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I recently had the privilege to visit Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, erected for the Nimrod expedition in 1908. Shackleton, with three of his men and four ponies, marched out from this hut to attempt to reach the South Pole. They reached a latitude of 88° 23’S, a record at the time and less than 100 miles from their goal. At Cape Royds the shelves are still stocked with all sorts of intriguing supplies, carefully restored… Read more: Shackleton’s Tonics – An Antarctic Pharmacopoeia

I love watercolour for its portability. For me it’s the perfect on-the-go medium to capture travel memories. So when I found this tiniest of accordion sketchbooks (the Hahnemühle Zigzag in 5cmx5cm) it had to come with me to document the summer’s adventures in Svalbard. Keen Arctic travellers might recognise the cabin – Bamsebu at Ahlstrandhalvøya. This site was used through the 1930s as a hunting ground for beluga. The bones of hundreds of beluga still… Read more: Tiniest Travel Sketchbook

I am not too fussy about watercolour paper, since when you paint on nautical charts, the paper quality is atrocious and I tend to use a transparent surface primer to make it halfway acceptable. For sketchbooks, I’ll often pick up something from Hahnemühler, so I was interested to see their new line of papers with a more sustainable selection of fibres than the typical water-hungry cotton. I picked up a tiny 8×10.5cm pad of Agave… Read more: Paper Review: Hahnemühle Agave

The white continent is looking distinctly green around the gills. Or at least around the edges, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience. It’s easy to think of Antarctica as a polar desert, devoid of plant life and uninteresting to the botanist. That’s true for its vast plateau of ice (snow algae aside), but at its margins Antarctica is host to a few extreme photosynthesizers. Mosses and lichens are best represented, being able… Read more: Antarctic Greening

Autumn is in the air, and a thin crust of frazil ice is reforming in the Arctic waters where I work in summer. October is just around the corner. Last Autumn I took on Inktober for the first time. Having watched from the sidelines for a couple of years, I finally plucked up the courage to give it a go myself in 2023. It came at a great time for me, when life was otherwise… Read more: Inktober 2023