Tag: antarctic science

As Antarctic travel specialists, we know just how much people love penguins. Who doesn’t? They’re animals so ridiculously charismatic that they could have been designed in a laboratory for marketing purposes alone. These scene stealers sometimes leave little room for some of Antarctica’s other wildlife, including its seals – no matter how picturesque they can […]

Science and Antarctic exploration have gone hand in hand since the first people began  visiting the continent in the early 19th century. Expeditions, like those of Captain Scott, undertook extensive scientific programmes alongside the headline-grabbing attempts to reach the South Pole. Since the Second World War, many countries have operated scientific research stations in the […]

One of the things we love most about expedition cruising in Antarctica is helping travellers take part in citizen science projects where they can contribute to active research projects. One of the projects closest to our hearts is Happywhale, which allows travellers to log sightings of humpbacks and other whales to create a global database […]

It’s March on the Antarctic Peninsula, at the tail end of the expedition cruising season. Winter is in the air, with the days getting shorter in a blaze of terrific sunsets. On shore, the penguins are undergoing their annual moult in anticipation of spending the next few months at sea, and everywhere it seems, there […]

If you take an ice cube out of your freezer, you’ll see that it’s full of tiny bubbles: microscopic pockets of air that were trapped in the water the last time you refilled the ice cube tray, a week or a few months ago. Pluck a piece of floating glacial ice out of the water […]

If you were looking down from space, it would appear that every winter the Antarctic continent more than doubles in size. That’s because the ocean around it freezes over creating a vast curtain of sea ice. It’s one of the planet’s most extraordinary seasonal cycles and it plays an important but little understood role in […]

Antarctica is often closer than you think. From the fish in your supermarket to the supplements in your health food store, traces of its most important animal are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Krill, the tiny crustacean at the centre of the Antarctic food web eaten by everything from gentoo penguins to whales, is being […]

When it comes to Antarctic wildlife, penguins, seals and whales grab all the attention but there is one species that visitors are unlikely to see but without whom the entire ecosystem would be vastly different. To celebrate World Krill Day on August 11 we spoke to krill biologist Dr Kim Bernard, who is currently over-wintering […]