That's what it says on my luggage ticket this time around. I was travelling home from Mount Pleasant Airfield in the Falkland Islands to the military airbase at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. It wasn't a comfortable flight – the seats only reclined the width of three of my fingers – but I didn't really care – it was going north. We only had a couple of hours in Ascension (not like last time) and, before I knew it, I was stepping off a plane at just after midnight. Brize doesn't have those fancy tunnel things you get at commercial airports to leave the plane, so I walked down a flight of steps and onto the tarmac. I looked up to a beautiful clear sky and saw northern stars for the first time in months.

Home.

Well almost. I still had to negotiate customs, immigration and a final roundabout route involving Oxford, Heathrow and an amazing taxi ride through Regents Park (trees! green!!) before I finally walked through my front door at 0630.

Our voyage from Rothera to Stanley had been relatively quick – but certainly not boring. Just before we left the base we got a cloud free satellite image that showed the local sea ice conditions. Now Rothera base is on Adelaide Island – but this island is separated from the Antarctic continent by gap only a few hundred metres wide. With mountains thousands of metres high on either side the gap is called The Gullet. In all my visits to Rothera I had never been through the Gullet because it has always been blocked by ice. This time was to be different. With a satellite picture show ice-free conditions the captain made the choice to take us on the inland route.

To tell the truth my photos of the day were not great. The light was poor and of course there was not much of it! Having said that it was magnificent. When you are standing out on the bow of the ship the only thing you can hear is the wind – not the engines or anything like that. You just take it in. When we reached the narrowest part of the channel it seemed a bit stupid to be surprised by the fact that an iceberg virtually blocked the channel. The problem was that the satellite can only see things bigger than a certain size (this is determined by the resolution), and this particular iceberg – although too small for the satellite – was large enough to almost stop us in the tracks.

image of ship's radar.

[copyright Mark Brandon]

The image on the left is a photograph of the ship’s radar at the time. The Bright yellow on either side of the image is land, and the blue patch from the bottom left hand corner to the upper right hand corner is water. The yellow blob almost in the middle of the picture with the green line coming from it is our ship – the green line shows our direction of travel. You can see right across the middle of the blue, and in front of us is a yellow bar – this is the radar reflection of the iceberg that almost stopped us. We were heading right for it!

In yet another outrageous piece of seamanship the Captain managed to squeeze the ship through the tiny gap on the left of the berg. Amazing.

Being out at sea again on the way back the Falklands we soon left the last iceberg behind.

Mark Brandon.

[photo © copyright Mark Brandon].

So now I am home at last, sitting in the sun and enjoying the long daylight hours. At home when you go from winter to spring you almost miss the extra minutes of daylight that arrive every day until suddenly it is light for all of your waking hours.

To jump from early winter to late spring in one go is an unsual and wonderful thing.

I have to say I now really love the colour green!

Hi, my name is Mark Brandon and I am a Senior Lecturer in the Earth Sciences department at the OU. As well as contributing to teaching in the university I am an active research scientist and I study the frozen ocean surrounding Antarctica. This subject is literally a 'hot topic' and over the past decade I have found myself working in a region that has shown some the highest atmospheric temperature rises on the planet. Whenever you hear about climate change they always refer to the global mean surface temperature (GMST) increasing about  0.6-1.0°C. But this is a mean increase across the whole of our planet - it hides huge regional temperature changes (something my colleague Dr Stephen Peake pointed out last year). On the Antarctic Peninsula for example, the air temperatures are almost 3°C higher than in the late 1950's, and some of the best scientists in the business have directly linked these higher atmospheric temperatures to the collapse of floating ice shelves in this part of Antarctica.

There is no debate here - human induced climate change is happening and you can see Antarctica changing literally in front of your eyes.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing this blog about a research trip I am just starting in with a small team of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of East Anglia to study the effect of the ocean on the vulnerable ice shelves at the southern end of the west Antarctic Peninsula. We are sailing on the RRS James Clark Ross, and during my journey I hope to tell you a bit about the science, the history, the wildlife and hopefully why I think its important enough to leave my family for two months!

Until the next entry,

[photo © copyright Mark Brandon]

Cheers

Mark.