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After the team had created a hole in the ice, Dr Ceri Lewis ensures that the net is deployed properly. You can see another trawling net to the left hand side attached to the inside of the tent. The net is used to catch the copepods in the waters below the sea ice.

Dr Ceri Lewis uses a fine net to trawl for copepods in the waters underneath the ice. The net is lowered through the sampling hole using a bicycle winch.

This is a close-up of the end of the trawling net. The weights ensure that the bottom of the net sinks properly when lowered into the water. The plankton are caught in the mesh container at the bottom.

After the net has been lowered to a specific depth, Dr Ceri Lewis then looks at the mesh to see what has been caught. A number of different kinds of zooplankton were found during the expedition including copepods, pteropods and amphipods.

The copepods and other zooplankton are carefully transferred to sample bottles. These bottles are labelled so that Dr Ceri Lewis knows the day, time and depth for each individual sample.

The zooplankton Dr Ceri Lewis collects are so small that they cannot be picked up in her fingers. Also, she needs to be careful not to harm them.

A stove in the tent provides some warmth during the sampling. The scientists need to wear thin gloves so that they can operate the instruments and collect samples. Seawater freezes at -1.8C and freezing hands can be quite painful.

On two occasions during the expedition, the team conducted a 24 hour trawl, taking samples every hour. It was very tiring working through the night and snatching small amounts of sleep. Dr Ceri Lewis was interested to see if the copepods were at different depths at different times of the day. Some theories say that copepods feed near the surface at night, to avoid natural predators who might feed on them during the day.

Dr Ceri Lewis isn't taking the copepods for a walk for fun. She needs to get them back to her lab tent at the other end of the camp to analyse them. The lab tents are heated so the samples won't freeze.