The BELARE team celebrates Christmas in Antarctica as construction of a new geomagnetic observatory continues and a team heads to the Romnoes ​Nunatak ​to repair a radio relay.

​A very Antarctic Christmas

The team at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station celebrated Christmas as they always do, with a plenty of good food and cheer. With an excellent dinner and our plastic Christmas tree adding a bit of ​ambiance, we had a festive evening.

The two cooks, David Rigotti and Riet Van de Velde, teamed up to prepare an excellent Christmas dinner. We were spoiled with tuna carpaccio as a starter, turkey as a main dish, fresh vegetables that had been flown in on the last flight into the station, and a delicious cake for dessert​. It was so good we didn’t want to waste any of it. We’re still going through the leftovers several days later​!

After dinner, everyone sat around and told ​stories of their experiences over the years, in Antarctica, the Arctic, or other interesting and remote parts of the globe they’d travelled to. Many of us also spent time Skyping with family and loved ones back home, as one tends to do on Christmas. With Belgians, Germans, a Brit, a Swiss, an Albanian and several Canadians taking part, it was a truly international evening.

We had been working too hard to have any energetic party. But at least being in Antarctica, we were able to have a white Christmas!

Geomagnetic observatory takes shape

The observatory the BELARE team ​is building for the GEOMAG project has been progressing nicely. The concrete support columns have been poured, the wooden support frame completed, and the fiberglass shell that will protect the instruments from the elements has been has been mounted. Everything will be ready for when Jean Rasson from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium's Geophysical Center arrives to install all the instruments in a few weeks.

It’s certainly not easy to mix and pour concrete in subzero temperatures. You have to pre-heat the cement mix and sand, ​then pour the water into the cement mixer while it’s still warm. But this is the same team that managed to build an entire research station in much colder and windier conditions, so they've got the experience!
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For gravel to mix into the cement​, the builders added some loose rocks that were collected from a​ moraine next to a glacier not far form the station. It’s quite handy not to have to ship gravel in from elsewhere in the world if you’ve got a natural moraine with glacial debris nearby!

As everything in the observatory must be non-magnetic so as not to interfere with the ​instruments' ​readings, only fiberglass, aluminium, wood, and A4 grade stainless steel ​can be used in the observatory’s construction. The concrete pillars were reinforced with stainless steel bars when they were being poured. However, the builders had fixed the bars to each other using wire to keep them in place. Although the wires were stainless steel, there were last-minute doubts about them being non-magnetic A4 grade stainless steel, so it was decided to pull them out. Ilir Berisha had to put his arm into the wet cement all the way up to his shoulder to tear out the suspected wires. Everyone had huge smiles on their faces. It was a funny sight to see!

Repairing the radio relay

On Sunday, a party of electricians together with some strong guys from the Princess Elisabeth crew headed out to Romnoes Nunatak ​60 km from the station on the way to the coast ​to repair the radio antenna relay. They made the four-hour drive on skidoos, hauling with them a lot of materials​ to make repairs.​ They took several 32 kg batteries to replace the ones that had likely frozen when the antenna stopped working.​

The radio relay is very important for field communications in Antarctica. It allows teams in the field within a radius of 100 km to communicate with the station using a hand-held radio rather than a Iridium satellite phone, which can be very expensive.

When the team arrived at Romnoes Nunatak, they discovered that the antenna had snapped in two,​ and ​the solar panels powering it had blown away. The poles that had secured the solar panels to the rock had even been ripped up. ​And of course, the batteries, not in use, had frozen solid. A​ll this damage was likely due to a very strong storm ​that happened over the austral winter. It must have been a true force of nature!

The team replaced the frozen batteries and erected a sturdy wind turbine to power the antenna, which they hope will be able to withstand the elements. They ​spent a good part of the day on the Romnoes Nunatak before making the four-hour trek back to the station, where we found them very tired and a lot more tan than when they left.

But the work for them isn’t over. They’ll have to return to Romnoes ​N​unatak to replace the entire antenna, which they weren’t expecting would be necessary when they first went.

There’s always work to be done in Antarctica!

Jos Van Hemelrijck recounts the time he spent visiting an emperor penguin colony on the coast of the King Baudoin Ice Shelf with members of the BELARE team.

One the trail of penguin poo

Two years ago, Alain Hubert and Kristof Soete made headlines as the first humans to confirm the existence of a newly discovered colony of emperor penguins.

In a 2009 study, two scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) discovered potential locations for a number of new emperor penguin colonies around the coast of Antarctica that had previously not been known to science. Using satellite imagery, Peter Fretwell and Phil Tratham spotted from space stains left by penguin poo on the ice. Where there’s penguin poo, this is a strong indication that penguin colony exists.

One of the proposed new emperor penguin colonies was supposed to be in the vicinity of the King Baudoin Ice Shelf. Alain had read about Fretwell and Tratham’s study, and took advantage of few free days during the 2012-13 season when he was already out on the ice shelf to see if he could confirm the location of the colony. After a bit of searching, he managed to find a thriving colony, validating Fretwell and Tratham’s observations.

Alain returned last season to check on how the colony was doing, and this season he went back for a third visit. I had the opportunity to go with him this time!

Time to see the penguins!

The penguin colony is situated at the eastern end of the King Bauduoin Ice Shelf, a mere 100 kilometres from the Drill Camp where the IceCon scientists from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) were working this season.

One day when the weather was calm, Alain decided it was time to pay the emperors a new visit to see how they where doing. I was invited to go along, together with mechanic Kristof Soete and field guide Christophe Berclaz.

I was thrilled!

The skidoo drive was long and tedious. The sky was overcast. But I could care less.

At 9:00 in the evening we arrived at a waypoint marked with a red flag on a bamboo pole. It indicated the entrance to the valley where the penguins live. Unlike valleys back home, this valley was made entirely of ice. Known as a rift in scientific terminology, the valley forms due to a disturbance in the flow of the ice shelf caused by some obstacle at the bottom, such as a projecting piece of rock that splits the ice shelf right where it reaches the sea.

The lack of sunshine made it to hard to distinguish any features in the snow. It took us more than an hour to pick out a safe way down the steep slopes of the rift. We even unloaded the extra fuel cans we brought to make our skidoos lighter for the final plunge.

Then suddenly we found ourselves driving across sea ice, passing between 30 metre-high walls on our left and right formed by the broken ice shelf. In spite of the grey weather, the scenery was spectacular.

A healthy colony

After two kilometres, we saw the first sign of the penguin colony: a brownish line on the horizon in the distance. When we drew nearer, we began to see individual dots. We stopped our skidoos not far from the colony, and all of a sudden, we could hear the din.

Thousands of penguin chicks where squawking, yakking and flapping their little wings vigorously as if they wanted to fly. The air was heavy with the smell of fish.

We stood still for some time, watching in awe.

Taking special care not to come in contact with the penguins or disturb them, we ventured towards the edge of the penguin rookery - where young chicks are nursed.

The penguin chicks paid no attention to our presence. They looked cute in their brown down, which made them look like they were wearing a fur coat. They tottered about clumsily with a funny rolling gait that made me smile.

We spotted a few adults, although not as many as I had expected.

“This is a nursery,” Alain explained. “The chicks wait here until one off their parents comes back from the sea to feed them.”

“Both male and female penguin parents spend equal time caring for their offspring,” Alain continued. “Each couple has one chick per season, which makes it very easy to count them. For each chick we see, there are two adult emperor penguins in the colony.”

We witnessed an adult feeding several chicks. Was it mom our dad doing the feeding? Impossible to say. The chick begs for food by pushing its head against its parent’s chest. The parent then regurgitates the content of it’s stomach, and the chick greedily gobbles it straight from the parent’s throat.

Alain Hubert was beaming. “I can hardly believe my eyes!” he said. “The colony has definitely grown since the last time I was here.”

Alain estimated that there were as many as 2,000 chicks in one rookery. Last time Alain came, there were five rookeries of the same size. As we looked around, we counted an additional rookery, making a total of six rookeries full of noisy penguin chicks. That’s one more rookery than there was two years ago. This was wonderful news!

Alain estimated the colony had as many as 20,000 penguins, adults and chicks combined.

Patrolling predators

By the end of the season, when the sea ice breaks up, all of these young penguin chicks will have mooted, and must be ready to fend for themselves in the sea.

“Let’s go to the edge of the ice!” said Alain “You can see the adults queuing to take their turn to dive into the water and go fishing.”

The colony is spread out over a very large area and the rookeries are several kilometres away from the sea. I drove my skidoo to the sea, passing many penguins on their way to feed their chicks, and others that were on the way back to the sea to go fishing again. The penguins were sliding on their bellies, propelling themselves with their feet and steering with their wings.

At the edge of the ice, we found many adults, but they were not queuing to go fishing. They were huddled together in a tight, nervous band. It was obvious that no penguin was going for a swim today.

The reason soon became clear: alarge seal was patrolling the waters, and it wasn’t just any kind of seal: it was a leopard seal, also known as a sea leopard. This ferocious predator would have caught any penguin that dove off the ice into the water.

I noticed some small heads further out at sea. There were penguins out there that wanted to get back onshore to feed their chick. In order to do so, they would have to run the gauntlet and dodge the sea leopard. I positioned myself close to the waters’ edge, hoping to film their attempts.

I knew the sea leopard was close, but I never expected him to do what he did next.

Suddenly he threw himself up out of the water and onto the sea ice and opened his mouth, in search of a penguin to eat. I jumped back completely startled at this magnificent sea predator. The animal was huge. It must have been three metres long and weighed at least 300 kilos.

After writhing about on the sea ice for a couple of metres, and spotting no penguins to feast upon, he gave up and dove back into the water.

What an encounter! Antarctica is a wild place!

As 2014 draws to a close, the first wave of scientists and crew who arrived for the 2014-15 season have headed home, and a new ones have arrived to replace them.

Getting a ride to the “airport”

On Saturday, December 20th, 15 people left the Princess Elisabeth station to head to Cape Town for a few days before heading home to Belgium in time for Christmas. Among the 15 were all of the scientists who had arrived at the station in mid-November, including InBev-Baillet Latour laureate Jan Lenaerts, as well as field guides Raphy and Christophe, station crew members Julien en Greg, and Polar Quest winner Roger Radoux.

After goodbyes were made to the station crew who were staying on for the rest of the season, everyone piled themselves and their gear onto a sledge hooked up to the back of a Prinoth tractor. The machine started up and slowly made its way to the “airport” - which is basically a runway of compacted snow about 2 km from the station, large enough to allow small aircraft to land.

On the way to the Basler DC-3 (which would take them to the Russian Novolazarevskaya station at the coast, where they would catch a connecting flight to Cape Town), everyone reminisced about the many weeks they were fortunate enough to spend in Antarctica. For those who had come to the White Continent for the first time, it was the end of their exciting first experience...perhaps the first of many! Once you’ve been to Antarctica, there’s something about it that makes you want to come back…

New faces

Even before the group heading home to Belgium had left, the station already had new scientists and crew to welcome to the station.

An eight-man team of scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Germany arrived a few days ago. They’ll be spending the next month at the station conducting geomagnetic observation flights over East Antarctica in AWI’s Polar-6 aircraft. The Polar 6 will take off and land at the Utsteinen airstrip once a day (on average), weather permitting, to conduct the aerial surveys.

This is the third year in a row that the Germans have been using the Princess Elisabeth station as a base from which to conduct their geomagnetic research in this part of East Antarctica. They seem to like it here!

As for the station crew, we also have some newcomers. Jean Marie Blaise and Adriatik “Ilir” Berisha have joined the building crew. They’ll be working on constructing the new magnetic observatory for the GEOMAG project, and will make some repairs on the garage. We also have a new electrician, Marc Van Gelder, and Walter Cumps, who will be helping Kristof with vehicle maintenance.

Cook David Rigotti, who has worked his culinary magic at the Princess Elisabeth station for several seasons already, will take turns with Riet Vandevelde in the kitchen. The two of them have already started to plan the Christmas feast that everyone at the station is looking forward to. It’s always a world-class Christmas dinner at the station, and everyone is looking forward to celebrating the holiday in very good company! Sugarplums are already dancing in our heads!

Veteran reporter Jos Van Hemelrijck recounts the memorable journey he took to the King Baudoin Ice Shelf. He spent more than a week getting a taste of what life is like for a scientist doing field research in Antarctica.

Off we go!

On Tuesday, December 9th we set out from the Princess Elisabeth station for our long awaited trip to the coast. Alain Hubert, seismologist Denis Lombardi, schoolteacher Roger Radoux and I, your veteran reporter, set off for the coast. We had news that our friends on the Derwael Ice Rise were doing really well despite heavy snowstorms that kept them shuttered in their modified container / living quarters for three days. They had finished drilling the first of two 30-metre ice cores and were 17 metres down on the second when we started out.

We were to meet with them on the King Baudouin Ice shelf in a couple of days, but first we were expected at Sismo Camp, 160 kilometres north of the Princess Elisabeth station in an area known as the “grounding line” of the ice shelf. The grounding line is the place were the glacier ice that slowly flows down from the Antarctic high plateau reaches the ocean and starts flowing out over the water on a floating platform of ice.

It took us twelve bumpy hours on our skidoos to get there. We made a stop at the former Japanese research station of Asuka. Abandoned since 1994, it had become an eerie Antarctic ghost town. The station itself has long disappeared under the snow. But the site was littered with traces of activity long ago.

We marvelled at the sight of rows of abandoned vehicles – skidoos, bulldozers and trucks – nose-diving slowly into the ice from the weight of their own engines. Much to our surprise, we spotted a sledge sporting a mast and skis. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a catamaran wrecked on a reef in a sea of ice.

But we could not linger. We had another 80 kilometres to go. It was a rough ride on our skidoos. “It's been a bad year for snow,” Alain remarked. “The surface is usually a lot smoother.”

Eight hundred metres below our feet lies the edge of the continent

Sismo Camp appeared as a black speck in a sea of white. As we approached, we could distinguish a row of bright coloured dots: the tents where we were to sleep.  There was a snow tractor and two sledges: one with the lab-container; the other was loaded with fuel tanks and a 10-foot mess container.

We where welcomed by Jan Lenaerts and Christophe Berclaz. “It's good to see new faces!” said Jan. Christophe insisted we have a bite to eat before making any plans. They had arrived at this location four hours before we did.

The next day, Jan set up his automatic weather station. It will stay here until next year and transmit via satellite information about air and snow temperature, wind speed and direction, air pressure, solar radiation, snow height, etc.

Denis Lombardi, assisted by Alain and Christophe, meanwhile started to install a series of seismometers north and south of the grounding line. Each seismometer was buried inside a neat hole they had made in the snow, sitting on a glass disc, protected by a plastic cover and connected to its own solar panel to power it for months. He also brought two very precise GPS stations to keep track of the vertical and horizontal movement of the ice.

“The ice, when it reaches the ocean at the grounding line, is 800 metres to 1 kilometre thick,” explained Denis. “Where it starts floating over the water, it hinges with the ice on the bedrock of the continent. The floating ice shelf is subjected to the effects of the ocean tides. The entire ice shelf rises and sinks 1.5 metres twice every day.”

The King Baudouin Ice Shelf is stable and healthy…or is it?

By Iridium satellite phone we heard that the IceCon team had left Derwael Ice Rise to set up a new drilling camp on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf.

“When you ride on a slow-moving snow tractor over this plain of snow, you get to thinking,” glaciologist Frank Pattyn told me later, “The Baudouin Ice Shelf is about the size of a country like Belgium. It's 400 kilometres across.  And this ice shelf holds back an area of ice roughly the size of Europe!”

Global warming has caused important ice shelves to disintegrate in the recent past, although mainly in West Antarctica. The flow of outlet glaciers there is speeding up at an alarming rate, contributing to a lot of ice being lost to the ocean. However, this is not the case in East Antarctica – al east not yet.

The King Baudouin Ice Shelf is typical for this part of East Antarctica. Ice here flows down to the coast at a leisurely pace of a 150 metres a year. This ice shelf seems to be stable and healthy… or is it? Frank said that this is what they are trying to figure out. He explained that a weakening of this seemingly rock solid chunk of frozen water could have dramatic consequences on sea level rise. So it's important to know if it will continue to hold back an area of ice the size of Europe for a long time into the future.

No wonder scientists from different disciplines concentrate on studying the King Baudouin Ice Shelf!

Down to work!

Frank and his assistant Brice van Liefferinge, brought a PRESS ice radar. The instrument is so sophisticated that it can measure the loss off even half a centimetre of ice down at the bottom of the ice shelf, were the warm ocean water meets the ice.

Jean-Louis Tison and Morgane Philippe want to drill strait trough the entire ice shelf to understand what happens to the ice down there.

The site of the drilling camp was picked very carefully. The average thickness of the King Baudouin Ice Shelf is 300 metres. But some spots are different. On satellite pictures, the scientists saw that several long gullies run trough the shelf from the grounding line to the sea. These gullies are not very big – only a couple of hundred metres wide and quite shallow. They are only 15 metres below the surrounding ice. 

“No big deal!” I thought, until someone pointed out that 9/10ths of the ice lies below the surface og the water. This means that the shelves’ thickness here was not 300 metres, but a mere 150! Jean Louis reckoned that the drill would hit the water at that precise depth.

These mysterious gullies that seem insignificant at the surface seem to be cavernous vaults on the underside of the shelf. One hypothesis is that they funnel the warmer ocean water beneath the Baudouin Ice Shelf, weakening it from underneath.

The drill gets stuck!

At Sismo camp, Roger Radoux , the schoolteacher, took charge of preparing dinner for tonight. It was a delicious pre-cooked lamb curry with rice. Humans need fuel too. Thanks Roger!

In the morning, InBev-Baillet Latour winner Jan Lenaerts showed me how he takes firn samples from the surface layers of the ice shelf. He uses a device called a firn corer. This instrument is a hollow, hand-operated device that is slowly screwed into the snow, and can reach up to 5.5 metres deep. He cleverly fitted a cordless drill to the top so that not everything must be done by hand!

The firn cores he extracted clearly show different layers of compressed snow alternated with layers of ice. “The ice layers are proof of periods of summer melt,” Jan explained, “and once snow on the surface has melted, its albedo changes dramatically.”

The albedo is the snow surface’s capacity to reflect the sun’s energy. Once the snow has melted and refrozen, it absorbs twice as much solar energy as before. And it will continue doing that for the rest of the season.” The goal of the BENEMELT project is to find out if the King Baudouin Ice shelf is affected – as Jan suspects – by surface melt and ice loss from the surface.

The first cores seemed to prove him right. Jan began taking a series of samplings across the shelf from Sismo Camp to the drill site, 80 kilometres away.

That night, Alain told us that at Drill Camp things had gone wrong. The drill got stuck at 54.6 metres below the surface. We decided to pack up our camp a day early and go there to give them a hand.

All is lost...or is it?

Jean Louis Tison is a  positive thinker. He happily showed me the ice cores he had drilled up at Derwael and here on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf in what he calls his “ ice library” - the deep-freeze container that will preserve his harvested ice samples until they reach his laboratory in the Université Libre de Bruxelles. At least all was well on that front.

But now he had to make a difficult choice: pull harder on the drill – essentially overruling all standard safety procedures for the use of the drill. Doing so would risk snapping the cable and losing the expensive drill, motor and all, 54.6 metres down in the ice. The alternative was to try a method he had never used: freeing the drill with glycol, or anti-freeze. However there was one problem: there was not near enough anti freeze available at the camp site. 

Alain chimed in and announced that there was plenty at the Princess Elisabeth station. We arranged for a 200-litre barrel of antifreeze would be loaded onto a Prinoth snow tractor that same night. It would drive northward as soon as possible and rendez-vous halfway with another snow tractor that will set out from our side at Drill Camp. The arrangement would save us valuable time, which was fast running out.  The scientists had only a few days before they had to pack up camp and return back to the Princess Elisabeth station so they could catch their flight back to Belgium in time for Christmas.

Glycol to the rescue!

The glycol arrived the following evening. It was not as simple as pouring it down the barrel of the drill into the bore hole. The glycol simply dispersed in the upper layers of ice without doing any good at the bottom. It needed to be diluted, too. But we put our collective heads together and found a way. We devised an antifreeze delivery contraption that made use of garden hoses, plastic pipes and gardenia couplings, all secured with duct tape and pieces of string in case anything became undone.

We pumped half a barrel of antifreeze down the hole and let it sit overnight, and crossed our fingers...

The next morning, Jean Louis applied maximum amperage to the winch’s motor. The cable vibrated, and the drill returned to us at the surface! You could see the relief on everyone's faces!

The drilling continues

Too much time was lost to reach a depth of 150 metres. That was obvious. Now the question was: Should the team not just pack up and admit defeat? It seemed the sensible thing to do. 

But nothing would conquer the indefatigable spirit of the scientists in their quest for knowledge. They decided to forge ahead and drill continuously 24 hours a day in shifts.

Everybody joined in the effort. Teams where formed to relieve Jean Louis and Morgane to give them a chance to rest every now and then. Brice set up a pair of hi-fi loudspeakers on the drill site, and Kristof Soete put on his collection of Dutch tearjerkers, Heavy Metal and Punk to keep everyone's spirits up. Scientists, field guides and mechanics took turns at tweaking the controls of the drill, checking the cable, brewing coffee and marking and storing more and more  sections of ice cores. This went on for a full two days and two nights.

A fruitful effort nonetheless

But unfortunately, time ran out. It eventually came time to pack up and head home for Christmas. But the team had reached a total depth of 107 metres, and the data contained in the ice cores will certainly be very valuable.

“You know what?” remarked Frank Pattyn as we boarded the convoy bound for the station. "We measured the ice every day at the same location for the entire period we were on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf. Every day, the same layers showed up until at the very end, something changed...” Frank explained.

“We have yet to analyse the data, of course, but something surely is happening down there below!”

The team of scientists who spent a few weeks on the King Baudoin Ice Shelf has returned from their field expedition and is preparing to head home in time for Christmas.

It's nice to be back after a long journey

Alain, Christophe, Jos and all the scientists made it back to the Princess Elisabeth station safe and sound on Wednesday evening after a 22-hour drive from the King Baudoin Ice Shelf at the coast. Two Prinoth tractors made the journey hauling eight sledges filled with scientific gear and ice cores back to Utsteinen.

While sleeping in a tent in the snow was a fun experience for many who sojourned on the ice shelf, the expedition team was happy to finally be able to sleep at the station again.

Scientific research a success, despite setbacks

Bad weather and technical difficulties with the ice core drill hampered progress for the IceCon team. Due to time constraints, they had to stop drilling of a planned 150-metre ice core at only 107 metres. But according to the IceCon project’s blog, the scientists involved in the project were very satisfied with the work they managed to accomplish this season. Even if they weren’t able to go all the way to the bottom of the ice shelf for the 150-metre core, there is already a wealth of information in the one 107-metre and two 30-metre ice cores the IceCon team managed to drill.

Meanwhile, Denis Lombardi was able to install all the seismometers he had planned to install while on the ice shelf. And InBev-Baillet Latour Antarctic Fellowship laureate Jan Lenaerts managed to take enough firn cores and set up an automatic weather station (AWS) on the grounding line of the King Baudoin Ice Shelf for the BENEMELT project. The AWS will collect meteorological data and transmit them to the Princess Elisabeth station over the next year until Jan returns next season.

The ice cores the scientists drilled during their time in the field have been put into deep freezers to keep them safe at a constant temperature. The freezers containing the ice cores will be shipped back to Belgium on the Mary Arctica, the ice-class cargo vessel bringing supplies to the station. The ship is scheduled to arrive at the coast in late January, when the annual unloading of cargo supplying the station will take place.

Now the scientists are busy packing up their gear for their flight home, which is scheduled to depart on Friday 19 December. Only one more day in Antarctica! It’s been a whirlwind month in Antarctica for them - both literally and figuratively!

Penguins' paradise

Before leaving the coast, a few interested souls, including expedition leader Alain Hubert and veteran Belgian reporter Jos Van Hemmelrijck, paid a visit to the emperor penguin colony on the coast that members of the BELARE team had visited during the last two seasons. They were happy to report that the colony was very healthy and had grown over the last year, with an estimated 24,000 penguins.

The story of the penguin colony is an interesting one. Alain and other BELARE team members were the first humans ever to see this colony in person, after its existence had been discovered a few years ago when satellite imagery picked up traces of penguin faeces in the area...

Jos will tell us more in the coming week as he recounts his time in the field and sends us some amazing footage of what he saw.

Stay tuned!

Dr Alexander Mangold from the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) of Belgium is now on his sixth season in Antarctica. He and his colleague Dr Quentin Laffineur have been busy with some new projects this season.

Not only are they servicing the variety of instruments that the RMI and its collaborators - KU Leuven and the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB) - use in the BELATMOS and Hydrant projects (including an automatic weather station as well as instruments to measure atmospheric particles and ozone). They’re also launching weather balloons and working with a new instrument from Leipzig University that mesures cloud-forming aerosols.

What are your research objectives this season?

In brief, our objectives this season are setting up and re-starting all the instruments that measure atmospheric composition, cloud formation, precipitation and weather conditions.

Each time we come to Antarctica, we service the automatic weather station (AWS), as well as all the other 12 instruments. Before we leave at the end of this season, we need to make sure all the instruments are repaired. The work keeps us busy. We only have one more to reapir before we leave.

What are the new projects you’re working on this season?

This year, we've been launching a  weather balloon every day, and trying to determine the origins of aerosols in the atmosphere over the Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. If we can determine to what extent the aerosols influence cloud formation and precipitation, then this will help atmospheric scientists improve their models for predicting cloud formation and precipitation in Antarctica.

This year you've got a new radio-sounding system that you've been attaching to weather balloons you’ve been launching.

This is the second season we've been doing launching  weather balloons in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and the International Polar Foundation as part of the ACME project. Last season we used a radio-sounding system from WSL, but unfortunately, the radio sounding sensors compatible with their system are no longer produced. Therefore we switched to a new system and on 28 November we launched the first balloon with this system.

Every day at noon we fill a  weather balloon with helium and launch it from the Princess Elisabeth station. We attach a radio-sounding sensor to each balloon, which transmits  air temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind direction and wind speed by radio to a ground receiver every second as it rises into the atmosphere.

The balloon is tracked with a GPS receiver that measures the position of the balloon as it ascends, so we have a vertical profile of all these atmospheric conditions. The balloon rises up into the atmosphere and takes measurements as far up as the balloon will go before it pops in the stratosphere, some 30 km above the ground.

What use is the data you collect?

Aside from getting a vertical profile of atmospheric weather conditions above the Princess Elisabeth station, the information the radio sounder collects also gives us more information about air circulation and aerosol transport, as well as conditions for potential cloud formation in the region.

We freely share the data we're collecting with any other scientists who are interested in having it. There aren't so many vertical profile observations of atmospheric conditions in Antarctica, so the information we're collecting is very useful to many scientists.

For example, we send the data we collect to the German Neumayer III station at the coast, which is responsible for making weather forecasts for this part of Antarctica. They are more than happy to have the data we're collecting with the weather balloon.

So there aren't too many research stations in Antarctica from which researchers launch weather balloons?

I don't think so. Most of the stations that do launch  them are at the coast. Towards the interior of the continent, there aren't so many. So having a vertical profile of atmospheric conditions further inland in Antarctica is data that atmospheric scientists and meteorologists are eager to have.

More of these kinds of observations are needed, and Princess Elisabeth is at a good location to provide them.

You're also working studying cloud formation in Antarctica with the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) at Leipzig University. They gave you a new instrument you’ve been working with.

Indeed, we have a new instrument from TROPOS. It complements the measurements from other instruments we already have that measure aerosols. The instruments from the BELATMOS project measure all fine particles in the atmosphere; the instrument from TROPOS focuses on the fraction of particles that have the potential to form clouds and precipitation.

More specifically, the instrument from TROPOS determines the percentage of particles in the atmosphere onto which water vapour can condense and thus form cloud droplets and clouds, as well as at what ambient humidity precipitation could happen. Clouds only form if there are enough of these cloud-forming particles in the atmosphere, and if the humidity in the atmosphere is high enough.

For example, when a system of lower clouds moves into the area of the station, or if it starts to snow, we expect to see some kind of change in aerosol composition in the atmosphere.

What can one do with this information? One would imagine that it helps in weather forecasting.

This information is useful for helping those in the modelling community who run models on cloud formation and precipitation over Antarctica. So it can help meteorologists forecast precipitation in the region, for example.

It's also useful for us working on the BELATMOS project, because it tells us the kind of aerosols we have in the air in the vicinity of the Princess Elisabeth station, and if they are likely to form clouds or not. If a large share of particles does not form clouds, the particles are either too small or composed mostly of insoluble substances, such as fresh organic material.

There was apparently a peak in atmospheric particles two weeks ago. Can you explain what happened?

Normally the air is very clean in Antarctica – only about 200-300 particles per cm³. That's very clean compared to say, anywhere in Europe.

However last week we saw a sudden increase in the concentration of particles in the atmosphere, from 200 to 6,000 particles per cm³, as the wind was increasing and low clouds were coming in. From another instrument we were able to see that ice particles were forming in the upper atmosphere, but they weren't reaching the ground as snow.

The TROPOS instrument saw no increase in the number of cloud-forming particles, however. This means that the increase in the overall number of particles was due to an increase in tiny particles that had just formed.

So very small particles don’t lead to cloud formation?

Usually older and larger particles tend to be cloud-forming particles. But the fact that the particles we observed were smaller means that they were newly-formed particles, probably formed within a 100 km radius of the station. Such small particles (below 100 nanometres) grow rapidly enough that we can be sure that they were produced not too far away.

This means that Antarctica has its own source of particles. This is very interesting. We can't say more at the moment, but it's something we atmospheric scientists should investigate further. Where do these articles come from? How are they formed? We would like to be able to answer these questions.

Part of the whole particle budget of Antarctica is formed locally, and another part is transported to Antarctica from the lower latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. One of the objectives of the BELATMOS project is to determine what percentage of atmospheric particles is formed locally, and what percentage is transported from elsewhere.

What kind of very small particles are formed locally in Antarctica?

It's difficult to say exactly. My colleagues in the atmospheric sciences community and I are still investigating exactly where these particles come from and how they're formed. But we have some hypotheses.

These very small particles can't be dust. Dust would be too large. These particles are more likely organic material and sulphates that come from the coast and are transported to the upper atmosphere. Then, through the interaction of atmospheric circulation, the influence of sunlight, and turbulence, new particles are also formed and come down closer to the ground near the station, where we can measure them with our instruments.

Would it be possible to collect some of these particles and do an analysis of them to determine exactly what they are?

Yes, it would be possible to do this with some kind of air pump and filtration system. Air would need to be pumped through a filter long enough – say, several days – before we could collect enough particulate matter mass to analyze in a laboratory (they’d have to be transported elsewhere as we don’t have the facilities at Princess Elisabeth station to do the chemical analysis of the particles). So if an analysis could be done, we would be able to determine the chemical composition of the particles.

We're planning setting up a pump-filtration system in one of the coming seasons. Alain is going to take care of the necessary zero-emission power supply for the pumps, and we'll take care of the filtration system. Suitable pumps are already at the station. These experiments have to be done at least 1 km away from the station to avoid potential contamination. We'd only be able to do these filtration experiments while the station is occupied during the austral summer, though. You need to have someone there to change the filters. So hopefully this will happen in the coming years.

Back in November, your ozone spectrometer measured dangerously low ozone levels above East Antarctica. Have they improved?

Ozone levels were low and the strength of UV radiation was high back in November. But now things have improved. Ozone levels have gone from dangerously low 180 Dobson Units (DU) up to 320 DU, a level which is normal. The UV index is still moderate to high (5 to 6). But it's less dangerous than the before (9 to 10). It’s not especially dangerous to go outside without sunscreen anymore, although it’s still important to wear it if you’re going to be outside for long periods of time.

You and your colleague Quentin will be leaving Antarctica just in time to get home for Christmas. Will someone look after the instruments after you've left?

Most of them can run during the winter and take data year-round. But others you need to have someone there, because they're too sensitive. For example, you need to have someone present to look after the ozone spectrometer, and the TROPOS instrument. But all the other instruments can run unattended when no one is at the station. This means that the TROPOS and the ozone instrument will be de-installed by station staff mid-February. During January and February, the station’s engineer or electrician will regularly check our instruments. And via email and remote sattelite control we can handle all potential issues.

Do you have anything special planned for future seasons?

Not really. If we can get the filtration system operational that would be nice. We have 12 instruments already, and this is already a lot to take care of. It's always nice to have more instruments, but then we would need more people to take care of them, and that's not in our budget. We have to first see if there will be financing for upcoming seasons that will allow us to continue our research as it currently is.

Over your six seasons at the station, have you had any interesting experiences?

The first two seasons I came here there were really bad storms. I'm not sure I want to live through that again. Other than that, my time here has been spent working on my research projects.

But the thing about Antarctica is that is has this special flair to it. It's a unique experience, every single season I come here.

The scientists at the coast have been extracting ice and firn cores from various sites across the King Baudouin Ice Shelf. The shallow firn core drillings Jan Lenearts has been taking for the BENEMELT project have been very successful. However, as the ULB IceCon team tried to drill deeper into the ice shelf to extract a deep 150-metre ice core, the drill head got stuck...

What's the drill?

In order to drill a deep ice core, one must take a stepwise approach. Every 1.5 metres you drill, the drill head must be pulled back to the surface to recover the ice core. The drill head must also be cleaned, and drilling debris removed.

However despite following all the rules one needs to follow for ice core drilling, the drill managed to get stuck in the ice after only 50 metres while they were drilling the last 150-metre ice core. While everyone tried several ideas, the stubborn drill head refused to get out of the ice!

Since the drill head is attached to a metallic cable, the team tried to use the cable to gently move the head around to loosen it up. The problem is that that cable is quite thin, and might easily snap with the cold. If that happened, a simple inconvenience could turn into a real catastrophe for the scientists.

The cavalry to the rescue

Using the InmarSat telephone, the scientists contacted the station and spoke to Kristof, our veteran mechanic of several seasons. After taking the call, he sprang into action. Kritof loaded a Prinoth tractor with some extra fuel, spare parts and a bit of anti-freeze on the request of a scientist, and set off towards the coast.

In order to save time, another Prinoth left from the ice shelf to meet with Kristof halfway to pick up the supplies to bring back to the the scientists. Just 24 hours after the call for help was made, the scientists managed to free the drill head and get back to work. Thank goodness for Kristof!

Tick tock

After freeing the drill head, the scientists decided to try another drilling location. Taking advantage of the 24-hour sunlight this time of year in Antarctica, the scientists have been working in shifts to finish drilling the ice core. They’ve already made significant progress, managing reach a depth of 80 metres.

What remains uncertain is whether they’ll be able to  make it through to the bottom of the ice shelf as originally planned. Time is running out. Regardless of whatever progress they can make, the whole camp on the ice shelf must pack up and leave in two days so they can be back at the station on the morning of Thursday December 18th. This will give all the scientists about a day to get ready to go home for the season. Their flight back to Cape Town leaves on Friday December 19th. They can’t miss this flight if they want to be back in Belgium in time for Christmas!

Some fly in, some fly out

Before they leave, the scientists who have been at the station since the beginning of the season will get a chance to meet some new arrivals this season: German scientists form the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), who will conduct aerial geomagnetic surveys with their Polar 6 aircraft over the next month or so.

The Germans will arrive tomorrow - a bit earlier than expected. But the station can handle the surge in inhabitants for a day or two. Extra company is always welcome in this remote part of the world.

With most of the scientists at the coast, things have been calm at the Princess Elisabeth Station. In Belgium, preparations are being made for the departure of the cargo ship bringing supplies and equipment to Antarctica.

Holding the fort

The station has been quiet a lot quieter over the last few days. The IceCon scientists and InBev-Baillet Latour laureate Jan Lenaerts have been making progress on the King Baudoin Ice Shelf now that the weather has improved. Jan managed to take five firn cores for his BENEMELT project, while the IceCon team took some radar soundings of the neaby area and worked on drilling the second 150-metre ice core for their project. Veteran journalist Jos Van Hemelrijck and Polar Quest winner Roger Radoux have also gone to the ice shelf to accompany Denis Lombadri from the Royal Observatory of Belgium and expedition leader Alain Hubert as Denis installs more seismometers for the SMEAIS project.

The only scientists left at the station are Alexander Mangold and Quentin Laffineur from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. They spend their time keeping track of the data their 12 instruments collect, and launch a meteorological balloon to collect atmospheric data every day at noon. They share the data they collect with the German Neumayer Station at the coast, which puts together weather forecasts for the Queen Maud Land region of East Antarctica.

Keeping Alexander and Quentin company at the station are engineers, electricians and mechanics who take care of the day-to-day functioning of the station. There's always something to keep them busy!

“We're only 12 people now, so it's been much quieter this week,” Alexander explained. “It will be a lot busier once everyone is back form the coast. We'll have 35 people at the station again.”

Cargo ship to leave Zeebrugge

Meanwhile in Belgium, preparations are being made for the departure of the cargo ship that will transport supplies and equipment from the North Sea port of Zeebrugge to the BELARE team in Antarctica. Unfortunately, the cargo ship doing the job this season has been delayed by bad weather in the North Atlantic on its journey from Greenland to Belgium. Instead of arriving the morning of Friday, December 12th as scheduled, the cargo ship is expected to arrive sometime on Saturday, December 13th.

Once the ship arives, the loading of the cargo will begin in earnest. Food and equipment are part of the cargo, along with two new specially adapted Toyota Hi-Lux vehicles. The heavy-duty Hi-Luxes have been modified to haul heavy loads across snow and ice in Antarctica: Instead of tyres, they have caterpillar tracks!

The ship is scheduled to arrive at the coast of East Antarctica in late January, after a short stopover in Cape Town. Hopefully the sea ice around the coast of East Antarctica will be easier to handle than last season!

This Sunday, I learned that Antarctica was in fact a very dry continent and how aerosols and particles were playing a role in that dryness. Ironically, that was in stark contrast with the recent news from the coast, where our friends were​ getting massive amounts of snowfall​ dumped on​ them.

Remembering ​Queen Fabiola

Last Friday, we learned that Queen Fabiola had passed away. In sign of mourning, the ​B​elgian flag ​at the station ​has been​ flying at half mast. It will stay that way for a few more days. After all, Princess Elisabeth is a little piece of Belgium in Antarctica​,​ and we all wanted to pay our respects.

Bad weather at the coast ​delays ​progress​

We had news from the team at the coast yesterday​, and unfortunately the weather​ has been quite a hassle. I​t​ ​has been snowing very heavily​. An entire day was lost ​for both for research​ers​ and ​crew. Near white-out conditions make scientific work in the field impossible​, and repairs on one of our venerable Prinoth tractors had to be postponed​. This morning, one scientist even woke up to discover that ​the entire inside of his tent​ filled with snow ​overnight because of the wind.

Time is running short for the ICECON and BENEMELT ​scientists. They ​must soon​​ leave their camp on the Derwael ​I​ce ​R​ise and move ​out close to the edge of ​the King Baudouin ​I​ce​ ​Shelf​,​ where they ​ hope to drill a few 150 metr​e​-deep ​ice cores, weather permitting. Let's hope the weather will be better soon​ so they can accomplish what they came for!​

Particles, aerosols and snowfall

Meanwhile at ​the ​Princess Elisabeth​ station​, our meteorologists​,​ Alexander Mangold and Quentin Laffineur from the Royal Meteorological Institute​ of Belgium, spotted something unusual while monitoring aerosols in the upper atmosphere​: ​their instruments recorded a very sudden and sharp increase in the number of​ particles ​in the atmosphere ​above Utsteinen​. At ​6​,​000 particles per cubic centimet​re, their concentrations were 20 times the usual amount​ of ​particles in the atmosphere.

Alexander told me that​ this increase had nothing to do with pollution​. He believes that it might have been triggered by turbulence in the upper layers of the atmosphere​,​ where these particles are formed.

​P​articles and aerosols play a big role in Antarctica's climate​, so it's nothing to worry about.​​ The​y​ play a huge role in the formation of clouds. If there ​we​re no particles or aerosols​ in the atmosphere that moisture ​could​ adhere to, no droplets could form and there ​would be no clouds, precipitation ​or​ snow.

In the ​austral ​summer, ​average concentrations of atmospheric particles ​average​ around 300 particles per ​cubic centimetre. In the winter, concentrations drop to 10 or 12 ​particles per cubic centimetre​ (even the best "clean room" laboratories with fancy air pumps and filters would struggle to get to such low levels​ of particles​).

That's why, contrary to popular belief, Antarctica is a very dry continent, with very little ​​snow​fall ​... except at the coast these days it seems ...

The weather has improved for the scientists at the coast, Denis Lombardi finally has some good news, and Jos Van Hemelrijck learns why covering up properly in Antarctica is important for your health.