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The gorgeous weather we had these past few weeks finally came to an end. For two days we we visited by a mighty snowstorm. The storm left us with a lot of work to remove snow from the terrace and grooming it. In addition to dealing with routine things like snow removal, we've been up to much more exciting things.

Our whole team completed the necessary medical field training to handle emergency situations. It was a good preparation for our upcoming mission to prepare the Perseus Airstrip for the arrival of the first scientists of the season. The airstrip is located just 60 km north of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. Before any plane can land on it, it must be well groomed and we have to make sure the infrastructure is up to speed.

Six members of the team went on the expedition, leaving the rest of us at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. For those us who stayed behind, it was a quiet, but productive week. We installed the scientists’ new workshop and partitioned the room for to store new field equipment. We also started up the wastewater treatment system and almost completed maintenance on the wind turbines.

All of this work aroudn the staiton was necesary as the arrival of the scientsits and new team mebmers is approaching. Even as we temporarily got used to having a smaller team at the station, we know that we have to prepare ourselves for our numbers to triple in the coming days.

While making preparations, we learned from our colleagues at the Perseus Airstrip that the anticipated arrival of the scientsits had been moved from December 7th to December 9th due to bad weather conditions. The weather has been getting worse and worse lately, so this is not surprising at all! A massive amount of snow piled up in the station's garage, making it difficult to level it off, as we have to do each season.

We can't wait to see what the next week will bring!

We’re delighted to announce that following last year’s online event, this year’s symposium will be held as a hybrid event that will allow us to meet both digitally and in person in Brussels on December 6th and 7th!

As it does every year, the Arctic Futures Symposium will assemble a wide variety of stakeholders, including local, regional, national and EU policymakers, Arctic indigenous peoples, entrepreneurs and representatives from the business sector, natural and social scientists, and others with interests in the Arctic.

This year's symposium will be held as a series of webinars over two successive days starting at 1 pm Central European Time (GMT+1) or 7:00 am Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on the 6th of December and continuing at 1:30 pm CET or 7:30 am Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on the 7th of December. The physical event will befor a limited number of people at Martin's Brussels EU, located at Boulevard Charlemagne / Karel de Grootstraat 80, 1000 Brussels.

As registrations to attend the event in-person are limited, we encourage everyone to follow the event online. The webinar access link will be sent directly to the participants who have registered, so don’t forget to register!

For those unable to regsiter, it will be possible to follow the symposium live streamed on the International Polar Foundation's YouTube Channel.

Programme Outline

The symposium will feature panel discussions that cover a number of key topics and challenges chosen by Arctic stakeholder partners including:

• Arctic governance
• Arctic youth, demographics, and capacity-building
• Arctic resilience
• The Arctic as a more sustainable place to do business

All are welcome

Everyone who is interested in what is happening in the Arctic region - be they politicians, diplomats, civil servants, academics, indigenous peoples, representatives from the private sector, representatives of civil society, teachers, students, or members of the general public - are more than welcome to register and take part in the discussions.

For more details about the symposium programme, speakers, and registration, please consult the Arctic Futures Symposium website.

If you have any additional questions about the symposium, you are welcome to contact us at events@polarfoundation.org or at +32 (0)2 520 34 40, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

We look forward to seeing you online next Monday and Tuesday!

We are all settling in nicely to life at the station as we work hard to make sure everything is in order for the arrival of the first group of scientists in a few weeks’ time. We’ve been lucky to have gorgeous weather these last few weeks. It has allowed us to make a lot of progress.

Settling in

We are all settling in nicely to life at the station as we work hard to make sure everything is in order for the arrival of the first group of scientists in a few weeks’ time. We’ve been lucky to have gorgeous weather these last few weeks. It has allowed us to make a lot of progress.

Over the past week, we’ve been able to start up scientific instruments at the station and in the shelters nearby that collect data of all kinds of phenomena including cloud particle formation, UV radiation, and geomagnetic and seismic activity. Benoît Verdin has started the daily launch of weather balloons that collect weather data that contribute to regional weather forecasting and climate modelling, and not to mention the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP).

We have also been doing regular maintenance checks on the station’s systems and making improvements whenever possible.  We are making progress with the annual checkup of the station’s nine wind turbines, and performed maintenance on the station’s ventilation system, which has raised the humidity levels indoors to more comfortable levels.  Antarctica is a cold desert with hardly any relative humidity. Sometimes the dryness can be uncomfortable.

Favourable weather conditions have made possible for PEA to produce excess energy, which is “dumped” into heating resistors in the annexes where the workshops and garages are located, making them nice and warm places for the mechanics to practice their trade. Although we have not needed them, we have also been doing general maintenance on the station’s backup generators (the gensets).

Preparing for the scientists’ arrival

In their warm and cozy garage the mechanics have been busy working on general maintenance of the skidoo fleet and vehicles leaving for Perseus Airfield 60 km north from the station.

We have been preparing living containers to support a six-person party who will spend ten days at Perseus Airfield to prepare the landing strip for the arrival of the Ilyushin-76 carrying the first team of scientists directly from Cape Town. The landing is scheduled on December 7th. The BELARE team built Perseus Airfield a few years ago to allow direct transcontinental flights, reducing the cost of transporting scientists and equipment from South Africa to PEA in a shorter amount of time.

Due to the constant flow of the ice sheet and accumulation of fresh snow, airfields in Antarctica need to be well maintained before planes can land on them. The party heading out to the airfield will make the runway perfect for welcoming the first teams of scientists!

Safe tracks have been prepared and mapped out leading to and from the station in all directions. This is a mandatory procedure to ensure that teams have a safe route to follow whether they are travelling close to the station or heading out into the field. But we are also mapping out tracks in our minds to prepare for the adventure that lies ahead for us this season.

The 2021-2022 season has begun for the Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition (BELARE) team at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica research station!

On November 2nd, after a mandatory quarantine in Cape Town, South Africa, the first 14 members of the 2021-2022 BELARE team arrived at the Princess Elisabeth to open the station a few weeks ahead of the arrival of the first scientists of the season.  After eight months of lying dormant, PEA was happy to welcome back many familiar faces and several new ones!

After a few days, the team had cleared away the excess snow that had accumulated during the winter and started up the station's systems, which are once again running on 100% renewable wind and solar energy, as they have every season since the station was completed in 2009. The team will make sure everything is ready for the arrival of the first group of scientists in early December.

You can follow the adventures of the BELARE team and all of the scientists and visitors to the station this season on the website dedicated to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.

November 22, 2021 - Share on Twitter or FaceBook

The Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station (PEA) is up and running for the 2021-2022 season! 

After a quarantine in Cape Town and the usual PCR tests to punctuate our days, the Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition or BELARE (which rhymes with “volare”) departed for Antarctica on November 2nd. It was early in the morning when we left our hotel, and the sun was rising behind Eagle’s Nest, the mini peak next to Houtkapperspoort, where we were staying. There were 14 of us to take the Ilyushin. All of the expedition members for this first flight were crew members, tasked to open up the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station and to deal with any technical issues before the arrival of the scientists. 

This is another COVID year. We hoped there wont be any more, because it really messes things up and means that you end up spending much longer in Cape Town, and have to factor this quarantine into planning.

The Expedition Leader is Alain Hubert. There is also systems team Benoît, Timothée and Nicolas; the doctor, Barbara; the Water Loop guys Bernard and Paul; the building maintenance and construction team, young Tom and French Thomas; the cook, another French Thomas; the Vehicle Ops team Pierre, Tim, and Yann; and Jacques, the snow machine operator from Québec. Nicknames will soon become essential….

Arriving on an Ilyushin Il-76 at the airfield of Novolazarevskaya Station (Novo Air Base) the team is rapidly shuttled towards the DC-3 feeder flight with their baggage. The journey to PEA is 450km, and it takes about one and a half hours. The DC3 isn’t so fast, but then you have to remember that it dates back to the early 1940s!  We landed on the ungroomed airstrip around 8 pm. We had to leave most of the cargo at Novo to be brought to the station via a separate feeder flight the following day. 

The BELARE team members used skidoos and sledges dug out of the containers next to the airstrip to cover the last 2 km to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.

The weather stayed clement, making for a gentle introduction to Antarctica for the newbies. There was no wind at Novo, which someone said was the exception. But it is now the Antarctic summer, so maybe it’s normal.

The crew arrived at the station and immediately set about with the first visual checks to identify any issues that might have occurred during the station’s long winter sleep. Temperatures inside had dropped to -25 °C during the winter. 

The engineers run diagnostics to study any mechanical or electrical failures. Everything is an opportunity to learn and it is fascinating. Despite the extreme cold during the winter, there was no significant damage beyond a few extra deeply frozen food items. The backup generators were started up and ran the station for a short time, giving the power needed to dry out the technical parts of the station and restart the most critical station functions: water production, light, heating, and cooking. A guy’s gotta eat!

The gradual heating of the station back to normal temperatures was necessary to get the remaining electrical systems and batteries back up. In no time, the station was running on 100% renewables again.

Timothée, down in Antarctica for the first time, explains:

“As we continued to start up PEA’s systems (smart grid, water production and distribution, ventilation, water treatment, and communications), we also began the important annual task of clearing the snow from the station to free access to the garages and create a flat, ordered area in front of the station where we can park the scientific equipment, field containers and vehicles. This year we benefited from excellent weather conditions: lots of sun and little wind.”

All of the station’s essential systems had been successfully started by the end of the first week. The whole team is doing well and preparing for the coming weeks, which will be dedicated to carrying out general maintenance and improvements of the station and its systems before the arrival of the first scientists on December 7th.

The mood is good and it is really exciting to be in such an amazing place - not only in terms of the natural environment, but also in this station that looks like as it has just landed from an interstellar trip.

Beam me up, Scotty!

Thanks to the financial support of the Québec Government Office in Brussels, IPF has released a new animated videos created with the help of Zest Studio in La Hulpe, Belgium, focusing on biodiversity - just in time for COP26!

The four-minute animation is available in English, French and Dutch on IPF’s YouTube Channel.  

The animated videos focuses on safeguarding biodiversity as an essential part of maintaining all life on Earth, and also addresses the adverse impacts human activity has had on biodiversity, such as unsustainable farming and fishing practices.

The video ends with a list of actions we can all take to reduce our impact on ecosystems and help preserve biodiversity and become a climate hero.

Educators in particular will may find the videos useful for introducing their students to the concepts of biodiversity and sustainability in their lesson planning.

If you would like to learn more about IPF's educational and outreach activities, please feel free to contact us at education@polarfoundation.org !

The International Polar Foundation mourns the passing of one of the giants of polar research.

Prof. Jörn Thiede (1941-2021), Honorary Member of the International Polar Foundation (from 2002), passed away this summer. The IPF lost an adviser and friend who had guided the Foundation from its early formative period. 

Despite being the Director for many years of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, one of the foremost polar research establishments in the world, he remained always very approachable and humble. Many young scientists will remember him as having been instrumental in helping them find their way in the world of polar research.

His palaeogeological work on ocean sediments inspired many to follow and opened up the exploration of longer time series on climate than those offered by the studies of ice cores. The number of expeditions he actively participated in would require several volumes to recount.   

Jörn Thiede was the recipient of many awards and tokens of recognition for the valuable contribution he made to Polar research. The GEOMAR Institute, which he helped to found at the University of Kiel, mentions his numerous achievements in their obituary notice:

ransform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;"> The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the DFG (1988), the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1995), honorary citizenship of the city of Bremerhaven (2010), the International Willy Brandt Prize (2011), the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society (London), the Grand Prix d`Océanographie of the Fondation Rainier III de Monaco, the Chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite, France as well as the Honorary Fellow of the EUG and Honorary Doctorates of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and St. Petersburg State University,  member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz (1991), member of the National Academy Leopoldina (from 2007),  member of the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Natural Sciences - Russian Federation, the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea.

Prof. Thiede was truly international in spirit and deed. He worked assiduously to bring together scientists from all over the World, including during the International Polar Year 2007-2009, in which he played a key role. 

Despite his numerous projects and activities, he still managed to find the time to participate in the Arctic Futures Symposium held by IPF and its many Arctic stakeholder partners, and to Chair the Committee of the Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellowship, which awarded the largest single biennial prize to young scientists wishing to carry out research in the Antarctic.

A truly great man, a visionary scientist, who lived life with humour and energy.  He will be greatly missed by many. 

On the 19th of July 2021, Alain Hubert and Nighat Johnson-Amin of the International Polar Foundation flew to Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland to assist Simon Steffen and Derek Houtz of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in Zürich in their mission to remove the remains of the Swiss Camp research station from its location on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Konrad Steffen (Koni), former Director of the WSL, as well as the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder and the scientific Director of the Swiss Polar Institute, was one of the world’s leading glaciologists and a leading authority on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Simon and Derek had accompanied him on his last fateful mission to Swiss Camp in August 2020, and it was with great emotion that the team found itself in Ilulissat again, preparing to head out there. They were to be witnesses to the end of an era.  

Evidence that the summer melt on the ice sheet was accelerating had been growing in recent years, and Koni was tireless in sharing this message. He had spent just over 30 years studying the changes happening to the Greenland Ice Sheet, and in particular to the Jakobshaven Glacier ablation zone. In fact, Swiss Camp sat close to this point so critical for the assessment of the changes in the flow of the glacier, which emerges in a bay to the south of Ilulissat, about 80 kilometres away.

In 2019, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Swiss Camp, Koni had welcomed a group of VIPs at the camp in order to show them firsthand what was happening to the ice sheet, so that they would appreciate the potential impacts of Greenland's melt on the rise in sea levels across the world’s oceans. Koni was tireless in his attempts to drum the message home to politicians, to the public, and to other researchers that there was cause for serious concern.

In the summer of 2019, the situation became critical at Swiss Camp, as the melt began to affect the foundations of the platform under the camp, leaving it very exposed to the katabatic winds that form at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Alain and Nighat first went to Swiss Camp at the invitation of Koni in 2011 and found themselves unexpectedly extending their stay as the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano erupted in nearby Iceland, grounding all air traffic for several days as the ash cloud settled. In 2012, Swiss Camp was suffering from the movement in the ice sheet, and Koni invited the pair back to help rebuild a completely new platform, which was installed at ground level.

By the following year, the platform was again two metres up in the air. The ice had receded from below, and the foundations had to be reinforced. Snow accumulation and melt cycles continued over the following years, but miraculously the camp held, until 2019. That summer, it became increasingly obvious that the area was in transition, as new crevasses opened up around the platform, and even close to the tents. It was fast becoming obvious that the site was no longer safe for operations.

In late July 2020, as Koni arrived in Ilulissat ready to fly in to the camp to assess the conditions, he received satellite images that showed that the platform had collapsed. He was accompanied that year by Simon, Derek and Jason Box, (a foremr student of Koni's who later joined the Denmark Geological Survey (GEUS), which took over the maintenance of the automatic weather stations (AWS) that Koni had installed).

This was to be Koni’s last research mission to Greenland. On the 8th of August 2020, he disappeared when we went out onto the ice. The search and rescue teams that flew in later that day deduced that he had fallen into one of the larger crevasses in the area.

Returning to Swiss Camp in July 2021 was not straightforward. The summer of 2021 had proved to be a summer of meteorological records: the hottest, wettest, strangest summer of plagues of Biblical dimensions. Fires burned along the West Coast of the US and parts of Siberia. Heatwaves were followed by torrential rains, causing catastrophic flooding in parts of Europe. 

Greenland was not spared the fluctuations in weather, as unsettled weather systems unfurled over the Davis Strait from Canada, one succeeding another. The first attempt to reach the camp had to be aborted as thick fog blanketed the ice sheet. The next attempt took place on the 25th of July Flying in, the team was able to see the full extent of the summer melt, with ubiquitous surface melt ponds like pure blue lakes dotting the ice sheet. Rivers flowed on the surface of the ice. Barely any snow was visible, that is until Swiss Camp was reached.

Once there, the team had to rope up in order to assess the area. A safe zone was staked out in a ring around what remained of the platform and the facilities that had been there. The mess tent had virtually disappeared into the snow. The workshop tent was still intact, but half full of snow. This snow blanketed the structures that poked out where the support posts had been. It looked like a shipwreck.

One ten-metre weather station tower had collapsed, and the other AWS sat on the far side of a crevasse. Koni’s tent, which Simon had left up for him, was buried up to the very tip, of which only a few centimetres were still visible.

Once camp was set up and the dome mess tent was operational, our task was to recover all the equipment, snow mobiles, and supplies that could be salvaged and to return them to Ilulissat (where Kathy and Steve Young, previously of Polar Field Services, supporting the US National Science Foundation (NSF) operations in Greenland (of which Swiss Camp was a part initially), would manage their recovery, recycling or disposal).

The cleanup was not a simple task. Once the platform had been disassembled and the wood piled up, the remainder of the equipment and snowmobiles were under thick snow. Much of the snow is what is referred to as “sugar snow” resembling granulated sugar. This substance is not very compact and very slippery; it gives virtually no traction for pulling.

The surroundings of the safe zone were completely bare, in contrast to Swiss Camp, which was blanketed. A few days of digging uncovered a thick layer of solid ice about a metre and a half down, which had encased the snow mobile runners. But this ice layer lay under about thirty to forty centimetres of water.  No amount of bailing could lower the level of the water. One snowmobile was dragged out with slings, but a second, which looked promising, was held fast by one ski and no amount of pushing or pulling could dislodge it. Finally, that ski had to be removed with a disc cutter. The two snowmobiles were flown back to Ilulissat on the last day by helicopter, dangling underneath it like two yellow ducks.

When the Bell 212 helicopter flew in to Swiss Camp on the 27th of July, the pilots brought us the news that the temperature in Ilulissat was a sizzling 18°C! But that was not all. In Kangerlussuaq, the temperature had soared to 27°C! This had never been experienced before in Greenland. The Danish researchers later estimated that the melt on the 27th of July from the Greenland Ice Sheet produced enough water to cover the entire State of Florida in 5 cm of water.   

This news was not encouraging. Alain and Derek roped up to carry out the maintenance of the AWS, and Alain surveyed a path from the safe zone to the weather station so that Derek could go and recover the memory card from the other side of the crevasse.

The two also dismembered the ten-metre tower and packed whichever instruments and sensors were still intact to send them to Ilulissat, and from there to Zürich. The intention was to try and assemble a new AWS for Antarctica from whatever could be salvaged.

A Viking ritual in the lit pyre of wood from the platform served as our memorial service for Koni.  We spent the last night in quiet contemplation. The place held many memories for all present.

On the morning of the 29th of July, two helicopters flew in to evacuate the camp and the salvaged equipment. On the flight back to the coast, a further stop was planned to service a GPS station at the Jakobshaven ablation zone. But we learned that the apparatus had been all but swallowed up by thick ice, and the attempt was abandoned.

It was during the flight back to the coast along the glaciers that it became apparent that the level of melt on the ice sheet was exceptional. Swiss Camp was like a speck of snow surrounded by bare ice sheet stretching hundreds of kilometres in all directions. In places, the surface of the ice sheet was so dark that it accelerated the melt. In others, we saw the rosy tint of pink snow, which harboured algae, which also accelerated melt.

The glacier front itself was now on land and no longer in the fjord.

It is now clear that recent warming has transformed the ice sheet into a much more dangerous and unpredictable place to conduct research than a few decades ago. But as we left to return to Brussels, Derek was about to join Danish researchers who were going to service the remaining weather stations during the month of August.

On the 9th of August, a year after the disappearance of Koni, the IPCC published their Sixth Assessment Report on the science supporting projections of climate change and its impacts to a frenzied reception, as storms, and fires, continued unabated. It sounded like a foghorn warning of the dangers ahead.  

On Tuesday, July 13th, Mychael Arafe and Roman Petibon, two climate activists in their early 20s who founded the Paulette Ride for the Planet project, visited IPF headquarters to interview IPF Founder Alain Hubert and Science Liaison Officer Henri Robert for a documentary they are making about the green transition.

In March, Michael and Roman left their homes in Central France to cycle across 11 European countries with the aim of collecting interviews from European citizens about their environmental concerns. They've also been speaking with climate innovators working on initiatives that are helping the world to transition away from carbon-intense energy sources and towards more renewable and sustainable ones. The two travelling friends plan to use the interview footage they've been collecting along their months-long journey to produce a seven-episode documentary.

During their interviews with the two young activists, Alain and Henri discussed the design, construction, and operation of the world's first zero-emission polar research station, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. They stressed that in addition to society transitioning to more renewable sources of energy, having a different attitude towards energy use is also important, as we all need to learn to use less energy and live more sustainably.

The pair of activist cyclists hope that once completed, the documentary will "provide our generation with keys to understanding and inspiration to help them get started and do their part in the green transition." 

They plan to finish up their bike tour around Europe and return to central France in late July to start work on the documentary, which they plan to finish by December. They intend to broadcast the documentary online over seven episodes.

The most recent Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellowship laureate, Dr. Kate Winter of Northumbria University, along with Dr. Denis Lombardi from the Royal Observatory of Belgium and other colleagues from Newcastle University have published a paper describing their findings from data they collected using low-cost Raspberry Shake seismographs.

While in Antarctica to complete the second of two seasons of her BioFe reach project in January 2020, with help from the technicians at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) research station, Dr. Winter installed several Raspberry Shake 3D seismographs on a wind-scoured blue ice area close to the station in order to explore local seismic activity in the area.

The ice sheet covering Antarctica is constantly flowing towards the coast in all directions outwards from the highest points in the interior of the continent due to gravity. The ice frequently undergoes stress as it expands, contracts, and flows, which often creates small yet measurable icequakes.

During a ten-day monitoring period, the seismographs detected thousands of icequakes.  One even detected  2,936 icequake events.

The paper, entitled “Monitoring Icequakes in East Antarctica with the Raspberry Shake”, was published in April in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

Collecting data

Raspberry Shake manufactures seismographs that are easy to set up and deploy even in extreme environments so that scientists and even non-scientists who are interested in citizen science can collect seismographic data wherever they are in the world. All data collected worldwide is uploaded to the global Raspberry Shake server. However, due to limited access to the Internet in Antarctica, Dr. Winter had to make a few modifications to the seismographs (which she managed to do thanks to her knowledge of the Python programming language) so that they could collect data without uploading them to the Raspberry Shake server, and instead be retrieved once the unit had been removed from its location at the end of her most recent trip to Antarctica.

Dr. Winter and her colleagues validated the data they collected by comparing them to the data taken from a broadband station close to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, where data broadly matched what the seismographs collected.

By comparing their data with local air temperature measurements from the Landsat8 satellite, the research team determined that fluctuations in temperature over the course of the day due to varying levels of solar radiation are the main reason that the ice contracts and generates seismic activity in the blue ice fields.

“Our short-term seismic investigations provide us with valuable information on the thermal state of the ice and ice fracture mechanics in blue ice areas (which are often difficult to obtain by other means),” Dr. Winter explained.

An inexpensive way to collect seismic data

The study demonstrates Raspberry Shake’s general main purpose of providing inexpensive seismographs that can allow anyone, whether scientist or non-scientist, to collect seismic data from anywhere in the world. As seismographs are small, lightweight, and easy to transport, scientists can easily take some on missions and non-scientists can place them at home or at work to gather data.

While there are many Raspberry Shake seismographs in more populated areas of the world, there aren’t too many in the Polar Regions at the moment. But Dr. Winter hopes that their most research paper will help convince scientists to take a few low-cost seismic sensors on missions in the future to help collect cost-effective data on seismic activity and fill in some gaps around the world.

“I will certainly pop a Raspberry Shake or two in my kit bag the next time I travel to the Arctic or Antarctic,” she said. “As they are so small and lightweight, I won’t have to take out too much of my emergency chocolate to fit them in!”