Antarctic video gallery
Solar Farm at Casey
Video transcript
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
Video transcript
Text on screen:
The seven-week science voyage to East Antarctica on RV Investigator has been a major success.
Searching 200,000km2 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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Renewal of Antarctic research stations
Video transcript
Text on screen:
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
Video transcript
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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Ice runway reopens
Video transcript
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
Video transcript
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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In the Director’s Chair
Video transcript
This job for me is an extraordinarily exciting adventure. It seems to be a bit of a culmination to a long career in activities that all lead to the Antarctic Division. I was an army officer. I graduated and went into amphibious logistics. I went there specifically because I wanted to go to the Antarctic.
I spent a year operating in and out of the southern oceans and the Antarctic continent — a remarkable, character-forming experience. Then I spent nearly 16 years running small and large airports in Australia, and then went into the botanic gardens area.
There is going to have to be a significant element of change in the Division going forward, and the change is driven by this remarkable window of opportunity that we’ve got now. A significant investment by the government in the Division, in providing additional capabilities, a new icebreaker, the overland traverse capability, the rebuild of Macquarie Island, the aviation capability. They are amazing investments. The change will come for us in managing both those new capabilities and delivering our existing operations.
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Blue whales, krill and poo power
Video transcript
Dr Elanor Bell, Voyage Deputy Chief Scientist:
Blue whales generally eat about three tonnes of krill a day and therefore they go down to Antarctica in the summer months when the ice is cleared out where they can find these huge swarms of krill, and eat them.
It’s completely about how krill and whales interact. So we’re going to be looking at the krill swarms themselves, and in a world first we’re going to be looking at the the characteristics of those swarms, how big they are, how deep they are.
Then we're going to look at the blue whales and how they’re behaving around that krill, which of those swarms they’re targeting.
And so we’re hoping to actually record this in a world first, because it’s something scientists have talked about and theorised about for a long time, and if we can show it in the real world, it will be fantastic.
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