We left for a while!

The German media covered our record breaking Lufthansa flight to the Falklands in length. One only has to add that due to a departure from Hamburg Airport 12 hours earlier than originally planned we approach the airstrip of Mount Pleasant in the morning of 2 February after having been in the air for almost 16 hours. The touch down is soft despite a brisk head wind. Prior to that the whole party is happy to see our home for the next 8.5 weeks, Polarstern, waiting in the bay of Port Stanley (Photo 1).

After a short halt at the arrival hall and a 1-hour bus trip on a winding road, we arrive at the stormy peer of Port Stanley where we have to wait for a bumpy shuttle to take us in small groups to Polarstern. At 2 pm, the last member enters the ship via a pilot ladder – one remembers the transits to the German island Helgoland – and moves loaded with suitcases to his cabin. The only official date of the day is the obligatory fire drill, which forces us to search for the cabin’s life vests and brings us together on the helideck.

The next day, nobody complains about a jet-lack our missing time for adjustment because the ship’s crew opens the first lab and freight containers in the front hatch. Everybody wants to take advantage of the quite stable ground to equip the labs and prepare the instruments (Photo 2). That busy, almost nobody notices the tanker on the starboard side, which will pump 2000 t of diesel into Polarstern’s belly for the next 20 hours.

The ant-like activities come to a sudden end in the afternoon of 3 February. The captain wants to use a little gap in the endless band of stormy low-pressure systems, to cross Drake Passage – the narrow sea between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula – without teasing too much our stomach. At 5 pm, 52 scientists and 44 crewmembers start their roughly 11 000-km long voyage from Port Stanley to Port Stanley via the southern Weddell Sea. In the ‚Furious Fifties‘ once in a while instruments get dropped in deep wave valleys: Floats – autonomous oceanographic ‚one-way‘-sonds, which produce vertical profiles of various parameters and send these home via satellite until their batteries run out of power.

The experience of our captain pays off already the next day since the sea calms down giving way to the hectic actions as the day before. The crew has moved and opened the containers on the working deck (Photo 3) allowing to continue feeding the starving labs and instrument rooms with further equipment. However, it is surprising that nothing is missing, and the spirit is high even in the evening to continue our seminar series we had started in the second week of our quarantine.

On the morning of 5 February, light snowfall escorts our crossing of 60 °S thus entering the Antarctic Protected Zone. As we move south, we see more fur seals, penguins and whales in the water, and at the horizon one can spot the first frosty messengers of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (Photo 4). Our task now is to plan the details of the scientific stations ahead of us – thanks to PERPLEX, because the multi-disciplinary mixture of our team requires a firm coordination to make COSMUS an inter-disciplinary success.

After all the efforts of the last couple of days, everybody is looking forward to the Saturday opening of the Zillertal, where the missing snow here and the blizzard at home is discussed.

In good spirit and full of beans, PS124 sends regards from the Weddell Sea, which attracts polar researchers for more than a century.

Hartmut Hellmer, Chief Scientist