Hi APECS! My name is Allen Pope and for July-August 2010 I will be up in Ny Ålesund, Svalbard for the next 3 weeks doing fieldwork. My research is related to collecting ground-based glacier-surface reflectance data to help in validation and interpretation of satellite and airborne imagery.

In addition to myself and two other team members, we will be joined by our mascot Fjord the Reindeer. As an outreach measure, Fjord will be keeping a blog of our activities, research, life in Ny Ålesund, and stories about Arctic research complete with photos, maps and hopefully video.

So, check it out at www.notrudolph.blogspot.com, and keep checking back as he’ll be putting up new content frequently. Please feel free to tell any friends you have interested in education & outreach, too – we would love to get questions from anybody interested in our work or Arctic fieldwork in general whether school kids or armchair explorers. If you’re interested in more expeditions and outreach, check out www.educationthroughexpeditions.org.

Written by Angelika Renner

Hei all,

After more than a year on land (or in small boats), I'm off on a cruise again! Back on the RRS James Clark Ross and to the Weddell Sea and of course we will maintain a cruise website and blog! Check it out: http://www.classroomatsea.net/andrex/

In case you're a teacher/lecturer, discuss any Antarctic related stuff in your class, and have questions for us: we will build a Q&A section and any questions we receive, we'll post there with an answer (if we can come up with one...). So get your student asking! If you're just generally curious and have questions yourself, fire away as well!
We will try to blog in as many languages as we have on board additionally to the english posts... Just to add a challenge to our work...

Hope to hear from you,
Geli

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As a Marine Biologist, my work consists on the most exciting (and longest) scientific expedition for a Portuguese scientist in Antarctica ever: 9 months during the Antarctic Winter (between March and November) to test some hypotheses on how climate change can affect the behaviour of Antarctic animals, particularly albatrosses and penguins. Results will helps us understand how other animals, elsewhere  in the planet can deal with climate change. On the first two months (March and April), I looked at their prey abundance (particularly fish, krill and squid) in different parts of the Southern Ocean, onboard of the RRS James Clark Ross as part of the international Programme ICED (Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics of the Southern Ocean) that got together more than 20 scientists from all over the world, mostly early career researchers, still as part of the International Polar Year (IPY) science programme.

After at the life cycles, abundance and distribution of key marine organisms, I went to the British Base at  Bird Island, South Georgia. Here, I am going to stay until November studying the foraging ecology of two of the most amazing species on Earth, as case study species: the wandering albatross Diomedea exulans and the Gentoo penguin Pygoscelis papua. I will be particularly interested in linking where they go (using GPS tracking techniques), what they eat and how do they relate to oceanographic and climate conditions, through the Antarctic Winter. Wandering albatrosses can travel up to Brazil while searching for food whereas Gentoos do not know as far as 70 km from South Georgia. Are they capable of adapting to different food availability? Will they change their foraging? Will this affect their survival? Big questions that I hope to get an answer....

While at Bird Island, the science is intimately linked with education and outreach too. As an APECS member, I got through numerous conversations to schools, workshops, conferences, summer schools (in UK, Brazil, Malaysia, Portugal, Norway,...) using the WWW and it has been amazing sharing the science and the paradise that the Antarctic is...living in the middle of icebergs, penguins, seals and albatrosses...

9 months are flying pretty fast....  Jose

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Building upon on-going large, integrated projects (THRESHOLDS and DAMOCLES FP6 IPs, and the ARCTOS network) the project Arctic Tipping Points (ATP) will identify the elements of the Arctic marine ecosystem likely to show abrupt changes in response to climate change, and will establish the levels of the corresponding climate drivers inducing regime shift in those tipping elements. In addition, state-of-the-art oceanographic, ecological, fisheries, and economic models will determine the effect of crossing those thresholds for the Arctic marine ecosystems, and the associated risks and opportunities for economic activities dependent on the marine ecosystem of the European Arctic.