Antarctic SCALE Spring Cruise

Michael Daniel
Apr 23, 2020
16 min read

Updated: Apr 25, 2021

October - November 2019

“The world is a huge place. How will you know where you fit in unless you explore...” - Ernest Shackleton

It was on the afternoon of 12 October 2019 that the SA Agulhas II set sail for the Antarctic sea ice. The Southern Ocean Seasonal Experiment (SCALE) spring cruise had begun and I was one of the ninety-something scientists on-board.

The story of how I found myself on such a voyage is quite curious. On hearing from my fellow students that our university took part in numerous scientific cruises to the Antarctic every year, I immediately inquired about how one goes about getting oneself on such a cruise. A few inquiries and emails later, I found myself in front of the desk of the professor in charge of plastics research and it was he who was looking for a research assistant. I was only too happy to volunteer as tribute. Never being one to simply observe opportunities as they pass by, I grabbed onto the rope as it slipped through my fingers and was whisked away. I informed my supervisor of my decision the following day only to be asked why it was that I even wanted to go to the Antarctic. Somewhat taken aback, I inquired whether he had been to the Antarctic before. 'Yes. Three times.' was his reply.

Something that I did not foresee when accepting the offer was the stress that acquiring a Seafarer's Medical certificate would bring me. We are all familiar with that illogical feeling of foreboding that overcomes us when we see flashing blue lights and a hail from a police officer of the law. A similar scenario is what I found myself in while sitting in the waiting area in the Tokai Medical centre. I know that I am a healthy man, one of the healthiest I know if it’s not too bold to say, but no amount of logical thinking was proving any comfort at the time. The nurse telling me to "just breathe normally" while hooked up to the Holter machine, electrodes stuck to my bare chest, did nothing to quell my anxiety either. Being sure that the nurse was going to tell me I had a rare disease and only months to live put my resting heart rate at 112bpm and no amount of soothing words were bringing it down. Needless to say, I left with a full bill of health and a new zest for life.

Week 1

As research assistant on the plastics team I had a few responsibilities. As far as scientific work went, while in open water we would be doing observations from deck for macro plastics, deploying a Neuston net after every station (coordinates at which scientific readings are taken) to catch any surface plastics above 25um, as well as using a bucket to get water samples for filtering. Once in the ice, observations and neuston nets would cease and be replaced by ice cores, pancake ice and snow samples. Do not be discouraged if you are not keeping up with the nomenclature, all shall be revealed in time.

It was thus we spent two days, observing the ocean as she slipped by. The wind then picked up, gusting at 50 knots (96kph) and put an end to observations. There is always someone needing help on-board however, so a good portion of day 4 was spent searching for a scientific sail buoy allegedly in our vicinity. The infinite wisdom and forethought of scientists and engineers was demonstrated beautifully in this instance in the colour of said sail buoy: dark blue. A hue, you can imagine, very similar to that of the surface of the ocean. It is little wonder that we didn't find the buoy but I'm not one to complain about having an excuse to stand out on deck.

Day 5 brought with it the first sightings of marine mammals in the forms of Pilot whales and southern right whale dolphins. It also brought with it the opportunity for the first night deployment of Whitney Neuston, the neuston net (video of a day deployment below). Unfortunately the gods had different plans and sent a squall while we were lowering her into the water and the deployment had to be abandoned. Getting caught on deck in the rain was well worth it though. I felt like Jack Sparrow himself.

The first snow was seen on day 6, collecting in corners and covering the deck like flour on a baker’s countertop. The novelty of snow has not worn off on us South Africans and a few of us younger folk were tossing the stuff at one another in no time. What a contrast this was to the suffocating heat the residence of deck 4 woke up to the following morning with a heating system failure resulting in the entire deck being maintained at 30+ degrees C.

Being a lowly research assistant, I was situated in a shared cabin occupied by myself and three fellow men. Not a big space, it comprised of 4 bunk beds separated by a corridor of similar width with a window at its end that looked out onto the foredeck. We had a single desk under the window and a couch opposite. The remainder of the space was taken up by cupboard space and a bathroom. It was not a big space for 4 men but it was only really a place to sleep and I had no qualms. Life on-board is actually nothing but luxurious. Crew and scientists are treated to a three course meal three times a day, underfloor heating, a gymnasium, a sauna, a ping-pong table in the heli-hangar, and two bar areas for socialising. We really had nothing to complain about. And the scientific work that was being carried out was quite remarkable, ground breaking even. The SA Agulhas II, a state of the art, fully scientifically equipped, ice breaking polar explorer is something we as South Africans can be proud of.

Week 2

Week 2 was when things started getting cold. The closest I've been to getting frost bite was definitely while lifting buckets of sea water on deck bare handed to avoid plastics contamination from gloves. I lost fine motor control and experienced severe pain, but that's no worse than I feel while surfing Atlantic side in the Cape, so I don't even know why I brought it up.

It was also in weeks 2 that I was murdered. The murder mystery game had been going on for a few days where participants were each given a name, a murder weapon and a place in which to commit the heinous crime. Using trickery and deceit I was lured into the bathroom by a damsel in distress to fix a broken tap. By the time I realised it was too late, I was brutally murdered with a beanbag. Chivalry was not dead, but I was.

The first behemoth we came across towered some 90m above the surface: icebergs. Pictures are inadequate at communicating their awesome size. With 90% of its volume hidden beneath the surface, this equates to some 900m of ice descending into the depths below, a truly unfathomable distance. Their silent presence is felt as they drift by, an unstoppable mass, their geometric edges betraying their earlier lives as part of the continental ice shelf. I must have taken at least 100 pictures of every one we passed.

When you think of sea ice, what do you see? White stretching to the horizon? Meandering through fields of icebergs perhaps? What I had never considered was what the transition of sea to ice would look like. The answer was given before I thought of asking the question as we entered into the pancake ice. This may be the most beautiful natural phenomenon that I have ever seen. 50 shades of grey ice paving stretching to the horizon. More mesmerising still was to watch the swell moving sleepily through the pancakes, slowly stilled by the lullaby that quietens the ocean.

Once into the ice proper, seals and penguins became more frequent and ice core drilling training commenced on a pancake that had been fished out of the sea and placed on deck.

This training was soon put to test at the first ice station where the plastics team were set to receive our first cores and snow samples. On inspection of the handling procedure of the core and snow samples, our team leader Eleanor was not happy with the level of contamination and made a formal request that we be allowed onto the ice to collect our own samples. It was thus that the morning of day 14 found myself and Eleanor kneeling on the southern ocean, collecting snow samples while an emperor penguin came to inspect what it was that we were doing on his floe (photo and video below). This is the reason I got into this field. It is in these kind of outrageous circumstances that I wish to find myself on a more regular basis. Emperor penguins are the largest of the penguin species and fully grown are roughly as tall as an adult standing on their knees. They also have a very curious and trusting nature, so much so that while stuck in the ice, the crew of Sir Ernest Shackleton simply walked up to them and led them by the flipper back to their ship.

Week 3

Week 3 was spent completely in the ice. For us this meant sampling and we spent a great deal of our time cutting, melting down and running ice core and snow samples through filters that would be analysed for microfibres at a later stage. So much sampling actually occurred that the fuse blew on our trusty vacuum pump, a job that took 2 electrical engineers and a great deal of discussion to fix.

Our second outing onto the ice ended with more excitement than we had anticipated. While standing the requisite distance behind the safety officer as she tested ice thickness, she suddenly turned around, made a big 'X' with her arms and ordered an immediate evacuation of the ice. Following an orderly panic, we were told when back on board that she had discovered that we were dangerously close to a ridge, the area where two ice floes meet, and a very unstable place to be conducting scientific work. This call was questioned when we found that a section of a test core had been tested and shown to have a breaking strength of 26kN, or 2.6 tons. However, decisions are always easy to criticize retrospectively and I would have made the same call. Safety is sexy after all.

It is worth mentioning here the strength of this ice. Needing to section our cores for sampling, I figured the easiest way would be to break them. To this end I placed a metal rod underneath the midsection of the 1m long core until it seesawed on top of it. I then proceeded to gingerly add weight, first using my arms, then the weight of my upper body, and finally my full body weight by standing with a foot on either end. Neither of these techniques resulted in anything other than me making a fool of myself. From this point on, the cores were cut in half using a saw.

Being in October of 2019, this cruise ran concurrently with the Rugby World Cup, the final of which would be played between South Africa and England. South Africans have never shied away from showing gees (spirit) and a plan was made to decorate a weather balloon with the Springbok before making a wish upon it and releasing it into the stratosphere. When the Poms got wind of this they demanded an equal share and subsequently drew their rose on the opposite side. It was around this time that I heard of this plan and immediately offered my services for team and country; there is nowhere I go without my South African Speedo, a decision that I have yet to regret. My request was granted, as the pictures will attest, and we went on to win that World Cup. I would like to document in writing here that I was the one to start the speedo trend that swept the country after the world cup, not Faf de Klerk the Springbok scrumhalf. Social media will confirm that my picture was posted first. He even had the audacity to steal my caption. You heard it here first.

I previously gave an indication as to the safety procedures that were followed before and during all work that was carried out on the ice with the engineers of the Ice Team. This included an initial safety briefing before entering the ice and a presentation by the on-board doctor on the dangers and stages of frost bite. At each ice station a safety reconnoitre was then carried out by the safety team where test cores were drilled in the sampling area to confirm ice thickness. All work then had to take place within 1m of these safety cores. Absolutely no caution was thrown to the wind. It was given a hard hat, a harness and tethered to the ship.

You would assume that these were universal safety protocol, applying to all who took part in scientific work on the ice. You, like me, would be wrong in this assumption. Very little of the above applied to the sealers of Seal Team 6 and in so doing, perfectly demonstrating the difference between engineers and biologists. Due to the nature of their work, they simply could not afford the time taken to follow the procedures mentioned above. Their wildly different standard operating procedure involved the use of long sticks which would be used to give the ice a few perfunctory jabs before deeming it fit for load bearing. They would then step off the cradle in hot pursuit of a seal before it was able to evade capture.

This is much less of a chase than you are may think because the amount of insulating blubber that these seals carry is simply astounding. A suitable comparison would be to a sausage with a face which tries to worm away. At the risk of sounding insensitive, it’s quite humorous, as chubby animals trying to display athleticism often are. I have seldom been more envious of a group of men than I was of the sealers of Seal Team 6.

Week 3 ended with a superhero themed Halloween party in the bar of Deck 6. Quite the carouse was had between the hours of 8 and 10 pm when the bar was open and the time limit enabled ample time for rehydration before hitting the hay. Hangover avoided.

Week 4

Week 4 brought with it the Rugby World Cup Final. Under the Captain's orders all work was suspended and the limited Wi-Fi was disabled everywhere except for in the auditorium. Crew members and scientist alike gathered in anticipation. 90 minutes later satellites may have picked up a spike in acoustic signals coming from somewhere in the southern ocean as 130 people whooped cries of celebration. Most South Africans will remember where they were when we won the World Cup and for us it would be no different. The festivities continued with the same buzzing atmosphere as the braai's (barbeque) were lit on the helideck. The hangar doors opened to the smell of burning fire wood, perfectly complimented by the 'tsshhh-kh' crack of opening beers. A light snow then began to fall, the music was turned up and we danced in a circle on deck until the early hours of nightfall. To cap it all off, a sealer lit a pipe and I became a hardened seadog that night, as few things are more manly than smoking a pipe while wearing shorts in the Antarctic.

Myself and another young German man, Max, decided in week 4 that it was time to start a yoga group. Every second day we would meet in the heli-hangar and work through a series of movements in the sun salutation sequence. Once word got out, we were joined by a number of fellow yoga enthusiasts and soon were planning classes for their entertainment. With Max as the technical leader and myself as the flow leader, we were missing a spiritual guide. Enter Izzi. We now had the perfect trio, a Yogi Trinity if you will, and nothing could stop us.

I find it hard to describe why I enjoy being outdoors. I seem to have a greater appreciation for nature than the common man and possibly even the common biologist. I am very easily satisfied by Mother Nature and when around her, am happy just being. For this reason I spent a great deal of my down time sitting outside on the upper decks, watching as the scenery passed by. I'd be rewarded by the occasional penguin, albatross or whale but it was the lure of neither one that kept me there, but rather the collection of the whole. I was just completely captivated by the outside in which I found myself in, with its endless ice fields, whether it be pancakes, pack ice or featureless floe. A notable highlight sighting was that of a leopard seal and her pup, a very rare sighting indeed. The raptor like shape of her head immediately identifying her as a predator. These seals have been known to launch out of the water at people standing too close to the ice edge, mistaking them for penguins. Quite a remarkable animal.

We exited the ice for the last time on day 28, and with it, the calm waters. We were back in the swell and sea sickness returned for some unfortunate few. I had been lucky with only a few hours of discomfort at the very beginning of the voyage, and nothing since.

Week 5

The open ocean. Now that we were out of the ice, observations had started back up again, so, as long as conditions permitted it, Eleanor and I alternated hourly shifts, watching the passing water, hoping for a piece of kelp to break the monotony. I was often seen entertaining myself by dancing to the sounds of my iPod while on observation duty, much to the enjoyment of the birders and whalers with whom we shared monkey island; the deck above the bridge. It was on one such morning that while dancing to the tunes of my 'Feeling good' playlist, I was joined by a squadron of wandering albatrosses. The swell was the biggest we had had at 6m and as the ship pitched and yawed lumbering northward, the albatrosses drew long circles around the ship as they soared effortlessly on the wing. One curious individual etched herself into my memory by coming within a few wingspans of my position 20m above the waves from my lookout point. While observing one another I was able to grasp the full size and majesty of these masters of the air. A wingspan of almost twice my height with not a single feather out of place. With the most subtle and calculated of movements of the tail and wing edges she was able to match the speed of the ship and keep her head perfectly level. I remember the faintest of pinks in her bill, something I had not noticed at a distance, the brilliant white of her coat, and how her feet tucked perfectly under her tail in flight. The apparent ease with which these magnificent birds were able to navigate the air independent of conditions was staggering. They'd glide with their wingtips barely kissing the waves be it a calm clear day, or in the midst of a tempest, seemingly indifferent to the weather. Perfection in motion.

With the absence of ice, a few of the teams, namely the engineers of the ice team and the sealers of Seal Team 6, found themselves with time to spare and not much with which to fill it. The first mental thumb twiddle that they devised was developing code capable of solving a Sudoku. Intrigued, I myself had a go, but my lack of coding knowledge was too high a hurdle to jump and I gave up soon after taking up the challenge. Sometime after this the Antarctic Philosophical Society was established that would meet every second night to discuss everything and anything with like-minded company and a glass of wine. A most spectacular idea and the opportunity for some verbal jousting was taken most enthusiastically.

It was in week 5 that I stumbled into what I now believe to be one of the keys to happiness. This was a nugget given to me by one of the older members of the scientific community, a sealer by the name of Marthan, a 60 - something years young Afrikaans oom from Pretoria. While shooting the breeze over a bottle of red wine one evening, Marthan made a joke that he himself thought so humorous that he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. This was a level of happiness to strive for. If you think you are the funniest person in the room, you will be endlessly entertained and always happy. A good laugh at yourself is good for the soul.

Necessity breeds invention. This is precisely how the game of Ping-cock (or shuttle-pong depending on your inclination) was invented. Needing a way to expend energy and having at our disposal a Ping-Pong table and bats, the game was a natural progression when a shuttlecock was found. The aerodynamic properties of the shuttlecock make it a most perfect projectile on which to release energy. With its extremely low terminal velocity, comes a threshold beyond which any increases in applied impulse results in minimal increase in distance. As a result, the game of Ping-cock has long, nail biting rallies and fierce competitiveness, both of which I took part in whole heartedly.

A clear day brought with it an opportunity for some bird photography. A variety of seabirds were often found in the wake of the ship but on this day the conditions were particularly good. I do not have a photographer’s eye and therefore work on the probability principle that the more pictures I take, the higher my chances of getting a few good ones. It seems that this technique is inherent in birding photography due to the difficulties in following and focusing on a moving target. Be that as it may, I was satisfied with what I had achieved until I saw the photographs of a real photographer, Derek. His pictures made me want to throw away my camera. But after some sulking, I convinced myself that it was all down to his superior equipment and dwelt no longer upon it.

Stargazing has always been one of my favourite nocturnal past-times. Fortunately, we were blessed with a few opportunities to do just this during the homeward leg of our expedition. It was during these that I often got into conversations regarding gender fluidity, pansexuality and non-binary identity with a fellow scientist, Kelsey. A very interesting topic indeed and one in which I found myself completely lost. A revolutionary thought occurred to me to just treat everyone the same, independent of how they identify.

In order to keep some class and prevent anarchy on-board the ship, a few formalities are enforced during meal times and in the bars. These pertain to dress code and are very reasonable, being collared shirts, long pants and closed shoes. Through these, an opportunity presented itself for me to complain in excessive quantities when I was kicked out of the bar area for wearing shorts. I was completely in the wrong of course but the steward could have handled it a bit more politely I thought. In my defence, this particular steward had been on my nerves for a while with his lack of common decency, unable to give more than a scolding grunt when greeted politely. As you can see, I still have some unresolved feelings on the matter so I will leave it at that. Never the less, a good complain and sulk never hurt anyone.

Week 6

Week 6 was the last week that we would be spending on the ship. A 3:30 am neuston net gave me a chance to stay up for sunrise and so, I took my guitar up to Monkey Island and strung a few chords together as the sun pulled itself over the eastern horizon.

The retrieval of one of the sail buoys that were released on the downward leg was an event of great excitement, and not just because nobody had anything better to do. The first success was just in finding it, not an easy task in the expansive Southern Ocean. While manoeuvring alongside the payload for pickup, three wandering albatrosses took interest in the very expensive piece of scientific equipment and proceeded to peck at its solar panels. Watching this through binoculars was entertaining enough but what made it memorable was a comment by a fellow onlooker, nonchalantly asking 'What are those ducks doing?' The absurdity of the remark had me in stitches and it’s something that I still chuckle about today.

The remainder of the trip was spent enjoying the sun on deck during the day and one another's company in the evenings. The final party was quite the soiree and involved not a small amount of tekkie squeaking. As home drew nearer I remember being disappointed by all the chatter I heard about getting back to good Wi-Fi and take-away food. I was quite happy to turn the ship around and spend another few weeks, months even, in the sea ice. The first glimpses of Cape Town's lights had everyone on deck, teary eyed and phoning loved ones in the recently acquired cell reception. Two tugboats assisted us with birthing in the heavy breeze and just after midnight we were lining up outside customs. I left the SA Agulhas II, hopefully not for the last time, at 1 pm on 20 November 2019.