From Janet Dalziell, expedition leader.
21st January 1997
We are rolling our way across the Drake Passage; 32 people on board our ship that suddenly doesn't seem so big in the enormity of the Southern Ocean. Last night, after days of waiting for a helicopter part to arrive, we finally left Ushuaia, a small town at the southern end of Argentina that proudly claims that it is at the end of the earth (in Spanish: "al fin del mundo"). We arrive in Antarctica on Thursday, once we get through these two days in a patch of sea that is supposed to be the roughest in the world.
Because this ship is an icebreaker, it has a very round hull, which means it moves a lot in the ocean's swells. The ship's crew have all been on board since before Christmas, so they are all used to the movement of the ship. But the rest of us, campaigners, photographers and journalists that came on board more recently, are currently struggling with various degrees of seasickness, counting the hours before we reach calmer waters close to land around Antarctica.
We have already started to see the first signs of the frozen south. We have been followed all day by several wandering albatrosses, huge birds which soar endlessly over the waves, with wings that catch the wind so well that they never need to flap. In contrast are the tiny fluttering storm petrels, which seem far too fragile to be this far away from land.
This is the first in a series of diary entries that will be put up at this website. Some of the people on board will take turns to write a description of where we are, what we are doing and what we have found, as we go through our month's work around the Antarctic Peninsula. Our expedition this year concentrates on climate change. By bringing back pictures from Antarctica, we want to make the world finally take notice of the huge and scary things that are already happening in Antarctica because it is warming up. We will be interviewing scientists that are researching these changes, and we will be going to the places where changes can be seen and filmed.
Watch this space!...