Shackleton’s Antarctic whisky raided. Not by me, honest!

A quick update here, by way of test posting simultaneously to thenightjar.posterous.com and www.antarcticodyssey.wordpress.com. I wrote a while ago on the Antarctica blog, about discovery of the Antarctic explorer Shackleton’s whisky stash from the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907. Now the crate has been carefully thawed out, it seems one of the bottles is missing. [...]

Tactical Nuclear Penguin: The World’s Strongest Beer and The Ultimate Antarctic Beverage?

We interrupt our usual broadcasts to bring you news of something that actually involves Antarctica. Well, penguins anyway. Oh alright, two Scots dressed as penguins. But hey! It’s a world record claim involving a malt-based beverage, and as long-term Antarctic Odyssey readers will know, I claim the record for the world’s southernmost whisky tasting. The [...]

Curb Travel to Antarctica?

The BBC ran an article yesterday about curbing tourist travel to Antarctica in ships not designed for the harsh conditions. “Campaigners say the sinking of the M/S Explorer last year was a wake-up call.” We travelled in The Professor Mutanovsky” an ex-research vessel from the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in St. Petersburg, and was designed [...]

Penguin Web Footage (!)

One of the most endearing sites in the Antarctic is the penguins. The most common penguins on the Antarctic peninsula are Gentoos, although I saw a few Adelie penguins and others saw Chinstraps. However, none of us saw anything like this amazing footage released today by the BBC of a previously-unknown colony of Adelies. (You [...]

Antarctic Rescue!

You can bet that our friends have been asking what ship we are going on in March, following the sinking of the Antarctic tourist liner M/S Explorer on 24 November. Well, there are no worries on that front, we’re going on the Aleksey Maryshev, a modern and comfortable research ship of the Hydrographic Institute of [...]

Antarctica in the news

Recently, there have been reports in the press about Britain “claiming” vast areas of Antarctica with the aim of securing mineral rights. This from the Guardian newspaper. As is often the case with the media the headline misleads you into reading the report; the supposed claim is for areas of the seabed off the Antarctic [...]