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More conflict with the pack ice down here. The problem is the bathymetry that is of interest is lurking under the cloak of the overlying sea ice, with the occasional tantalising open water gap that is only just large enough to do a trawl in. Sometimes. And then it’s all on the move anyway, so the discovery of an open water area tends to be a fleeting thing. So plenty of quick thinking and adapting to conditions has been going on over the last 24 hours. Plus some hair pulling and gnashing of teeth too. Our shipboard data display system, known as “Noodles”, displays a GPS track in the last 48 hours that looks just like it’s host name: a pile of noodles. It’s a tangled web we’ve woven... A few wins, with a couple of successful beam trawls yesterday and early this morning, returning more interesting biological samples to the wet lab for eager sorting, classifying, and photographing. And a few losses too, with some gear snarl-ups on some rough ground, and a tangled net or two. Overall, however, the marine science team remains positive. We’ve travelled further west, to what we hope will be a more ice-free working area, but conditions are so changeable here at the margin between open water and pack-ice that it’s a bit hard to predict what we may encounter next.
Regards, Doug, Aaron & Margaret
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.