Antarctic video gallery
Derek Stevens is bound for Macquarie Island
Video transcript
ANTARCTIC STATION LEADERS: SEASON 2021
DEREK STEVENS, Macquarie Island research station
I think the main thing for me is just the uniqueness of the experience, I think the big attraction is it’s pretty hard these days to find something which is different and unique and Macca definitely fits the bill.
New Zealand’s home for me, Australia’s home to me but I sort of moved to New Zealand eight years ago, I live in a town called New Plymouth which is on the west coast of the north island, and yeah, here I am.
The role’s predominantly around your people skills and your ability to lead and motivate and coach teams. I’ve been doing that for most of my life. I sort of started life in the military and in the last couple of years I’ve been working in engineering and construction, working in many different places and countries. It’s a pretty good background to do what I’m doing now.
The biggest thing to keep the community together is a sense of identity, you know it’s the sense of identity and shared purpose and us sort of agreeing how we work and relate and behave as a team, and it’s just making sure we have a nice strong team culture that we sort of build up in the good times and is there to help us when inevitably, things get a bit rougher at times throughout the year.
I was lucky enough to go sort of March last year, as a familiarisation trip. So I was involved in the resupply, I got to meet the team down there and have a good look around the island, which was fantastic to help me prepare for this season.
I think the main unique thing about Macca is just the wildlife. Just the immense depth and variety and the sheer numbers of the wildlife and being able to follow that through the seasons, we’re lucky to be able to have the ranger team and the wildlife rangers come with us. And we’ve already started getting briefed and just what we’re going to see on a month-by-month basis and I think for all the expeditioners, it’s one of the things they enjoy the most.
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Incoming Station Leader Esther Rodewald is looking forward to life on Davis
Video transcript
Esther Rodewald, Davis station leader
I’ve always wanted to do Davis. Davis was the one that came up first for me and there was a shift in personnel and I ended up going to Macquarie. So Davis has always been kind of on the radar as somewhere to go.
Starting with Macquarie Island which is sub-Antarctic but has the most incredible wildlife, so you feel like you’re living in a David Attenborough documentary every day, was just an extraordinary introduction. Antarctica’s different because it’s much more about the weather and the environment rather than the wildlife, but I’m interested to see how different Davis is to Mawson.
Always going somewhere different, it’s always different people so no two years are ever the same, even if you’re going to the same place.
It’s great when it works. Yeah it is a good feeling and it’s nice to see the relationships that they form separately and to see what holds on and what doesn’t when you come home.
You have to have hobbies and you have to be able to occupy yourself.
Knitting, reading, a few different hobbies to keep me through. And then the opportunity to actually get out into the field and be outside is so extraordinary that that’s quite motivating too.
It’s a people job for me. If everybody is down there to do their job and they’re all perfectly competent at doing their job, then for me it’s a lot more, pastoral care I think is the term they use. The emphasis is a lot more on the community. Summer’s busier, for station activities and for health and safety and all that kind of stuff, but over winter it’s a lot more, getting people through and getting the community through.
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Jason Ahrens is bound for Mawson research station
Video transcript
This will be my sixth season in Antarctica, so I’ve wintered previously at Macquarie Island, Davis three times and Casey once.
Mawson’s a place that I’ve been very keen to get to and I’ve put my hand up a couple of times to get there and haven’t managed to do that.
It’s going to be pretty exciting to go to Mawson for the first time and I’m really looking forward to getting out and seeing the Emperor penguin colonies.
We’ve got a good mix of returning expeditioners and quite seasoned expeditioners. We’ve got some expeditioners who’ve done multiple seasons, we’ve got a handful of expeditioners who, this is their second season. So they’re quite excited as well. And we’ve got five newbies. And they’re fantastic, they just bring so much energy to the place.
I love the winters, that’s where the challenge is. That’s where the remoteness is and that’s what’s inviting for me, is to challenge myself and to help others get through those periods.
For me it’s rewarding to see people achieve what they want to achieve personally when they go south. For people, that’s different. If I can give them the tools to do that, I walk away happy as well.
The family are great. They love it, they really support me 100% I send back regular emails with photos about what I’m up to.
They love the penguins. Not so much Gramps, but they love the penguins (laughs)
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Krill Matters
Video transcript
Text box: Scientists are voyaging into the Southern Ocean to measure Antarctic krill from all angles.
Text box: Using novel technologies they will estimate how much krill live in the waters off Mawson station.
Text box: Echosounders on RV Investigator can 'see' vast krill swarms under water and measure their 'biomass'.
Krill biologist – Rob King: So the principal method used in this voyage will be echo sounding the krill, and that's basically a glorified scientific fish finder. So we'll use those echo sounders to estimate the biomass of krill, that's how we measure it, but we also check that they really are krill by putting a net through these schools occasionally. And it also tells us about the type of krill that are in there, are they males, are they females, are they carrying eggs, what size are they. And all of this information refines our biomass estimate even further, and gives us much more confidence about that estimate.
Text box: For the first time, deep sea moorings will reveal how krill use the sea floor.
Rob King: There have been over 40 different occurrences now where krill have been recorded on the sea floor. Down as deep as three and a half kilometres deep. And we just don't know how important the seafloor benthic habitat is for krill. And if we're estimating biomass with an echosounder on the surface that can only see down 350 metres, how much of the population might we be missing all the way down to the sea floor?
Text box: The team will also study predators and ocean properties.
Text box: Their work will help set a precautionary catch limit for an expanding krill fishery.
Voyage Chief Scientist – So Kawaguchi: Setting precautionary catch limits, it's not only about krill biomass, but also understanding the relationship between the predators and the krill, and the environment. Because if you take too much krill, that may take too many krill for the food, for the predators, and that's the sort of thing that we really want to avoid.
Text box: The voyage will survey krill across more than 793,000 square kilometres.
So Kawaguchi: The last time that we surveyed in that area of Mawson coast is 2006, which is quite a long time ago, so we really have to update the understanding of that region so that we can, you know, update the precautionary catch limits and also the management strategy, to make sure that we have a good management system before the krill fisheries takes off again.
Text box: The research is critical to the sustainable management of krill and the predators that rely on them.
Rob King: Antarctic krill live in a unique environment, and they're perfectly adapted for it, but it's also one of the environments that is changing extremely fast with climate change at the moment. Laboratory research that we've done has shown that the acidification caused by dissolving carbon dioxide, has the potential to cause a 50% reduction in krill hatch rates by the end of this century if we did nothing to slow our carbon dioxide emissions. That would have a really important flow-on effect to biomass and how we managed the fishery. So understanding the environment, and the changes it can have on krill, is absolutely critical if we're going to manage this ecosystem to ensure the conservation of the species and those that depend upon it.
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