Southern Ocean, drones were used to take surface water samples.

Near icebergs where the ship couldn’t reach, drone missions dipped jars into the sea to collect water.

Vast amounts of other data about water chemistry were collected.

Every piece of the puzzle is important to better understand the ecology of the Southern Ocean.

Production: Mark Horstman, Simon Payne.

Vision: Alex Vail, James Cox.

This research is supported by a grant of sea time on RV Investigator from the CSIRO Marine National Facility.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Aleks Terauds

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I’m a spatial ecologist at the Australian Antarctic Division and I run a small section called biodiversity conservation, where we try and do research into environmental protection and achieving conservation outcomes for Antarctica.

The research looks at things like the vulnerability of biodiversity, what drives biodiversity, what are the linkages between the things that live in Antarctica and the physical environment; and then using that information to try and better understand what threatens the biodiversity of Antarctica and how we can mitigate those threats into the future.

The biggest threats to Antarctica are quite clearly things around climate change. But also human activity is by far and away another major threat in Antarctica.

So what we try and do in our research team is develop ideas around how we can mitigate those threats and actually put them into a format that then the Antarctic Treaty parties can understand and then make decisions to better protect or better manage the biodiversity that are under their remit.

What I really love about my work is the fact that we can make a difference, so myself and my research team have done quite a range of research that feeds directly into the Antarctic Treaty and has actually changed the way people operate and manage life in Antarctica, and I think that’s really important and that makes me really happy.

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Renewal of Antarctic research stations

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Antarctic infrastructure is costly to build and maintain, and must withstand extreme conditions.

The last major upgrade to all Australia’s research stations was in the 1980s.

New funding of $450 million over ten years will improve our buildings and machinery.

It will modernise fuel storage, water supplies, energy provision, and communication technology.

This will revitalise our science program for the future.

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50 years of Casey research station

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Text on screen: Australia’s Antarctic expeditioners have been living at Casey research station for 50 years.

But the station today looks completely different from its opening on 19 February 1969.

The original Casey was a 260 metre long corrugated-iron structure on stilts.

Thirteen buildings were connected by an unheated tunnel.

After 19 years it was replaced by a new steel-clad station.

Now extensions to the living quarters are nearly complete.

During summer, up to 120 expeditioners call Casey home.

Happy fiftieth birthday, Casey research station!

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Nuyina cranes and funnels

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Text box: Nuyina's two 55 tonne cranes have been installed.

Text box: The external cladding of the funnels is lowered into place. 

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Ice runway reopens

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On screen text: Flights have resumed to Australia’s Wilkins Aerodrome after major reconstruction works.

The 3.5 kilometre runway is built on a moving glacier.

A crew of seven has been clearing ice build-up from around the runway.

Nearly 20,000 tonnes of ice was cleared in 12 weeks.

Jeff Hadley, Wilkins Aerodrome Manager: What we’ve been doing is we’ve been grading the ice down to a suitable level, which has accumulated over the years, both natural and manmade.

On screen text: An A319 flight arrived yesterday with 17 expeditioners.

Flights will continue through to March.

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Krill swarms in 3D

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On-screen text: In the Southern Ocean, scientists are finding krill by following the blue whales that eat them.

ROB KING: It's fascinating to be on a voyage where we're targeting areas to research by focusing in on blue whales that we're hearing from hundreds of kilometres across the ocean.

On-screen text: For the first time, the RV Investigator's echosounders are being used to 'see' giant krill swarms underwater.

JOSH LAWRENCE: So the animation is showing us a three-dimensional representation a large krill swarm we passed over earlier in the voyage. The swarm was about 400 metres long by about 200 metres across and it kind of came up in this multi-level swarm that was a total depth range of about 100 metres, but with the three-dimensional view you can see that it's all connected and it's all one enormous swarm.

On-screen text: With a volume of a million cubic metres, this single swarm contains hundreds of millions of Antarctic krill. 

ROB KING: What sort of krill is a blue whale after? Because krill isn't just an individual. Krill is a super organism.

JOSH LAWRENCE: It might tell us something about the preferences that the whales have for the different three-dimensional structures. Again, that's something you wouldn't really be able to do without that three-dimensional information.

On-screen text: Each swarm recorded by the echosounders is also sampled for its krill. 

ROB KING: There's a whole bunch of female krill here that are ready to lay eggs. There's also a lot of developing juvenile krill that are maturing. But what's really interesting is that those krill are mainly females so it appears there's a strong gender imbalance in this area. It's not preventing them producing fertilised eggs. All of the females that have spawned here in the lab have produced fertilised eggs that have gone on to produce embryos, no trouble at all. So the system is working but we're not sure where the males are, so we're going to be looking for those as the cruise continues.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Mr Tim Spedding

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I’ve spent approximately eight summers in the Antarctic, and I loved that experience.

I also really love the work because it does have real tangible environmental improvements.

So I lead a team of multidisciplinary scientists and engineers, looking at and assessing the human impacts in the Antarctic and this is primarily around contaminants, fuels and heavy metals.

Remediation in the environmental context means the improvement of soil or water back towards its original state.

The reason we need to remediate sites in Antarctica is that, as part of the Antarctic Treaty, all nations that work down there have an obligation to clean up their waste disposal sites and minimise their environmental impact.

There are lots of technologies in the world that have been used in temperate conditions but have never been applied to the Antarctic, and our role is taking these technologies, modifying these technologies, and assessing if they can work to clean up contaminated sites in the Antarctic.

One remediation technology that we are very familiar with is bioremediation, which is using the natural or the native microorganisms in the soil, in Antarctica, to degrade fuel.

Ultimately our aim for our research is to be used by other nations. They’ll take our information and they’ll be able to make informed decisions to remediate and clean up contaminated sites around their stations.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Bruce Deagle

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My role at the Australian Antarctic Division is a molecular ecologist, so I lead a small group of geneticists who do research on the ecology of organisms in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

A lot of the things we’re doing are brand new, so people have never seen these sorts of data before. And the ability to really answer questions that nobody else has been able to address before is quite exciting.

So the type of work that we do ranges from things like looking at penguin diet using DNA markers to characterise prey that we get in faecal samples, so in scat samples, to looking at communities of microscopic organisms that are found in seawater.

Just recently started working on a collaboration with international scientists to get a whole bunch of different countries and different Antarctic stations collecting poo samples from Adélie penguins to start doing a larger project on the diet of the species all around Antarctica.

I think more generally genetics will be used in the future to do a lot of the monitoring work that we right now use a microscope to do and I think that’s a really bright area for genetics research.

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