Antarctic video gallery
Dave Buller station leader
Video transcript
I was previously a station leader in Casey in 2011. It does get under your skin it's an amazing and dynamic working environment down there with so many challenges.
My background is predominantly defence. 30-plus years in army. In actual fact when i went down to Casey in 2011 I was seconded by army to work with the aid in a non-military capacity and I guess you know as part of that that's where the love of Antarctica came into fruition.
Post leaving the defence in 2019 I decided to start up my own photography business which has been bad timing with COVID that didn't quite work out as well as what I would have liked and I think what I've missed the most is working with people from such diverse backgrounds professions and or age groups and seeing those people come together to work on common and unified goals.
Going to be an exceptionally busy summer but that's you know that's why we're here really really keen to value add and to make a difference and and part of that is I think you get to see the excitement from the expeditioners as you're preparing for this as well they know they're going to be part of something quite special.
The million year ice core coupled with the deep traverse project coupled with the deep field camp that we're hoping to establish, just getting that into station is a huge logistical challenge probably far surpassed by anything that the AAD has attempted before.
It's an amazing place it's the wild frontier unpredictable you know they call it the A-factor but it is really an amazing place.
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Dani Yannopoulos
Video transcript
I'm Dani Yannopoulos and I'm going into Davis station as a station leader.
Well I've been with the Australian Border Force for 21 years and something I never thought I would do. I joined as I said 21 years ago as a you know APS-3 in payroll and I've worked my way around the organisation doing some of the most amazing things you know from corporate through to regulatory working with the cargo industry and the supply chain and understanding the machinations of that through to operations you know being surrounded and involved in things like people smuggling.
Home for me originally is Canberra but I haven't lived much there in the last eight years or so I've been in Sydney and Melbourne and Malaysia so real change of temperature from 33 degrees every day in Malaysia down south to, you know minus 30.
Ultimately we're down on the ice to support science and protect the environment and to do that you need scientists but what you also need is a whole bunch of tradies to keep those you know to keep that station running so my job is to make sure that everybody has the environment that they need to deliver on their projects keep the station running and harmonious and having a great time.
You know I'm a little bit awestruck by the people who have been down south so many times and you've heard so many stories of people who've been there 20-plus times but the wonderful thing is that everybody went there for the first time once and that's a really great shared experience.
Obviously we're going to miss my family and friends but I'm absolutely going to miss my hairdresser for sure.
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Caring for krill
Video transcript
Krill biologist Rob King: So aquarium systems on Antarctic vessels have traditionally been cold rooms with small aquarium systems recirculating within them, and when you get back to your home port, typically the animals taken off in nets into buckets of cold water, packed in ice and trucked to their new home aquarium on land.
That has all sorts of problems with it because there's multiple handling of the animals and also it's quite a big work health and safety issue to move tonnes of water in buckets through doorways and ships. What we did was we turned that concept around and went to a much more logistically streamlined system, where we built the aquariums for Nuyina in containerised laboratory.
AAD Instrument Workshop Manager Steve Whiteside: We've basically designed this in a containerised system so we can increase the capacity, the safety and the ability to transport our krill in pristine health.
It allows us to safely remove the aquarium container from the ship, crane it directly onto a truck and then bring it to our Kingston aquarium where we can safely and efficiently unload the krill.
Rob King: So this removes all of the manual handling for humans, it removes the double handling for specimens, and provides much more continuity in the water chemistry control, oxygen control, and so forth, for the specimens in the tanks as well.
Steve Whiteside: We modeled the entire internals of the container in 3D CAD and that allowed us to work out if it could actually fit in the very small space. And then the construction and fit out was done here in our AAD workshops.
We have two lab containers that are configurable at different temperatures and one container for returning our specimens back to our research facility here in Hobart, and the other is for conducting experiments on the ship.
Rob King: So for the past 20 years we've been running an Antarctic marine research aquarium in Kingston, Tasmania, and that's allowed us to answer questions about Antarctic krill
At very short notice we've been able to do research on them because we have a captive population that represents wild krill.
So putting an aquarium on board the Nuyina that is much more efficient and much more easy to operate with a small number of people, and much more easy to bring the samples back to shore, is going to increase our capability to run that sort of research on krill.
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