My name is Henry Stanislaw and I am from the USA. Together with Maria Puig Ribas from Spain, Nora Hasselbach and Vincent Butty from Switzerland, Alexandra Le Dily from France and Carlien Wolmarans from South Africa, I joined the Young Explorer Program within Mike Horn’s PANGAEA Expedition. This program is created to introduce young adults to exploration, but also to scientific working and learning about the environmental conditions and threats. The first trip in this program took us to Antarctica. Mike is starting his expedition here, where he will walk alone from the Peninsula to the South Pole and back. For all of us this is the first contact with a polar environment. We started in Ushuaia / Tierra del Fuego, South ...

The Arctic has always been a difficult place to do any extensive monitoring and data collection. Until recently, there have only been a limited number of projects that have taken any significant, long-term, and coordinated observations of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent bodies of water. This is due in part to the extensive sea ice cover that persists over Arctic waters for a good part of the year, which makes it difficult to conduct ship surveys or deploy weather buoys and moorings to measure deep water currents. Arctic ROOS (Regional Ocean...

My name is Lucia Simion, I am a science writer and a photographer, specialized in the Antarctic. I love that continent because I always liked snow, it’s a magic element of nature, like wind, fire and ice. All these elements are to be found in Antarctica. But there is another reason too: As a child I used to live close by the home of Commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, explorer of the Antarctic as well as the Arctic. One year ago, in November 2007, I was deployed to the Ice to cover the ANDRILL SMS international project. ANDRILL stands for Antarctic Geological Drilling and SMS for Southern McMurdo Sound; the project has dr...

Sooty particles emitted during the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels (petroleum, coal), biofuels, and biomass (wood, animal dung, etc.) can do more than just create unsightly pollution and provoke respiratory problems. Known within the scientific community as black carbon, research and modelling conducted in recent years shows that this dark-coloured aerosol has been playing a significant role in climate warming through its absorption of solar radiation. Its impact is heaviest in the cryosphere, where its presence can reduce snow albedo and can lead to faster melting of snow on land and on sea ice. ...

On the occasion of the 31st Antarctic Treaty Consultative meeting held in Kiev, Ukraine, from the 2nd to the 13th of June 2008, SciencePoles looks at one of the lasting legacies of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08: A series of high-tech scientific research stations recently completed, or in the process of being constructed in Antarctica. Never since the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 has the frozen continent seen suc...

By Lucia Simion Far away from traffic jams, polluted cities and rat races, one thousand people are getting ready to live a fantastic adventure on the most remote continent of the world: They are the over-wintering population of Antarctica. Inhabiting some 35 different permanent stations scattered across a continent twice as large as Europe, they will be alone on the ice, where they will experience the polar night, the austral auroras, the blizzards, the solitude and the confinement. They will be more isolated than the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as it is very hard to be evacuated from Antarctica during the polar night. One of these stations is Concordia, where the overwintering began on February 1, 2008 for a crew of thirteen people fr...

Submitted February 17, 2008: Over the past few days we have been working our way south into the lower Ross Sea and then eastwards towards 180°, paralleling the Ross Ice Shelf. During this period Tangaroa got to its southernmost point ever at 76° 52.164’S 179° 55.856’ W. As expected, the main controller of all our activities has been the weather. Heavy snow showers earlier in this period gave everything a white coating, but once the snow cleared and the clouds broke, we had good (but distant) views of Ross Island, with the mountains of the Asgaard and Olympic Ranges as a backdrop. ...

Submitted February 13, 2008: Now that we are in the open waters of the Inner Ross Sea, the sampling program can start in earnest. In the typical style of all marine surveys, some of the gear gave us problems on the first deployment but once teething problems were sorted everything worked as we wanted. As expected, the weather has already had an impact. From a relatively calm sea we suddenly expe...

Which way did the camera go first: north or south? The Antarctic edged out her northern counterpart by only a handful of years. James Clark Ross' narrative of his 1839-43 expedition does not reveal any photographic outfit in its inventory, but one of his medical men later noted just such an apparatus for posterity. Dr. Joseph D. Hooker was lecturing about the historic expedition at the Royal Institution of South Wales in 1846 when he offered these words: I believe no instruments, however newly invented, was omitted, even down to an apparatus for daguerreotyping and talbotyping, and we left England provided with a register for every known phenomenon of nature, though certainly not qualified to cope with them all. The responsibility for any photographic ...

"Never give up your dreams". Jean-Louis Etienne — the French doctor and explorer — knows more than anyone what these words mean; for four years he has been involved with the Total Pole Airship project, which aims to fly a blimp over the Arctic ocean and the North Pole, measuring the thickness of the sea ice with an instrument designed by the Alfred-Wegener Institute. Last Friday, October 12, Jean-Louis Etienne could finally smile. The expedition blimp was inaugurated during a ceremony in Marseille — it was christened Total Pole Airship, after the sponsor Total. The blimp arrived in France from Russia (whe...