This post is brought to you courtesy of the rivalry and camraderie between Te Papa staff who have science degrees, and those who have arts and business studies degrees! Earlier this week I was invited over to the cold store at Te Papa’s Natural Environment research centre to document theRead more
In the early hours of the 25th, we were awoken and called to the bridge to see the biggest wall of ice that I will probably ever see. The Ross Ice Shelf, and enormous slab faced Ice sheet stretching over 700km from Cape Crozier to the Bay of Whales. TheRead more
It’s our fifth day in the Auckland Islands and so far we have been offered only one day with calm winds. We have become quite good at the game of moving the boat from one end of the island to the other, just to find some protection from the wind.Read more
Not Lower and Upper Hutt, but instead the story of two attempts at the pole. That of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the voyage of the Nimrod, and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Terra Nova expedition. We awoke to another extraordinary day at anchor off Cape Royds. The lunar landscape,Read more
Scott Base, as South as we go: In a place where the sun sets at 12.30 and rises at 2.30 sights just get more and more incredible. At 1am the sea around the boat started to freeze, the water became grainy and and looked like grease, slowing as theRead more
It has been a few days since our last update. During this time, we have been island hopping on the way down to the Auckland Islands. After refuelling and restocking the food cupboards, we departed Bluff on a lovely sunny summer’s day, hoping that the good weather will to stayRead more
After 6 days at sea, we finally sighted land, Franklin Island, with it’s glacial snow cap looked like Eden after the roller coaster ride of the Ross Sea. Franklin Island is home to a large colony of Adelie penguins and is the hangout for a few Weddell seals. Weddell sealsRead more
Te Papa Research Fellow Patrick Brownsey was recently contacted about a population near Levin of the very rare Ophioglossum petiolatum. Ophioglossum are odd looking ferns, as befits a common name of “adder’s tongue ferns”. We don’t have a picture of O. petiolatum (stalked adder’s tongue fern), but the related O.Read more
As we entered the Ross Sea we lef the band of large ice bergs behind us, and entered a fairly calm Ross sea. I kept a morning vigil on the bridge looking for whales. it was not until mid afternoon that we saw our first, a small and rapid antarcticRead more
Heading south from Macquarie Island we have had some relatively calm seas, pretty remarkable for this part of the world. Leaving the Roaring Forties which gave us a pretty slow rolling sea the fifties gave us a small taste of what it had to offer with some mild five-metre seas. PassingRead more
Day 6: last stations off the Otago Peninsula sampled. We are ready to move towards the Auckland Islands. We have been blessed with good weather conditions for the last six days which allowed us to complete quickly our diversity survey between 50m and 1200m depth off the Otago Peninsula. WeRead more
Titi Island is a 32 hectare slab of schistose tuff and sandstone tilted upwards towards the north, with a moderately steep forested slope opening up to a breathtaking façade of high cliffs overlooking Cook Strait. Shearwater surveys on the island in January provided an opportunity to record local plant communities.Read more
We arrived at Macquarie Island – the sheltered waters in the lee of the island provided a welcome relief from the open ocean we had crossed between here and the Auckland Islands. The cool subantarctic summer did not detract from the spectacular wildlife – elephant seals and penguins everywhere! Until 1920Read more
Day 2: sampling off Otago Peninsula. Our survey onboard the MV Tranquil Image has started after a rough transit from Wellington to Dunedin. After a very successful day 1 deploying camera and traps in the shallow (50 and 100 m), today we have started exploring the deep canyons of theRead more
I visited Enderby in 1995 as part of the DOC Sealion project. The project is still going today. Sadly the most noticeable thing on my return was the much smaller numbers of sealions and pups. It is very saddening to hear from Louise Chilvers (DOC’s sealion biologist) that the populationRead more
