Some of the Icy Bits of the Voyage!

These are just a few images of the ice on the travels of the Aurora Australia on the V1 trip to resupply the Davis Station. These offered a mild source of sanity during the day to day voyage. It is a big ocean and I would not recommend sea ice travel in a ship that is actually rather small.

If you are after a comparison have a look at the Yamal, Russian nuclear powered ice breaker for serious bugger off and was that an iceberg or just a speed bump that we obliterated.

This is a shot off the back of the ship. you can see that the safety fences have been put down flat as the helicopters had already done some work. This is really to show the path of destruction behind the ship. Full ice breaking mode has made that channel through the fast ice(has contact with the land and is locked in). It took the whole day to do that small bit from the open water!

This is what a 'lead' looks like. Leads are what the ship tries to find with the help of satelite imagery. If there are plenty of lead the boat uses them to go through the ice faster. Sometimes the leads run out or the boat has to find another way around. It was great fun to go up the front of the ship as it ramed through these more open areas. Heaps of things to look at. Icebergs, penguins and seals which was such a relief after having more than a week with just water!

This is a piece of the sea ice that has been flipped over. The brown muddy sludgy stuff is a type of algae. The krill and the photosynthetic bacteria feed on this and then the penguins and heaps of other things eat the krill. If the brown algae were not there then we would not have any penguins or whales in our oceans. Global warming can reduce how much of this algae there is as it only grows under the sea ice. No sea ice = no algae = no penguins or whales!

This is me standing on the 'Monkey Deck'(the highest deck outside) with loads and loads of pancake ice in the background. The ship is able to push through this stuff at 8-10 knots without too much trouble.

This is what it looked like when the ship was looking for leads through the ice. At times we went around and around and around or backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards just to get through it without burning through 1000's of litres of fuel.

This is a type of ice that forms on the surface of the water and is really like a slushy! You can see it moving in waves from the wake of the ship. We came across this in the early days of moving through the first year sea ice.