Where am I now?

There is only one word that can aptly describe the last few days for me, and that is amazing!
I thought I had seen and done quite a lot in my past seasons down here, but I realize now that I have barely touched the surface.
Since my last post we have made it down to the edge of the ice shelf in the Weddell Sea, taking the opportunity to see the condition of the mooring sites that we will be using in a few weeks when we visit the base at Halley.
Then after the recovery of a buoy from the sea bed, we have headed back into the pack ice for more science. The work is a mixture of ship based activities, such as water column profiling, and air sampling. And then there is the fun stuff (no offence to the water and air sampling folk)...

The above photo shows an intrepid group of scientists heading off across an ice floe to fix a tag onto a Weddell Seal. In total we need to find and tag 10 seals, which sounds easy enough, but there seem to be a distinct lack of Weddell Seals in the Weddell Sea.

For seal number 2, I managed to join the shore party, so had my first experience of working on an ice floe. So with the ship thrusting up against the floe, I was landed with a party of 5 scientists to carry out the task of tagging the seal.

Luckily the Weddell Seals are fairly docile, and easy to approach which made the whole process much easier. I got hands on with the work, and helped measure the seal (in between taking photos).

With the work completed, it was back to the ship. With a chance for a final few photos on the way. This time, it was an inquisitive Emperor Penguin, who popped up to see what the big red ship was doing.


And of course a final photo call to prove that I did manage to escape the bridge and help out with the work.