The ice and snow is back. Winter is on the way and summer is well and truely over. We woke up 3 days ago to find the bay in front of station iced over. Didn't last but it won't be long before it starts to cover the whole coast. The next morning everything was covered in snow where there had been none when we went to bed that night. The snow has created a very sudden change to how the station feels and how we work and get around. After the relatively barren rocky landscape of summer it once again looks like Antarctica out there.

Diving is in full swing and with only a few weeks to go before we leave we're diving every day we can. Sunsets like this are a nice way to end a long day on, and under, the water. The solar pillar visible in one of these photos lasted for about 10 minutes. Don't know the physics behind why it happens but it's a spectacular sight.

Some more Elephant Seals and a sleeping Weddell Seal from hte beach in front of the station. Soon enough they'll be heading back out to sea before the bay ices over for the winter.

Last week we got to fly down the coast to the Chinese station to attend a BBQ to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the station. We flew over glaciers and the edge of the plateau that rises from the coast and just keeps on going to the other side of Antarctica 4000+ kilometres away.

Yours truely doing some Antarctic diver and driver type things.

Some images from the last week or so. The scale of some of the bergs near station is pretty impressive. If you look closely at the bottom of this whopper you can see the one of the IRBs (inflatable rubber boats) we use to get around and do our work from. The very next berg over had some black spots on it. As we suspected, they were Adelie penguins. What they were doing parked up there together is any ones guess. The big Elephant seal is one of the largest of the group on the beach in front of the station. Even at 3 metres long he's only a littlun though. The Ele's we get here are all juvenile males. When full grown they get much bigger, up to 4 or 5 metres and can weigh in at over 3 tonnes.

The phytoplankton bloom greatly reduces the underwater visibility during summer. Unlike diving under the ice at Casey station where we regularly get 20 - 30+ metre visibility, here at Davis we've been lucky to see 3 metres on a good day. At least you can see some of the gear we wear to dive here. The funky Aga masks we wear have communications built in so we can talk to the surface and to each other while underwater. Makes doing our work a lot easier and safer. The photos are from Chris Gillies, the other set of eyes peering out of the mask.