Challenging Habitat

Blog

Tall Ship Pelican of London is looking splendid with a freshly painted hull.

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Earth Day is celebrated sometime in April each year since the 1970s and in 2022, it’s Friday 22nd.

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Back in January, Seas Your Future facilitated a fantastic opportunity for six young Scientists in Residence to carry out research project during a 12 day voyage on the Pelican of London along the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Here you can find out what they discovered:

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It is one thing to be aware of the carbon emissions of online activities (running a website, internet searches, emails, social media, video/music streaming), yet quite another knowing how to reduce it.

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When the Royal Meteorological Society invited me to write a guest blog about the Antarctic Quest 21 expedition for their MetMatters page, I analysed the daily SitReps provided daily from the Antarctic Peninsula by expedition leader Paul Hart to provide an insight how the weather and ice conditions determined the experience and progress of the expedition team.

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The team safely back in Argentina and preparing to go their separate ways to rejoin families and pick up their lives back home, Paul find time for a concluding message.

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My work with Seas Your Future gives me the privilege to sail the tall ship Pelican of London with some fabulous people.

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I have explained the background to the scientific projects we are supporting in a number of blog posts and on our website.

Now I provid an insight into what ‘doing science’ on the ice actually entails, with the example of sampling snow for metal analysis.

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As Antarctic Quest 21 draws to a close, the science team find time to send some video footage of what they have been doing.

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It was such fun to do this webinar for school kids from different ages and I was truly astonished what well-considered and pertinent questions I was asked. Well done, all of you!

There was one question I couldn’t answer at the time, but I looked it up after the webinar:

The amount of snow falling on Antarctica has been estimated to be around 2000 Gigatons per year. This is enough to cover the whole of Antarctica in 14 cm of water if it melted (or, as the estimate comes from Belgium, it would cover that country in 66 m of water).

The centre of Antarctica is relatively dry and most of the snow falls on the margins of the continent, in particular in on the Antarctic Peninsula and the West Antarctic Ice Shelf. To put it into a Southwest UK context, in terms of water, the western Antarctic Peninsula receives about as much as Dartmoor (around 2000 – 2500 mm).

So, what is a Gigaton? ‘Giga’ is the prefix for one billion (1 000 000 000 or 109). So, we are talking about 2 x 1012 tons or 2 x 1015 kg (1 000 000 000 000 000 kg).