For Andrew Naslund, Antarctica is his “favorite place in the world.”

He’s a marine technician for Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And while not a professional photographer, he’s capturing Antarctica’s beauty along his research journey.

The research

Naslund spends months aboard a research vessel, the R/V Roger Revelle (AGOR 24), which he describes as “basically a floating laboratory.”

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“The purpose of this ship is to provide a platform for scientists to reach some of the most remote reaches of our oceans,” Naslund said.

A big part of his role is assisting the scientists to safely deploy and recover their instrumentation over the side of the ship. He also keeps track of incoming data, ensuring the scientists are getting the information that they came out there to get.

“[We’re] a mobile weather station. So anywhere that we travel in the world, we’re collecting meteorological weather data,” he says. “And we’re helping to fill in data gaps where there are few direct measurements.”

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Aboard the ship are sensors that track all kinds of meteorological data, from precipitation to temperature to humidity.

All the data that they collect gets uploaded to a public repository that government agencies or academic scientists can pull from and then use for their analysis.

And having people on the ground collecting real direct measurements of the ecosystem also helps us to better understand satellite data, he explains.

“I first went to the Antarctic in 2018, working in my previous role as a fish physiologist,” he said. “[I went] to study how juvenile fishes respond to ocean warming and ocean acidification.”

(MORE: Marine life is disappearing. Experts explain what's at stake)

Charcot Island is one of the most important locations he has been able to help research.

“This is the island that scientists haven’t been able to get to since 2009, and so we didn’t have a lot of data to go off of for even how to get scientists to this island,” he said.

Their data helped fill in gaps for how the penguin colony there was doing.

The journey

To get to the Antarctic Peninsula, you have to cross the Drake Passage — which is widely regarded as the most treacherous stretch of ocean anywhere in the world, he says.

“And it was pretty rough. We had waves crashing over the bow and stern for days on end, and it was dangerous just to be outside of the ship,” Naslund says. “So pretty much everyone just had to hunker down and ride it out.”

On his ship, they get to deploy scientists to do a lot of near-shore work. This can be to better understand the penguin colonies, to service a weather station or to check in with active bases on the peninsula.

“But it’s not like these are inhabited islands where you can tie a boat up to a dock and get on and off. It’s a completely remote island where you have to find a place to land a boat,” he explains.

There’s a lot to consider, he says. There’s the swell, how much the boat is going to be moving relative to a stable ground, slippery rocks that you could be stepping out on to and the path to the research site could have its own hazards, such as a really treacherous hill on the way.

“So there’s a lot of risk assessment and experience that goes into safely getting scientists to these islands,” he said.

They also experience wildlife along the way and follow the Antarctic Treaty, he says.

“We’re very careful to not disturb the wildlife and to follow the established international agreed-upon regulations,” Naslund said.

The climate

“I think a lot of people think of the Antarctic as very homogeneous and just freezing cold everywhere you go,” Naslund says. “But there’s regional variation in weather and climate in the Antarctic as well.”

The Antarctic Peninsula in particular is one of the fastest-changing and warming regions of the entire world, where climate change is especially evident.

(MORE: Scientists warn Antarctica is melting from below)

He says that the weather there is very intense to experience: A lot of days it snows sideways and the wind chill brings you down to below freezing temperatures.

“And so that’s sort of what we all sign up for. We all know that we’re going to be working in adverse weather conditions,” he said. “Just because the weather might be uncomfortable doesn’t mean that we stop operations.”

The changes

Naslund has been three times, but he’s met a lot of people who have spent their entire career coming to the Antarctic. One person he knows has been to the Antarctic more than 40 times.

“These ‘Antarctic veterans’ all have very tangible examples of how the region has changed in their lifetime,” he says.

For example, scuba divers will tell you that the water has lost clarity. On the peninsula as ice melts and exposes the underlying bedrock plants have been able to grow, he says.

“Someone pointed out a glacier to me and said, ‘When I started coming here, it terminated over here, and nowadays it’s a few 100 yards off towards the center of the continent,’” he recalls. “There are definitely real changes that these people have seen in a matter of decades.”

It wasn’t that long ago when it wouldn’t have been possible to bring a ship like theirs, a non-ice strengthened, steel-hulled vessel, to some of the areas they go to.

“It is really a testament to how much this region is changing from an ice-dominated area to much more of a maritime area,” he explains.

(MORE: Antarctica breaks decade-long cold record with Earth's lowest temperature)

Antarctica is the only continent that doesn’t have permanent human inhabitants — people are there year-round, but no one can say that they permanently live there, he says.

“We’re still learning a lot about it today,” Naslund says. “So every time I go, I just feel really privileged to be able to experience it because it’s just such a unique area that not a lot of people have the opportunity to see.”

The challenges

These scientists all have to put their lives on hold for months to be at sea, where often they can’t even see land for weeks on end. Naslund says they miss a lot of the comforts that they know they have at home.

“Everyone who comes on these ships makes a lot of sacrifices to do this type of science. But we all think that we’re doing important work that has purpose and meaning,” he said. “It’s definitely a role that we feel is really important to our scientific knowledge and society.”

Content writer Ada Wood enjoys exploring the stories that science and climate teach us about our natural world and how it influences the way we live in it.