MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

HMS Endurance is heading Antartica.

As the Royal Navy's Ice Patrol Vessel, HMS ENDURANCE embarks upon her annual deployment she bids farewell to Portsmouth for the next six and a half months and looks forward to the Austral summer in Antarctica. She returns to her base port of Portsmouth, to which she is also affiliated, on 7 May 2002.

Antarctic Treaty all claims to sovereignty in the area are in abeyance, but the UK along with 27 other nations continues to work in the area on scientific and survey tasks as well as monitor their presence. This is a mission for which ENDURANCE is ideally equipped.

Antarctica itself is two and a half times the size of the USA and the world's highest, windiest and coldest continent. With an ice sheet some 4km thick in places, it holds 70% of the world's fresh water and 90% of the world's ice. Locked in its ice geology and atmosphere is the key to the world's history but more importantly, the guide to processes happening now that have critical implications for our future, since the effects of change in this polar region reach every part of our world.

ENDURANCE is a 6500 ton Class 1 Icebreaker capable of breaking one and half metres of first year ice. Her operational programme aims to meet simultaneously the requirements of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office on sovereignty and inspection issues, the British Antarctic Survey in support of science, and the UK Hydrographic Office for surveying work. The latter is increasingly vital as more tourist ships now make visits to the region.

This year, ENDURANCE's programme includes an initial visit to Rio de Janeiro, followed by a concentrated work period in South Georgia from November until New Year. She is therefore guaranteed a white Christmas!

Source: Navy News