The Endurance, the ship I was due to travel on to Antarctica sprung a leak before Christmas! I thought my Antarctic dreams were over....until BAS found me a place on one of their ships, hurrah!! I leave on Sunday, this week has been a little hectic - last minute packing, thinking up new experiments and ordering materials - the cruise plan is slightly different on this ship so I've had to adjust my sampling strategy. We sail from the Falkland Islands to Halley, one of the British bases on the Antarctic coast, and back again. I'll be making measurements of iodine compounds in the air and seawater from the ship, when we get to the sea ice I'll make cores in the ice and analyse the biology and chemistry, and when we reach Halley I'll set up a chamber on the ice shelf and measure iodine emissions.
Check out http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/living_and_working/research_ships/rrs_ernest_shackleton/index.php
to see what the ship's like, it's called the Ernest Shackleton, named after one of the early Antarctic explorers. One of Shackleton's trips to Antarctica resulted in the ship getting stuck in sea ice and the crew were stranded for more than a year, hopefully that won't happen to us! Bizarrely Shackleton's ship was also called the Endurance, I don't think it's such a lucky name!
