Transcript for the video embedded on the news story page: Cold, unbalanced and feeling seasick – all in the name of science.
[Will Homoky looking into the camera with an island visible across the sea in the background]
[Will says:] We left Punta Arenas around five days ago and spent a couple of days refuelling in the Falkland Islands, before voyaging 900 miles south across the Drake Passage, where we had some pretty lumpy seas but made good time to get here a couple of days later into the comparative shelter of the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula.
[Will points towards the island in the background]
[Will says:] And we've just had our first glimpse of Gibbs Island. Gibbs Island is one of a number of islands that string out here along the Antarctic Peninsula into the Southern Ocean.
And in these waters we've been able to test some of our equipment for the first time today. We deployed the CTD, the conductivity temperature depth profiler – it tells us about the saltiness and the temperature in the oceans and also helps us collect water from different depths.
And that's equipment we'll be using as we head further south now along the Antarctic Peninsula and into the Weddell Sea.