Australia’s Antarctic science and logistics season has started, with RSV Nuyina leaving Hobart on a six-week resupply voyage to Davis research station.
The ship has 100 expeditioners on board, two helicopters, a hot pink Antarctic tractor, 240,000 litres of water, 13 tonnes of dry food and more than 20 tonnes of fresh and frozen food.
It marks the start of an ambitious year for science and infrastructure at Australia’s Antarctic and sub-Antarctic stations.
“We’re all very excited to be underway,” Voyage Leader Anthea Fisher said.
“We’ve been chatting to the team who are down at Davis – they’ve been there for a year now – and they’re pretty excited for us to turn up too, to resupply the station and bring them home again.”
The journey south will take 15 days and require the ship to break ice for the last nine or ten kilometres.
“At this time of year there’s a section of ice breaking through the pack ice and then the fast ice,” the voyage leader said.
“We’ll break into that and park about a kilometre out from station and once we’re parked in there, people will be able to just walk off the ship across the ice to station.”
The trades team travelling to Davis will aim to complete work on a new reverse osmosis plant, which creates drinking water from sea water.
Along with a third water tank installed last year, it will give the station the water capacity it needs to support station populations in future.
“Davis station doesn’t have a fresh water source so we have to produce fresh water from salt water via a desalination plant and then store that water for most of the year until we can produce fresh water for a short window in summer,” Construction Supervisor for summer, Tom de Leon, said.
“A huge amount of planning goes into making sure we don’t run out of materials.
“There’s no Bunnings down there we can duck into so we have to think very carefully about what we bring and what we use when we’re down there.”
There are also science project teams on board.
“We have an important season of science ahead of us this year, kicking off with this first voyage,” Head of the Australian Antarctic Division’s Science Branch, Rhonda Bartley, said.
Two seabird scientists on board will stop at Davis for a few weeks to monitor local seabird colonies and look for any signs of avian influenza in bird populations and seals near the station. They will then go to Mawson research station for the rest of the summer season to monitor and conduct research on penguins and flying seabirds.
“We haven’t had any signs of avian influenza in East Antarctica yet but it’s really important that we have people there to look for those signs and assess the impacts of any outbreak,”
“We’re also very concerned for the health and welfare of our expeditioners so a lot of our planning is around having good biosecurity measures in place and being able to respond to protect our people.”
Three scientists on the voyage from the Cleaner Antarctica program – which assesses and remediates legacy waste at Antarctic and sub-Antarctic stations – will also carry out work at Davis before transiting to Mawson for the summer’s program of works.
Three scientific technicians are doing the round trip to maintain key geophysical and atmospheric monitoring equipment on board Nuyina.
In December, scientists will return to Bunger Hills for the third and final year of the Denman Terrestrial Campaign, which aims to increase our understanding of the glacier’s stability and possible contribution to sea level rise, through research projects carried out inland.
After the scientists leave in January, trades teams and expeditioners will start the mammoth task of packing the camp up and remediating the site.
Then in February, RSV Nuyina leaves for the 60-day Denman Marine Voyage, the ship’s first dedicated marine science journey.
The voyage will take 60 scientists from a range of universities and disciplines to the Denman Glacier region so they can study the system from the sea.
