30 Jun, 2017

Functional group diversity is key to Southern Ocean benthic carbon pathways Biodiversity on polar and sub-polar sea beds can be very rich and abundant, perform many vital ecosystem services but be vulnerable to indirect and direct human impacts.  As a result there has been a strong drive to establish conservation zones such as Marine Protected Areas.  For these to be most effective we have to understand for any one location what biodiversity is present, how it functions, what threats are there

05 Jun, 2017

01 Jun, 2017

Some news from a cruise around Ascension Island with the ASCCC team CLICK HERE

16 Mar, 2017

A few seconds with Chester Sands during the ACE expedition to better understand our project !

15 Mar, 2017

Bouvetoya is known as the most isolated island in the world. The areas we chose for sampling have never been explored before...this can be said for many areas of the Sub-Antarctic, however, Bouvetoya is a particularly remote and rare place – cold, hostile and impenetrable. Despite this, chinstrap penguins and many different species of albatross call this place home. Image: Bouvetoya Island. Photo: B. Moreno There are very few biological samples from this area, and the only recent records of

15 Mar, 2017

The South Sandwich Islands are a chain of volcanic islands in the Sub-Antarctic. This isolated, and as such rarely visited, and even more rarely sampled archipelago, is often sighted in stormy seas and dense cloud (as it was when Narissa visited in 2011, and when Rachel visited in 2012). Our first sighting of one of the northern islands, Candelmas, was similarly dreary. Image: Our first view of Candlemas Island. Photo: N. Bax Rachel was here at this craggy, volcanic, isolated place in 2012 on

06 Mar, 2017

After a few days of ‘not-so-glassy’ sailing we arrived at the Chilean sub-Antarctic island group – Diego Ramirez. Made up of a group of northern islands, or islets, and a southern group, we spent our time in the south, offshore of Diego’s two largest islands: Isla Bartolomé and Isla Gonzalo. We arrived bright and early at 6amish, though, of course there had to be some kind of drama. This time it revolved around getting terrestrial people ashore without the required immigration clearance

19 Feb, 2017

Enough time had been saved due to good weather and ice conditions in transit between sites to spend 4 hours at Peter 1st island.  As our winch was still not working and there was too much ice around we could not test the winch here so had the day off to enjoy the views of this magnificent ice capped monolith rising out of the ocean.  All up the ASCCC team spent 6 ours relaxing on the bow of the ship, watching the southern fulmars and skuas gracefully circle the ship and the crab eater seals

19 Feb, 2017

Mt Siple is a little known volcano near the Amundsen shelf…BIG icy, cold, white.  This was an opportunistic site as ice conditions suggested we couldn’t get to Peter 1st - a rare sensible group decision that everyone bought into, and for most people it turned out to be an excellent decision…especially for those who went on to sample at Peter 1st as well. We conducted two trawls at the Mt Siple station. They were both exceedingly rich - by far the greatest diversity we have seen on leg two.