Today we set sail to Antarctica

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An early start to get checked out of the hotel as today we are boarding our vessel to Antarctica ... the day is finally here to face the notaurious Drake's Passage. There are lots of conversations at breakfast about what sea sickness tablets to take or do you risk not taking anything?

We start the day with introducing ourselves to the rest of the group in 90 secs. ... you are not allowed to mention work but must say why are you here and what do you want to get out of it. For me this was all about the leadership journey that I am on which started back in Daventer and will continue for the next 12 months. I spoke about how I want to understand what my story will be and how will I be able to become a more inspirational leader from this experience. I hope that this will trigger new thoughts, emotions and build on my values so I have a more focussed personal strategy at the end of it.

I have so many expectations .....
to be blown away by the scenery
to get close to a penguin
to see whales swimming close to the boat
to survive a night camping on Antarctica
to see the effect of climate change first hand; icebergs melting, where ice has melted, ice walls collapsing
with a great team spirit, no one gets hurt
have good weather
not to be too sea sick
and finally find personal insight, belief and inspiration

and what would be really great is to be able to go sledging!!!

So lets see how many of these we achieve and yes may be I do have too greater expectatations !! But I hope not!

We had our first climate change lecture by David Hone from Shell. See his blog: http://blogs.shell.com/climatechange
Here we learnt about the science behind climate change - the greenhouse effect and how the levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially and this is causing the temeperatures of the earth to warm up. This is in turn casuing the icecaps in the Artic, Greenland to melt as well as many other devasting effects of Tornados, flooding, water shortages, bush fires, coast land flooding depending where you are in the world. There is also notable changes in Antarctica with the melting & break up of the Larsen B iceshelf.

There is now general consensus by all scientists that this is caused by man and will get a lot worse quickly if we do nothing. So the target is moving every day as we find out more about the effects of CO2. We need to rapidly reduce the CO2 that we pollute in to the atmosphere to prevent a rise of 4 or 5C.

This is the Inconvenient Truth, we need to understand our impacts and take action to reduce it.

In the afternoon we board our vessel and find our cabin mates. Again the excitement level builds and it gets better and better, it is amazing as each day you don't think it could be better. Another step of our journey is over and another door opens what will we find?

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Photos

Final views of Ushuaia
This is the last view of civilisation for 2 weeks