CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- The Adélie Penguin breeding season in Antarctica is short. By late January it is time for everyone to leave including the penguins. Before our team departs our last task is to band the chicks...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- Penguin chicks are born with a fine cover of small soft feathers. In a few days they will loose those feathers and grow wooly thick gray ones. These feathers will keep them warm for the next few weeks, but are not waterproof...

ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- In this land (Antarctica) and an ocean far away (to most of you), but not long ago (in the past weeks or so), a scenario was played out that in days long past may once have happened, in fact, near by to where you are, but involving penguin cousins...

CAPE ROYDS, ANTARCTICA-- I’m sure Inuits have a name for it, but otherwise it’s the fizzing sound as great expanses of ice dissolve so rapidly that any air still between its spaces or molecules is released into the atmosphere. We heard that sound...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- The penguins at Cape Royds have been challenged in recent years by widely varying extremes of conditions, mostly having to do with how far they have to walk between colony and ocean. That’s a very big deal for them. With the arrival of the big icebergs...

MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA-- Eighth grade science students at Rye Middle School in Rye, New Hampshire, got into the act in Antarctica. Under the direction of their teacher Robin Ellwood, they built a submersible robotic camera that was launched in the Ross Sea...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- When you first come to Antarctica you are overwhelmed by the enormity, vastness and seemingly endless large structures of ice which dominate this continent (see my last dispatch). These larger scale visions persists until you begin to look closer...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- When you first come to Antarctica you are overwhelmed with the amount of ice. Every direction you turn you are surrounded by it dominating and controlling the landscape, white against white. Beautiful and powerful...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- First time this has happened, but I was sitting today for a spell just to watch the penguins here at Cape Royds and the only sound was that of the blood going through my ears...

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA-- We’ve made three trips, by helicopter, to Beaufort Island this season. Usually we can’t do this until the end of the season, because the McMurdo helos don’t fly over open water and a ship is not available until the end. It’s a 40 minute helo ride and a 6 hour boat ride. This year, though, fast ice extends out to Beaufort...