Antarctic video gallery
Anzac Day Casey research station 2018
Video transcript
Casey Station Leader — Commander Rebecca Jeffcoat
On the 25th of April Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day the anniversary of the 1915 landing of British-led troops at Gallipoli.
It’s very special to me to be commemorating Anzac Day in Antarctica.
There’s a great tradition of Antarctic explorers who have served in Defence Forces in times of conflict including Mawson and Wilkins and Hurley, and we'll remember those men today.
And in turn the qualities of Anzacs who served and who we remember today such as teamwork and mateship, courage, self-sacrifice and self-discipline.
They are all qualities that I see in the expeditioners who are with me in Antarctica at the moment and it’s a great honour to be spending Anzac Day with those Australians and New Zealanders so far from home.
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Noisy sperm whales forage to the beat
Video transcript
BRIAN MILLER (Whale Acoustician): We've just conducted the first long-term study of sperm whales in the Antarctic. We've used acoustic listening devices to monitor for their distinctive clicks.
Sperm whales are incredibly vocal animals. They make sounds 80% of the time that they're underwater and they make these echolocation clicks typically once per second.
Sperm whales really aren’t so much singers as they are the rhythm section. I’m always very excited to have a look and listen to the data that come back each year and there’s always a possibility of hearing something that’s never been heard before.
MARK MILNES (Electronics Design Engineer): So we've developed a long-term acoustic recorder that gets deployed on the sea floor and basically listens to the sounds of the ocean for 12 to 15 months at a time.
It’s two-and-a-half meters high, it’s got a hydrophone on the top that detects the ocean noise, it’s made up of three flotation spheres so we can get it back quickly, and the bottom sphere has got all the electronics in there including the SD cards where all the data gets stored.
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Icy runway gets face-lift
Video transcript
Steve Wall: We'll be taking about 300,000 cubic metres of ice out of the northern runway edge to lower the height of the runway.
We will probably be doing roughly 10 flights over the season, five at the beginning and five towards the end, to keep the capacity to open up the stations and get people in at the beginning of the season, and we will still of course have our shipping program, so that will give us access throughout the season.
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LEGO model of new icebreaker to tour Australia
Video transcript
When one of our exhibitions was down in Hobart a couple of years back I was down by the docks there and there was this big red ship — really unusual looking — and you know they were loading supplies and containers and all sorts of bits and pieces on it — basically the Australian supply ship for Antarctica.
So how we take all of our scientific gear and food and supplies to all of the team that are down in Antarctica.
It’s basically been the lifeblood to Antarctica forever.
And of course it’s gotten older and it’s had a really tough life and all that kind of stuff so it’s time to replace it so years ago they knew about the replacement of this ship and they started a tender process.
So I contacted the Australian Antarctic Division and a fantastic team of wonderful dedicated people down there gave me lots of information — photos, pictures, plans — all sorts of really cool stuff about this amazing purpose-built ship designed for Australian Antarctic operations.
We’ve recreated that in Lego and brought it to life by cutting it in half so you can see everything that’s happening with it.
All the scientists are in there doing crazy stuff. You know they’ve hacked away an alien in an ice cube that they’re found down in Antarctica and we've got lots and lots of jokes and fun stuff as well as obviously the serious scientific side to it.
It’s an icebreaker and this thing can travel through metres of compacted ice and ice floe.
It’s the weight that comes down on the ice that causes it to break.
So we’ve wanted to show that off and to do that we've basically got the ship cresting on a wave with its bow out of the water, some huge Antarctic seas, which allows us to show the front of the ship.
So that’s kind of how we’ve tried to bring it to life.
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