Antarctic video gallery
Natural born krillers video
Video transcript
The Aurora Australis returned from Antarctica today with some very special passengers…
25 expeditioners, and ten thousand young Antarctic krill.
Krill are collected once a year in the Southern Ocean.
Once in Hobart, 200 kilos of party ice keep the krill cool at zero degrees.
Their new home is a unique lab at the Australian Antarctic Division.
Here we learn how they feed, grow, and deal with ocean acidification.
These krill are around a year old, and can live for up to ten years.
[end transcript]
Super-cooled clouds
Video transcript
Australian Antarctic Division Principal Research Scientist
Dr Andrew Klekociuk
It uses a laser beam to measure the height and the properties of clouds. The thing that we're most interested in is whether clouds are liquid or solid, whether they consist of water droplets or ice crystals.
That means that they influence the radiation coming from the sun in a different way to what we see in the Northern Hemisphere
When we calculate what the temperature of the Southern Ocean is in our model, we find it’s higher than we actually observe. We think that the liquid clouds in the Southern Hemisphere are implicated in causing that difference.
[end transcript]
Antarctic ice mission seeks mystery molecules that scrub sky
Video transcript
Dr David Etheridge, CSIRO atmospheric physicist:
Law Dome is, I’d say unique, I don’t think we have any other site on the planet, either in Greenland or in Antarctica, that has these qualities. And so it provides us with an almost perfect place to go looking for these long-term changes in the atmospheric composition.
[end transcript]
Underwater cameras light the way for Southern Ocean conservation
Video transcript
Tim Lamb:
All around the Antarctic there are areas known as vulnerable marine ecosystems, and we're trying to find them, so that the fishing industry can avoid fishing on them.
[end transcript]
Grand Designs: Macca
Video transcript
Adrian Young — Project Manager
We’ve selected a site just to the south of the existing station and it’s on ground outside of the storm surge area that we currently experience. But it’s also on good ground that’s away from known nesting site, from any of the elephant seals and penguins in the area.
Travis Thom — Strategic Infrastructure Project Lead
The reason we’ve had to make a virtual tour is that it’s really difficult to get to Macquarie Island. There’s only really one ship that goes down each year to do an annual resupply. There’s also fantastic opportunities to really get a sense of some of the science that’s carried out on the island, whether it be going inside one of the science laboratories or getting an insight into the radionuclide station.
The current station is made up of 48 buildings that are scattered across the isthmus. What we’re proposing for the new station is to reduce the number of buildings down to between 15 and 20.
[end transcript]
Virtual Space Station
Video transcript
[music]
Dr JEFF AYTON — CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, AAD: A mission to Mars is analogous to an Antarctic mission. Australia’s Antarctic stations are isolated and confined and they're an extreme environment. We are isolated for up to nine months of the year, so that is about the longest that people are isolated in a real-life situation on Earth. There’s not a whole lot of evidence around how to deal with teams in Antarctica or in other extreme environments.
[music]
PROF. JAY C. BUCKEY Jnr — PHYSICIAN, ASTRONAUT, GEISEL SCHOOL OF MEDICAL SCHOOL AT DARTMOUTH: And what VR allows you to do is to immerse people in different natural settings, so they can be in the Bavarian Alps, or they can be on a beach in Australia, and there’s evidence that exposure to nature which we all like and seek out, can be restorative and that it can help people to relieve stress, it can also help perhaps improve people’s attention and mental functioning.
NATE PAYNE, MECHANIC, MAWSON STATION: Best bit about the virtual reality experience is the 360 effect. I play a lot of games on my xbox and the VR is very different because you're interactive with it, you get to look around.
PROF. JAY C. BUCKEY Jnr — PHYSICIAN, ASTRONAUT, GEISEL SCHOOL OF MEDICAL SCHOOL AT DARTMOUTH: There aren’t that many people who live in challenging, isolated, and confined environments like this, so the information we get from them is so valuable because it tells us about how people in this kind of environment would use a tool like this.
[end transcript]