Let the fun begin!

So, we've spent the last two weeks in one of the most beautiful parts of our planet, seen the most amazing wildlife, made good friends and eaten far too much. But what about the science, the reason we are here after all?

We are all thrilled with the data sets we are going home with - these will keep us busy for several years to come. Ocean science is a bit like exploration - we're often going somewhere no-one's ever been before, so we don't know what the ocean is going to be like. Before we came here, we had made educated guesses (called hypotheses) about what we expected to find. So we've been measuring the temperature of the water, and the saltiness of the water, as well as how fast it's flowing and in what direction. Our biologists and chemists onboard have been measuring how much plant-life and krill there are in the water. One of the things we wanted to find out was how much all of these vary from day to day or week to week. Often we go with a ship just once, and so we don't know if it would have been completely different if we'd been there the week after. So we've left behind our three Seagliders, to keep patrolling the ocean for the next 6 weeks, to see how the ocean changes.

One of the most interesting things we've seen is the effect of a huge iceberg on the water. This happened to be sitting just where we wanted to make our measurements, so we turned this to our advantage and have measured how much less salty the water is in the wake of the iceberg. The surface drifters we threw overboard have all gone round the iceberg to one side or the other. We've measured very carefully the amount, temperature and saltiness of the cold, dense water that leaves Antarctica travelling north close to the sea bed. Because there is much more sea ice than usual, the ocean is very different to our last visit here in 2007. We've also seen how warm salty water gets spat out of the current from the deep water onto the continental shelf. And we've measured how the plants are flourishing not at the surface, where you'd think they'd get the most sunlight, but down at nearly 100 metres. Finally, we've caught lots of krill, which have been counted, identified, measured and weighed. We're very excited because one of the gliders has been measuring how much krill there are in the water by sending out a ping of sound and listening to the sound that is reflected back. This is the first time this has ever been done on a glider. In the future, this might help us to look after the wildlife of Antarctica better in future, by making sure that human beings don't take catch too many fish and krill.

Here's a picture of the temperature of the water we measured. The y-axis is depth and the x-axis is distance from close to Antarctica. Look at how cold the water is, below 0C! You might think that it would freeze, but because it's a bit salty it doesn't. As the water gets deeper, you can see the really cold water close to the sea bed. This water is going north towards the equator. A few months or years ago, this water was probably up on the continental shelf close to Antarctica. The next time it sees the sea surface might be in hundreds of years.

When we get home, we'll be busy studying all the data we've collected, and that the gliders are still collecting. We'll be piloting our gliders from our offices back at UEA and Caltech. Some of the samples we've collected will need to be tested in the laboratory for various chemicals or biological signals. We'll try to understand what the datasets we've got are telling us about how the ocean works. It's been fun being at sea, but for us, the fun has just begun!

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