Last season the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat began maintenance work on Wasa Research Station and its equipment, including the tracked all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles. The effort to prepare the station for future research work continued this season. This year’s expedition was again carried out in close cooperation with the Finnish Antarctic Research Programme (FINNARP).

The expedition to Dronning Maud Land can be divided into two logistics parts and a research part. The first logistics part, a cooperative effort with our Finnish and Russian colleagues, involved delivering fuel by parachute from an Ilyushin 76TD aircraft. After the plane had landed in Antarctica and all personnel and equipment had been offloaded, the passenger plane was converted into a transport plane. A total of 25 packages of fuel were delivered, each weighing 1,600 kg.

In the second logistics part, a tracked vehicle visited Neumayer Station, a newly constructed German research station on Atka Bay, to remove waste and retrieve equipment.

Strict rules governing waste incineration in Antarctica require that only organic material be burned. Wasa has no such incinerator so all rubbish must be shipped out. Shipments by water are necessary to bring large volumes of heavy equipment to Antarctica and to carry away the waste. It took six days to reach Neumayer from Wasa by tracked vehicle. After a layover of several days, we travelled to the edge of the shelf ice to pick up our cargo from a new South African research vessel, the S.A. Agulhas II.

The third part of the expedition was scientific. Göran Thor, who joined the expedition in Neumayer, worked around the Base and on Fossilryggen, re-inventorying test surfaces for mosses and lichens (see separate report). The team also fit in a trip to Svea Station, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2013, and to Jonsonhogna, where lichens were studied, a GPS antenna was fine-tuned, and a seismic sensor was serviced. At Wasa, tracked vehicle 12 was serviced, the spare parts containers were reorganized, and all the empty aluminium boxes were collected.