The Blog

The South Pole is at an altitude of 2,835m metres (9,301 ft) above sea level. The ice is estimated to be about 2,700 metres (9,000 ft) thick at the pole, which means that the actual land surface under the ice sheet is close to sea level. The nearest open sea is located about 800 miles away at Bay of Whales. Below: Dr Mike Stroud (left) and Sir Ranulph Fiennes (right) at the South Pole in 1993…

A day in the life of Spencer Smirl As the expedition objectives have been changed, so have our daily routines.  One of the biggest changes is we get a lot more sleep. Rich and I no longer have to get up and begin the start-up of frozen vehicles and we also have a huge surplus of personal time as well. It has almost been weeks now that we have been pinned down by severe weather. Temperatures w…

What is the Aurora Australis? The Aurora Australis (also known as the Southern Lights) is a natural light display in the sky created when charged particles from disturbances on the Sun interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere. By extension, the aurora over the Arctic is called the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. The Ice Team have not seen a great deal of the Aurora Australis so far, which is…

What is sastrugi? The word “sastrugi” is used to describe an eroded snow surface and it is caused by the wind. They can be as much as 1 metre high and the rough surface can make travel extremely difficult.

Congratulations to Sarah Crist on getting married to Jonathan Wiltshire today! Sarah was the project manager with Finning CAT, ensuring that we got all the resources we needed to prepare and modify the D6Ns. In this picture she is braving temperatures of around -50C with Ian Prickett inside the cold chamber at Millbrook Proving Ground. We miss you Sarah!

If you include its ice shelves and islands, Antarctica is around 58 times the size of the UK, or 1.4 times the size of the USA.

There are 17 species of penguin in the world and five of these breed in the Antarctic; the Emperor penguin is the only one to breed during the Antarctic winter. These two guys were spotted in Crown Bay when the SA Agulhas was being unloaded back in January.

Inside the workshop. Picture by Spencer Smirl with Richmond Dykes just about visible. Can you spot him?

98% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages more than a mile thick. If you exclude the ice shelves and islands, this percentages gets close to 99.7%.

To many people, Antarctica is one of the most fascinating places on Earth. Whether it be its remoteness, its extreme weather, its extraordinary landscapes and features, or just by virtue of the fact that there is still so much unknown about this isolated land, the continent captures the imagination like no other. Starting today we are going to be posting interesting facts, figures and phrases…