This time next week, I’ll be pulling out of the world’s southernmost port aboard my old friend the Natty B (RVIB Nathaniel B Palmer). I’ve signed on for another quick sail as the network administrator on the US Antarctic Program’s flagship icebreaking research vessel.

The science cruise lasts most of February (the least-icy month in these parts). Check out the current cruise website here. I’ll return here to McMurdo in time to get back to Christchurch before the closing of the station for winter.

The Ross Sea has been called the last in-tact ocean ecosystem on the planet. Far from most sources of pollution (except for some rampant dumping by the US Navy in the earlier days at McMurdo) and so far safe from over-fishing because of its ice-bound inaccessibility, the Ross Sea is an attractive place to do ocean science. If you want to observe effects of climate change, for instance, you have to rule out the effect of things like pollution and fishing. You need an ocean undisturbed by human activity.

Not that we can take such pristine conditions for granted. Last month, the US airforce took the extraordinary measure of airdropping parts to a trawler after it became stuck in the ice. With prices climbing for Antarctic Toothfish, a huge predator that takes about a hundred years to reach full size and is sold as Chilean Seabass in the United States and Europe, many fishing vessels find the payoff worth the risk. Fish that occupied the same ecological niche in other oceans are long gone.

Also, you may have noticed last month’s showdown just north of us in the Southern Seas between the Sea Shepherd organization’s Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign and Japan’s fleet of whaling ships. Exploiting a loophole in the international whaling ban, the Institute for Cetacean Research harvests thousands of minke whales a year for “research.” (Mikes are common in the Ross; today, incidentally, from my office window in McMurdo’s Crary Lab, I can see Minke whales spouting in the brash ice (I’m just saying)). The center’s prodigious sampling of southern whales has, in it’s 25 years, yielded exactly zero research journal publications.

When I was last on the NBP in May, we tied up opposite the four hundred foot monster factory ship Nisshin Maru in Punta Arenas Chile and watched from our bridge wings while the Japanese crew unloaded palettes of processed whale for three days. Trucks ferried the product to the nearby airport where jets spirited the whale meat away to Tokyo markets.

Sea Shepherd is like the militant wing of Greenpeace. They aren’t squeamish about a little destruction of property when, as they see it, the rest of the world is failing to enforce international law. (The best profile I’ve read was in the New Yorker in November 2007). They haven’t sunk any Japanese whalers yet, but their flagship is equipped with a steel I-beam on her bow which might serve as a can opener if she were to ram another ship.

As long as they aren’t confused about who the real researchers are next week when we sail into these troubled waters.