Southern Ocean soundscape

Video transcript

Jacques Cousteau called the underwater world ‘the silent world’ and he couldn't have been more wrong about that.

There's a tremendous amount of information that we can learn about the Southern Ocean simply by listening to it.

[Killer whale clicks]

I study underwater sound and particularly the sounds of whales and other marine mammals in the Antarctic.

Blue and fin whales in particular are endangered species. They are very rarely encountered in the Southern Ocean. But when we listen for them, we can hear them over very large distances, so listening for them is an incredibly efficient way to study them.

[Blue whale song]

TEXT BOX: Sonobuoys are deployed from ships to hear and track whales up to 1000 km away.

TEXT BOX: Moorings on the sea floor record ocean sounds continuously for one year.

[Whale and seal calls]

TEXT BOX: These yearly sound recordings help scientists learn more about marine mammal behaviour.

A lot of the questions that we're trying to answer; are how many whales are there, where are they, when do we see them? These are really basic fundamental questions that you need to be able to answer if you want to have any chance of conserving and managing populations of whales effectively.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Dana Bergstrom

Video transcript

I’m an applied Antarctic ecologist and what that effectively means is that I’m a problem solver. My focus is on protecting and conserving the living things in Antarctica and I mainly work on the things on land and not the ones in the ocean.

We want to protect the Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic because they’re really rare ecosystems. There’s intrinsic value of wildlife, plants, animals and fungi that have been there for a long long time, but there’s also scientific value. To study a place that’s gone through lots and lots of ice ages and greenhouse times, to understand how those plants and animals survive.

That helps us understand how evolution works and how organisms survive climate change today, which is really relevant with regard to what's going on in the world.

One of the projects we did was a thing called Aliens in Antarctica. It was about the way things can hitchhike to Antarctica and disturb the natural ecosystems.

We were able to organise a huge international project which involved 22 nations, so many ships and planes, and we were able to get a picture of what humans were carrying to Antarctica.

One of the things we did was build a state-of-the-art quarantine facility down at the Hobart wharf, in response to what the science was telling us.

We stopped rats getting in, we stopped mice, we stopped seeds, we stopped spiders. All action towards protecting Antarctica.

It’s really heart-warming to be part of something that’s focussed on environmental stewardship. 

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Antarctic lessons for space

Video transcript

Going to Antarctica is like visiting another planet.

It’s extreme, confined, and isolated.

Chief Medical Officer – Dr Jeff Ayton

“We’ve got isolation for up to nine months of the year, so we can’t get people out of Antarctica. So, we have a small population of 14-25 people at Casey, Davis and Mawson and at sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island.”

Australian Antarctic doctors are experts in remote medical care.

This knowledge informs space agencies planning for long-term missions to the Moon or Mars.

Chief Medical Officer – Dr Jeff Ayton

“Australia has been quite successful in undertaking space analogue research in areas such as immunology, but also mental health and behavioural health. How do teams work well together, but also how to individuals work well together and how can we support them.”

Dr Ayton will share his insights from the icy continent Aerospace Futures 2019.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Colin Southwell

Video transcript

I’m a vertebrate ecologist, working in the seabird research group.

One of the species we’ve spent most of our time working on is the Adélie penguin.

Adélie penguins are really entertaining in terms of their personality. There’s always something going on. The colonies are always incredibly busy. There are fights going on, there’s lots of action.

Recently we’ve expanded our interest to some of the other seabird species – the flying seabird species, such as snow petrels, fulmars, Antarctic petrels, cape petrels.

We’re studying these seabirds so we can provide scientific information to inform policies and management actions for conserving not just the seabirds themselves, but the ocean and the land environments that they feed and breed in.

We send down a team every year to carry out a long-term monitoring program. Effectively we cover about 4000 kilometres of coastline.

So we might fly over in an aircraft and take photos, and count from photos. We might visit the sites on the ground and count directly there, or use photographs.

We’ve designed cameras that can operate remotely in the really harsh conditions of Antarctica. We’ve got them out right now across probably about 40 sites in East Antarctica, and the concept has been adopted by researchers in other areas of Antarctica. So right now there’s a network of probably over 200 cameras operating around Antarctica, giving us a circumpolar observation of what’s going on.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Virginia Andrews-Goff

Video transcript

I think for me the career highlight would be working alongside Antarctic Blue Whales. I’m a fairly small human and they’re a fairly massive animal and it was just mind blowing being alongside this massive wall of blue. Essentially you were dwarfed, it is bewildering.

I work on the movement of whales and I came to the Antarctic Division through my speciality in satellite tagging.

We work alongside the whales in a small boat. So the boat’s around six metres long and the tagger stands in the bow sprit. The tagger has a pneumatic rifle, a line thrower essentially, with a tag attached. If you pull up alongside a whale, and you’re within the right distance, and you know you can deploy the tag safely on the whale, then the tag gets blasted out of the air gun and implants in the whale.

In the Southern Ocean it can be really difficult and the driver plays a critical role. And often you’re working within a pod of whales. So you’ve got to be really mindful of not getting between mums and calves, and not getting between individuals.

Studying movement of an animal is really important because it gives you an insight into some really critical information about the habitat that the whale occupies. I can define foraging areas and look at what’s important about that area.

The flow on effects of knowing how whales target their prey, and how we can feed that information up the line to policy makers, is really huge.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Mr Rob King

Video transcript

It’s a job where you go to work to do something fascinating, that might have a really important profound effect, on not just Australia, but the world.

Krill are crustaceans. This one species of krill we work on, the Antarctic krill, is around 500 million tonnes potentially. So an enormous biomass.

My role is to do research on krill, both in the Southern Ocean and in aquaria here in Tasmania.

We’re focusing on the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on krill. What we've been able to show by doing research in the laboratory here, is that if we do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions, by the end of the century we’d expect to see the hatch rates of krill in some areas of the Southern Ocean drop to only 50 per cent of what they are now. And that worsens to about two per cent of the current hatch rate by the year 2300. That will then spin on to be an effect on the food source for penguins, seals, fish, great whales and seabirds.

Working in Antarctica is a real privilege. The amazement of being associated with wildlife that has no fear of you is an incredible experience. To have a minke whale punch through the ice, right next to you, and blow a few puffs of air, and spray right around you and then disappear again, to be replaced by an emperor penguin ten minutes later. I mean it’s an absolutely incredible experience.

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Midwinter swim 2019

Video transcript

Amy Chetcuti – Davis Station Expedition Mechanic

Doing the swim was exhilarating. You think you are in there for ages, but it was like three seconds, so survival instincts definitely kick in.

Simon Goninon – Davis Station Leader

Water temperature is around minus 2 degrees, maybe just shy of that. Air temperature today is actually pretty good, around minus 22/23, and not a lot of wind, maybe four or five knots. So it’s actually a pretty good day.

The day on station is just really important for people, whether its people who have been coming down here for multiple seasons, or whether its people, like myself who are down here for the first time. It’s just a really nice way to recognise this turning point for winter, for everyone to gather together, and mark it as a really special occasion.

What it’s actually like to actually take this plunge is a bit hard to describe. Your breath gets taken away, it’s just a completely foreign feeling. You’re in sub zero water, the whole fight or flight response kicks in and you really just want to get the hell out of the water. And to be honest it’s once you’re out that’s the worst thing, because you’re dropping 20 degrees getting out of the water and into the air temp.

Luke D’Anastasi – Davis Station Expedition Mechanic

This is my first time down here and swimming in Antarctica was pretty hectic, pretty cold, I felt like my body was on fire and my head was screaming get to the ladder and get out as quick as you possibly could.

Kieran Lusio – Davis Station Boiler Maker

It’s pretty intense, pretty invigorating. But the water is not too bad, it’s just the getting out bit that’s super cold. I really enjoyed it.

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Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Louise Emmerson

Video transcript

I lead the Seabird Research Group at the Australian Antarctic Division.

We have a particular focus on the Adélie penguin, because they're commonly abundant, and they're a really good indicator on what’s going on, both in the marine and the terrestrial environment. But we also work on a range of flying seabirds, including the beautiful snow petrel and southern fulmars, and skuas and those tiny little Wilson’s storm petrels.

So the primary goal of our work is to ensure that any fisheries activities in the Australian Antarctic Territory waters, are conducted in a sustainable way for the birds.

The birds are dependent on krill, they eat a lot of krill. And so we try and understand things like, where they're foraging, what they're eating, and what their overall requirements are.

I find being in the field is where I actually have the greatest insight on what’s going on for the birds. It provides so much more insight than just looking at the data in isolation.

Sometimes we do surveys, and we could either go out in to the colonies and count the birds by hand, or we might fly over them and then take photos, and then we can count them from there.

We also do a lot of collection of poo, and we do that to understand what they're eating, and also to understand what level of parasites and disease they might have in them.

I’m always aware that it’s such a privilege as well as a responsibility, to be doing the work that I do, to actually get some understanding about these birds, when we know that no one else has ever looked at that sort of thing before. 

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