Hugh Powell; Photos by Chris Linder

Divergence True to its name, Project CONVERGE brought together people from all over the world to study the food web at Palmer Station. But now our month on the […]

The Kind of Change You Can't Say No To The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on Earth. Around Palmer Station, the average winter temperature has risen by more than 10 […]

Test Your Memory With "What in the World?" Many years ago, when your trusty blog writer and photographer were little, we used to open up each new issue of National Geographic’s kids magazine a […]

Sheathbill: The Most Peculiar Bird of the Whole Peculiar Continent Much is made of Antarctica’s incredible wildlife: throngs of krill; seals piled together like rolls of carpet; regiments of penguins; whales puffing c […]

Big and Bad, or Just Misunderstood? Meet the Southern Giant-Petrel We spend a lot of time looking at penguins down here, but they’re not the only birds around. An almost constant presence overhead is the aptly named s […]

A Radar Station With an Oceanfront View Sunday morning dawned clear and calm—only the second truly sunny day since we arrived at Palmer Station. It was a perfect opportunity for Dr. Josh K […]

How Gliders Work: A Look Inside the Blue Hen Earlier this week the glider team pulled in the University of Delaware’s glider, nicknamed the “Blue Hen,” from the ocean. They needed to change its b […]

Safety First in the Outer Islands Ever since January 15, Dr. Josh Kohut has spent each evening looking hopefully at the weather forecast. He needs one day of calm winds to do some […]

This Is Life at 64 Degrees South We’re still trying to get to the Wauwerman Islands to do some work on the radar station there, but once again today the weather did not quite c […]

A Peek at the Hectic Lives of Antarctic Seals This morning we woke up to find an Antarctic fur seal napping on the rocks about a hundred yards from our front door. It was a welcome surprise—we h […]

Here Comes the Neighborhood Donna Fraser remembers the day in 1993 when her team found the first gentoo penguin nests ever recorded at Biscoe Point. Fourteen pairs had set up a […]

Freezing Beauty in a Photo The scientists spent Sunday doing maintenance on a glider, checking giant-petrel and skua nests, looking for whales, and counting krill for as long as […]

Sights and Smells of Summer in an Adelie Penguin Colony In calm winds this morning we loaded the zodiacs with the safety gear we had assembled yesterday. But even as we put on our flotation suits and […]

Learning the Landmarks Antarctica is a lot less dangerous than it used to be, when people like Ernest Shackleton explored it in the early twentieth century. But it’s still c […]

Gliding Into the Danger Zone In yesterday’s post, the glider team took a calculated risk and brought glider RU05 into the shallow waters near shore. We made a big deal about how d […]

A Glider Joins Forces With the Krill Team The gliders have been out on their own for more than a week. In that time they’ve traveled far out to sea, but today the team decided to turn one of t […]

How to Follow a Penguin Out to Sea and Back A lot of science involves thinking of questions you want the answers to, and then figuring out how to get them. Many times, it requires finding a way […]

Just before suppertime on Friday evening the krill team sent out a radio broadcast: they’d spotted five humpback whales feeding just off Outcast Island. The two whale biologists at Palmer Station grabbed their […]

Meet the Penguins Yesterday, while we were out searching for krill with Dr. Kim Bernard, we saw lots of gentoo penguins, quite a few Adelies, and several chinstraps. […]

Listening for Echoes of Krill Today we went out to search for krill with Dr. Kim Bernard of Oregon State University and Shenandoah Raycroft, her assistant. Krill are an important […]