Heard Island and McDonald Islands Voyage
This season, the Australian Antarctic Program is leading two voyages to Australia’s external territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands.
The campaign is the first major campaign in more than 20 years to take scientists to the islands to assess the state of their unique plants and wildlife. These assessments will support Australia’s ongoing work to conserve these extraordinary and globally significant environments.
Voyage one will depart in September, and voyage two will depart in November.
Heard Island and McDonald Islands are some of the world’s most pristine wilderness areas and offer a rare glimpse of nature largely unchanged by people.
They are sub-Antarctic islands located in the Southern Ocean, around 4,000 km southwest of Australia and 1,700km north of Antarctica. Heard Island is dominated by Big Ben, an over 2,800 m high active volcano blanketed in glaciers. The island is surrounded by the small archipelago of the McDonald Islands.
In recognition of their globally significant ecology and geology, the islands and their surrounding ocean are UNESCO World Heritage-listed and, last year, the Australian Government expanded the marine reserve surrounding the islands, quadrupling its size. This action aims to better protect the habitat as critical breeding and feeding grounds for the region’s extraordinary wildlife including whales and penguins.
Much of the island’s biodiversity is found in few other places on Earth. This includes millions of penguins and thousands of seals, as well as a lush diversity of sub-Antarctic vegetation such as cushion and cabbage plants, tussock grasses and mosses. There are also many unique insects, including tiny weevils, and invertebrates that are specially adapted to living in cold sub-Antarctic environments.
Beyond the islands, the surrounding ocean has a rich and diverse marine ecosystem, with many unique species including octopus and sea urchins. It’s anticipated that the team will discover new species using cutting-edge technologies as they explore these remote waters during the campaign.
SAEF Science
Twelve SAEF researchers will take part in the highly collaborative voyages, with the majority joining Voyage 2 in November. The SAEF team is interdisciplinary and will conduct surveys of the islands and their surrounding marine environments to assess the state of the biodiversity.
Their research seeks to:
- Understand the extraordinary island and marine biodiversity
- Understand how the island’s plants, insects and other invertebrates have changed due to climate change, glacier retreat and occasional human visitation
- Understand whether the island’s marine ecosystems are being threatened by non-indigenous species
- Use the DNA of seafloor species to understand the history of the Antarctic ice sheet and Southern Ocean
- Refine vegetation mapping techniques using drones, multispectral sensors and AI
- Compare their assessments to those made 20-years-ago to understand how the islands have changed
- Provide information to support conservation management and the protection of the island and marine environments and their ecosystems
The members of the SAEF cohort are primarily early career researchers, including postdoctoral research fellows, research officers and PhD students from SAEF partner organisations, Monash University, QUT, James Cook University and the University of Adelaide.
The HIMI Campaign is being delivered by the Australian Antarctic Division in collaboration with our partners including Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), Serco, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), the University of Tasmania (UTAS), the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), Department of Defence, the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS), Australian Border Force (ABF) and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA).
For more information visit the Australian Antarctic Program.
