Two UNE scientists Dr Mary McMillan, a molecular and cellular biologist, and Dr Deborah Bower, a conservation biologist, recently returned from the Antarctica, where they were among 80 women participating in a Homeward Bound project. Mary described it as being all about leadership development for women from all different fields of science.
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We looked back at our ship, which seemed quite big when we were on it and against those mountains it was just a speck.
- Dr Mary McMillan
“The program that we were doing was a year-long and we were just the end of that. So, we all got together, got on our ship and headed to Antarctica,” she said.
“We were there for three weeks and for five or six hours each day we worked on our leadership programs. We all gave presentations. All sorts of different workshops, seminars, science talks and presentations.
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“Each day we tried to land somewhere as well, to get off the ship and actually walk about and see some other wildlife. Mary thought it would be hard to find the words to do justice to the vastness and beauty of the Antarctica.
It was cold with very few colours.
“Everything is white or blue, many, many, many shades of blue or grey, and the occasional touch of green from the mosses and lichens that grow there, then there’s a little bit of orange from some of the penguins,” Mary said.
“Because there is nothing that’s man-made down there, there is nothing to give things scale, so it’s really hard to understand how big things are.”
She said it was noiser than you would think.
“Once you get away from the noise of the ship, there is always noise. The ice itself is always cracking and creaking. Even when there is lots of sea ice, you can hear the air bubbles escaping from the ice with a popping sound,” she said.
“When you’re on the land, you can kind of constantly hear this roar of avalanches and glaciers breaking in the distance. It’s kind of amazing to hear that. And the penguins are really noisy. Extemely noisy and extremely stinky and they are beautiful.
A biologist’s dream
Dr Deborah Bower described the trip as incredible.
“There were 80 women a ship and I think some people don’t quite realise how amazing that could be. I was with astrophysicists, paediatric surgeons, geologists and the most amazing bunch of women from 26 countries,” she said.
The Antarctica is bound to be 'a she’, it’s that awesome.
- Dr Deborah Bower
“We were all surrounded by these most amazing women and we were all just constantly brainstorming and discussing and it was just an incredible time for my brain to be having these incredible conversations, while in this amazing place.
“We’d be doing these programs about leadership, and then a whale would breach off the boat. Everyone would rush to the window and you’d lose 10 minutes just watching Humpbacks. They came up to within metres of our boat to breathe.
“We saw Orcas, Penguins – I had never seen Penguins in the water before – they’re just the most hilarious animals in the world. We got to see three species of seals and albatross following the boat. For a biologist it was just a dream.”
Deborah thought the scenery was spectacular.
“We were doing all this while going past icebergs. Some people in the boat saw one of the icebergs carve off,” she said.
“And always changing, the sky was very moody. One day she would be bright blue and just everywhere you looked there would be something different, and then she would change her mind and you would be in a blizzard.
“And Antarctica is so quiet, just the sound of Penguins and the wind and the sound of Humpbacks and not much else. It was really different to anywhere else I’d ever been. It looks extreme. It’s many shades of tourquise, blues and greys and whites and blacks; it looks just like a dream.”
Deborah spends one month of every year in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea where she said the noise was a sensory explosion.
“In a rainforest every single frequency in the soundscape is taken up by a different animal trying to reproduce, and this [the Antarctica] was just eerie,” she said.
