From Tim Page
      onboard RSV "Aurora Australis"
      being followed by "John Ross"
      in the Southern Ocean
      6th Day of Chanukah
      19th Dec. 1998 (Hebrew Year 5769)
 

Hello again to everyone at Winthrop school, especially to the classes of Ms Adamo, Ms Smith and Ms O’Reilly, and of course to Ms Kelly!!
 

PRESENT POSITION:   58 degrees South Latitude, 76 degrees East Longitude
DIRECTION HEADING:   42 degrees (North East)
SPEED HEADING:   12 knots (14 miles per hour)
DISTANCE FROM DAVIS STATION: 593 nautical miles (684 miles)
DISTANCE TO FREMANTLE:  2284 nautical miles (2633 miles)
AIR TEMPERATURE:   0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit)
WATER TEMPERATURE:  -0.5 degrees Celsius (31 degrees Fahrenheit)
WATER DEPTH:   352 metres (1155 feet)
WIND SPEED:    24 knots (28 miles per hour)
 

Shalom!  Guess what?  We finally left the ice.  Yesterday I was woken up by the ship moving around a lot in the waves.  You see when you are in the ice, the waves are kept down by the covering of ice, so the sea is very calm.  When you come out into the open ocean that all changes.  Some people have been seasick (not me, thankfully).  Charlie Chowder, has, of course, been fine, as he is used to the sea.  The Japanese ship, the "Shirase", has now headed back to Antarctica.  Yesterday we met up with the South African tug, the "John Ross".  At the moment we are able to go under our own power, so the "John Ross" is following us closely in case we have any problems.

It has been very hard to sleep for the last month or so because it has never been dark.  When you are near the poles in summer, the sun stays up for months and never sets, and the opposite happens in the winter, when the sun doesn’t come up at all!  Down here in the Southern Hemisphere, we have summer when you have winter.  A couple days from now is the longest day of the year for us (called the Summer Solstice, which is the 22nd of December), but for you it’s the shortest.  Because we are now heading north away from the South Pole, it is starting to get darkish at night.  It has been very confusing when it’s always light, since you don’t know when to eat or sleep, as it’s always the same outside.

There’s no way I could come down to Antarctica in an Australian ship without taking about the most famous Australian Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson.  If you mention Antarctica in Australia, "Mawson" is usually the next word you hear.  In fact he’s so well known that his face (buried in a balaclava) is on the $100 note!  He was born in England in 1884 and moved to Australia when he was very young.  He was blond and very tall and strong, a perfect explorer.  Some of his friends described him as being like a Viking.

He first went to Antarctica in 1908 as a scientist on one of Shackleton’s voyages.  He was only supposed to stay for the summer, but liked it so much he stayed a whole year.  He seems to have had a great time, climbing the volcano, Mount Erebus, and being the first person the Southern Magnetic Pole.

Scott asked him to go on an expedition with him, but Mawson decided he wanted to lead his own Australian expedition.  In fact just like us,  Mawson also left from Hobart on a ship called the "Aurora Australis, but he went in 1911.  Eventhough he was a great explorer, he was a terrible sailor and spent most of the time in the Southern Ocean being seasick!

Although he is famous for being an explorer, he saw himself as a scientist first, and his expedition is considered the first one to be concerned more with scientific discoveries that geographical ones.  His speciality was geology (study of rocks and minerals).  Antarctica was a fascinating place to study geology as there are very ancient rocks here, and they could also be compared with the rocks in Australia, which was attached to Antarctica millions of years ago in a continent called "Gondwana".

He is best remembered for a famous dog sledging trip.  He went more than 300 miles onto the ice cap with 2 sledges and 2 companions.  One of the sledges (the one with the food) fell into a deep crevasse (a hole in the ice), and one of his friends was killed.  Mawson and the remaining man had to struggle back in the bitter cold.  By the end all the huskies were dead, and 100 miles from his base his other friend died, so he had to battle on alone for 30 days.  He didn’t think he could make it.  He just wanted to get close enough so they would be able to find his body.  Amazingly he made it back alive to the hut, only to see the ship that was to bring him back to Australia just leaving!  He had to wait another year to be picked up!

Well, that’s our history lesson for the day.  Forgive me, but I tend to think history is really important.  I think that there is no way you can understand what is happening now without knowing what happened before.

I now have the great pleasure of introducing the most famous passenger on our ship, Bill the Krill.  Bill has become fast friends with Charlie Chowder the clam.  I guess undersea creatures like to stick together.  Bill’s friend, Joel, studies krill, and Joel has kindly agreed to translate from krillese to English for us.  Here he goes:
 

"Hi everyone! My name is Bill and I'm a krill. Joel and Tim have asked me to talk about being a krill today, so here goes. First, what is a krill? Well, we look like small shrimps, grow up to about 2 inches long and have eleven pairs of legs! Yes! I have 6 pairs of big legs on the front half of my body, called the thorax, and 5 more much smaller pairs on the tail end, called the abdomen.  I use the 6 big pairs for filtering food out of the water, and the 5 smaller pairs for swimming. My body is covered with a strong outer shell, called a carapace, which is made up of one big bit covering my thorax and 6 segments covering my abdomen. Each segment is separate from the others so my abdomen can move while I swim. When I grow, because my carapace is hard and won't stretch, I have to dump the old one (which is called moulting) and grow a new, bigger one! I do this about once every thirty days. Worldwide there are 86 species of us krill, although only 8 are found in Antarctic waters.

Do you know what a species is?

Did you know that the biomass of krill is five times that of humans? That means if you took all the krill in the world and weighed them and took all the humans and weighed them, the krill total would be five times bigger than the human total! Krill Rule!
 

We krill are really important in Antarctica because we eat phytoplankton.  Phytoplankton are single celled plants and grow, like most plants, by using sunlight to make sugars from carbon dioxide and water. That's called photosynthesis. So when we eat phytoplankton we convert all that plant material, which other animals can't eat, to nice edible krill...... Oh No!  We are then eaten by many other Antarctic animals, including fish, penguins, seals, birds and whales. This chain of who eats whom is called the "food chain".  You can see that krill play a vital part in the Antarctic food chain. Almost everything here eats us, or eats something that eats us!

What do you think would happen if we suddenly disappeared?

We usually get around in big swarms, often made up of millions of us.  Usually each swarm is entirely boy krill or girl krill, with each member being about the same size. Most of the time we just swim with the currents in the ocean, but if we need to we can swim quite fast - up to about one metre per second. That's about 2 miles per hour, which is fast if you're only 2 inches long! I think Joel is going to change the water in my tank again now, so I better go. Bye!"
 

Thanks a lot Bill, and, of course, Joel.  We now know which are the most important animals in the Antarctic, not piddling little whales or silly humans, but KRILL!!!!

That’s all for now everybody.  Have a fun Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, Ramadan, New Year, or whatever!  I hope you get this before you guys go on vacation.  I’ll send another email from Western Australia when I get there; you can read it when you get back.  Enjoy!

See ya

Tim Page