Geologists' Finale. We have found one, one of those outcrops of a geologist's dreams. The metamorphosed primordial soup of rock, mixed through, boiled, drawn down into Gaia's deeps and pulled back up again, stones transformed, minerals drawn out in ribbons, brought back to light, tortured and prepared by ice and wind - for us? Hardly. How old? Three point nine. Doubtful, perplexed faces beg the completion of the count with units: 3.9 billion years! Most of us have surely not even begun to comprehend how old this big blue ball truly is. Here one can feel the antiquity through thick snowshoes. Lets try our other senses: the ears hear only wind, the nose is unemployed, instead of fresh bread rolls one tastes an ice plug. But the eyes, where should one direct the eyes? Optics of the highest power are required by the structures, colours, and forms that occur on all levels. One shifts between colourful crystals in front of one's nose and gigantic ice fronts on the horizon. And everything free of pesky vegetation. The ice has prepared for the geologist easy specimens of such convenient size. The helicopters will have to carry them. One packs up only those of the correct mixture to have, under the physical conditions of Mother Earth, resulted in the paragenesis of minerals of the finest order. Petrologists have yet another sense, that for the pressure-temperature diagram. And so that riot barely allows an emerald green diopside, springing from the baseness of chalk under a pressure of 3000 bar and a temperature of 700°C. It takes your breath away. And in the middle of everywhere, a saline lake - in deserts, the customary norm. We use that to take a gasp of air - at the end of the world, at the beginning of time.

Time and the Kerguelen call and so we turn the Antarctic to stern. Departure from a congealed Prydz Bay, slalom through the garden of table ice bergs produced from one fifth of the Antarctic ice shield and run aground in the shallows off the bay. Between them are held the remainder of the ice from the last year with a thick cover of snow and groups of penguins. The Adelies enjoy our passage and spring out of the water onto the ice and back into the water from the ice. In front of such loud excitement, pictures will blur. Penguins were rare 'til now. Against the end of profile "A" they called us from home, not to use up the 72.7th longitude. Now we haul ourselves over the coals of the 82.8th longitude. Out in the open ocean - a 120-mile profile we have still: C (B was cancelled due to an ice blockade). 15 lobsters plop into the water, sink to a depth of 3500 m, automatically level their gimble-mounted seismometers and lie in wait for the sound waves. The pulsers draw a deep breath and the seismic waves make their run.

Cranes we have a lot and all are orange, the extremities of the ship. In rest they lie in their depot with their elements and joints courteously folded up. Under electricity and instruction they grumble at variable frequencies, extend their limbs aloft, throw things out and bring things in, all under full control of the botswain and cargo officer. Today the front crane has its turn while the ship moves. Exceptional engagements demand exceptional tools and perspective. The media producer (skills stretching across one rightly broad working spectrum) lies in front of the ship, 10 meters above the water on the crane's frame and films the 10-knot traverse of the ship's bow through floes parted by a 52 mm steel blade. The ice's resistance is useless. The furry microphone hangs on a support over the border and records the indescribable sounds of the first resistance, then of retreat, and finally of the full subjugation and total destruction. Starboard and port thunder through the broken floes. Winter will repair them.

Lovely and windy at home? Composed, we settle ourselves into the seats of the seminar room in 3 meter waves while our meteorologist, in lieu of the local weather, tells us about a hurricane-strength low over northern Germany. It has taken it upon itself to whirl up the boundary between winter and spring. Is the sea already at home in the garden? Water shoots as if from a showerhead out of all directions and there are winds of force 12 on Sylt - or so we hear. Poor island of the rich. Polarstern has one excellent, fully equipped weather station, standing in for the entire marine weather service. One meteorologist, supported by data and observations from a weather radio man, cooks up forecasts on every journey. The helicopters request the flight weather every day. In fizzly drizzle the rotors remain in the hangar. There is also another ship in the 1500 kn neighbourhood (South Sandwich Islands abeam) lacking in comparably equipment and thus asking for forecast. The complex research carried out on Polarstern in its uncomfortable home oceans is unthinkable without isobar plots, ice maps, satellite pictures, and the daily, well-grounded prognosis. When one lies snugly in the bunk, it is nice to know how terrible the weather in the world outside can be.

Ships need traditions and certainly one repeated pivot point over the course of travels that marks how many weeks have gone by. On Polarstern, Sundays dawn on the Weighing Club. That has always been so. The scientists meet, in the machine workshop on the F deck below the water line, the storekeeper and his men in order to be put on the balance. Stock taking of the cooking quality in complementary colours: the nice green overall weighs, the funny red overall in charge for protocol. Fuselige (something between headless chickens and absent-minded professors; the ships internal nomenclature for scientists) wait courteously in the line until they are allowed on a board on a rope from a charming antique set of scales hanging from the ceiling. Then - the number of truth, the number that all offences and penances of the last week manifest themselves in. Failure to comply with the prediction one made (up or down) results in the payment for a worthy cause. The metalwork room, in which at other times the lathe purrs and the welder sizzles, is filled with buzzing discussions of the development of the weights of some others to the point of full derailment in a variety of ruins at the hands of hunger. Those on top of the food chain must report their increase in weight to the cargo officer at the end of the cruise as „cargo gained at sea“. But for now - Bon appetit! Today: kudu with potatoes. Fresh fruit and vegetables are fading out.

The chief scientist has handed out homework. Every expedition is required to document and make public the scientific work done and the samples obtained. This is done in the form of a Cruise Report with attractive figures and detailed tables. And so everyone sums up the deeds on their laptops, arranging, as a first step in the process, the ancillary data and, at their leisure, the diverse photos on the hard disc. Regarding electronic storage - when the ship departed on her maiden voyage in 1982 there was not a single computer on board. The first Polarstern-based PhD work muddled through their results using 64 kilobytes of memory. On this cruise, we travel with about 150 computers, connected through a network to the outside world via the Internet. And in the case that one goes briefly out, e.g. to catch a group of penguins on ice with a digital camera, half a gigabyte hard drive quickly fills up. Never mind the data....

We greet you all once more by night under the green curtains of the polar lights.

Prof. Dr. H.-W. Hubberten (Chief Scientist), Dr. Hannes Grobe, and the participants of the expedition

(Translation: Christina de la  Rocha)