Antarctic Blog 1 May 2017

by Julia Schmale

Mission Part I is now completed: After roughly 55.000 km of travel around the world the Akademik Tryoshnikov arrived in Bremerhaven and all material was offloaded from the ship, including our container. With that the voyage of the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition finished for us.

However the project as such has merely started. Now intensive and exciting work lies ahead of us to learn more about aerosol and trace gases in the Southern Ocean. One of the first questions that might come to mind is: “How clean is the air in Antarctica?” Anecdotally, we can show that concentrations of particles were very low sometimes. When preparing a cup of tea on the Mertz glacier during leg 2, there were not enough particles to generate vapor as we know it. Only when producing particles with a lighter, fumes develop:

The voyage has left us with many memories and thousands of photographs. Some of our impressions are captured in the ACE videos that were produced for each leg of the journey:
Video 1: Leg 1: Cape Town to Hobart
Video 2: Leg 2: Hobart to Punta Arenas
Video 3: Leg 3: Punta Arenas to Cape Town


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