Antarctic video gallery
Insightful approach to aging Antarctic krill
Video transcript
Dr So Kawaguchi: This is very exciting. Knowing the age of krill is a very very long research questions — more than 50 years, because krill doesn’t have any hard parts that record their age. To find out their age, we used eye stalks.
What we did was to slice those eye stalks into really thin slices and then polish it, and then count the annual bands that have been created. The concept is the same as the annual tree rings.
Krill is the fundamental food source for most of the higher predators, like whales, penguins, seals, in the Antarctic Ocean.
If there’s any change in krill populations, that will certainly have a fundamental impact in the structure of the ecosystem itself. So it’s really important to know how old the krill are, because that will be used for the fisheries management. We can actually retrospectively go in to preserve samples, like about a hundred years ago, and then compare with the recent krill — we'll be able to better predict what may happen in this changing environment into the future.
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Nuyina cranes and funnels
Video transcript
Text box: Nuyina’s two 55 tonne cranes have been installed.
Text box: The external cladding of the funnels is lowered into place.
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Under the sea ice in Antarctica
Video transcript
Glenn Johnstone — biologist
We’re diving under the sea ice in O’Brien Bay, south of Casey research station in East Antarctica.
This is a thriving, colourful world filled with sponges, sea cucumbers, sea spiders, worms, algae and starfish.
Here we are at 30m below the surface, where the water temperature is a chilly −1.5°C year round, and the sea is covered by ice that is a metre and a half thick for more than 10 months of the year. This ice provides protection from Antarctica’s harsh weather conditions and a stable marine environment that allows biodiversity to flourish.
It is important biodiversity like you see here that is the focus of our research into the effects of climate change and ocean acidification.
Here at the Australian Antarctic Division, we are working hard to ensure the continent remains valued, protected and understood.
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Flying Krill video
Video transcript
Rob King — krill biologist
The research we’re doing is all about understanding what’s actually happening in the Southern Ocean. While we have closed the life cycle in the lab, and we can rear the eggs and the offspring in the lab, it could be different using eggs from the actual Southern Ocean that have received the nutrition that the animals are receiving in the Southern Ocean as opposed to the lab population.
If we can catch krill going into Casey station on the Aurora Australis, we’ll unload them into IBCs which are 1000-litre bulk liquid carriers. When the flight comes in, they’ll be taken out of here, loaded onto sleds, and then wrapped in a thermal blanket so that they won’t freeze on the way up to the airport. They’ve got to make a three-hour drive on a sled up into temperatures that are minus-20 or minus-30, so this is going way out of the comfort zone for krill, and then try and fly those back using the C-17. We return krill to Australia from the Southern Ocean within about a day-and-a-half of being caught. That’ll bring perfect quality eggs to the laboratory in Hobart, which is something we’ve never had before; wild reared eggs.
We need to study these krill because they’re the principal part of the Antarctic ecosystem. They’re like the keystone species. They feed on 250 species of plants in the ocean, the phytoplankton, and then they pass that energy up to all the charismatic megafauna; the things like whales and seals and penguins. If something happens to the krill population and they’re not there, all of these vertebrate predators are affected, so it’s very important to understand it, especially with climate change occurring now.
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Impact of East Antarctic glacial melt on sea-level rise
Video transcript
[Dr Ben Galton-Fenzi, Glaciologist]
We’ve got six weeks of time down there early in the season and we’re going to be flying out and deploying autonomous, phase-sensitive radio echo-sounding instruments and GPS on the surface of the Totten to measure the flow of the Totten, how fast it’s melting and hopefully how that’s going to be evolving over a season.
The Totten Glacier is one of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica. It drains the Aurora sub-glacial basin. A substantial proportion of that is grounded below sea level. It holds about 3.5 metres of potential sea-level rise.
Recent satellite observations have shown that the Totten Glacier has been changing. The surface elevation of it has actually been lowering over time and we now also understand that it’s very sensitive to oceanic conditions and so what we want to try to do is get a baseline understanding about how fast the glacier is flowing, what that variability is and then therefore we can project forward in time about how we expect it to change into the future.
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