We're standing on sea ice, about a metre, 1.7 metres thick and underneath is probably
20 metres of water before we hit the sea
floor.
We are here doing some environmental surveys for the Davis aerodrome project,
so we're doing marine environmental surveys all around the Vestfold Hills
which is a largely unexplored area.
We've got onboard cameras, we've got laser scalers to measure the
size of things on the seabed.
All right so we've got polychaete reef
here mate.
All of those different kinds of organisms you'd normally see on a reef in Tasmania or southern Australia
they're here, they're in different
communities, different sizes, colours,
shapes and there's a obviously a lot of
them here and not found elsewhere,
they're endemic to Antarctica  - all of the
organisms here are endemic to Antarctica.
They stretch from the surface down to 30
metres, much like coral does really.
They're amazing, they're real
biodiversity hotspots, they're just crawling with life.
I reckon there must
be billions of sea urchins  in Ellis Fjord.
Everywhere you look there's a sea urchin, crawling over the polychaetes, all over
the rocky habitats, everywhere.
That's one of the biggest excitements, is
that we're popping this thing down,
through sea ice and we don't know what
we're going to find and we do know
that nobody's ever been to this site
before, so we know that when we do see it, we're the first people to see it.
You're like explorers, you know, the first people to look in these places properly and
document what's here. The fjords
particularly around Davis, they're
really extensive and we know barely
anything about them.
