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The team, which also consists of wildlife monitor Maggie Coll, base leader Lou Hoskin, museum manager Aoife McKenna and shop manager Dale Ellis, will soon leave the UK and travel to Argentina, where they will spend a few days before taking a boat through the rough waters of the Drake passage.

I’m not a seafarer; this is alarming, but apparently not unusual on the Drake Passage - the stretch of the notoriously rough Southern Ocean we are on.

Working in this way also means researchers operate on the tourist ship’s schedule, with just four full days travelling around the Peninsula before heading back across the infamous Drake Passage.

On maps, the spindly arms of Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula reach out to grasp one another, separated only by the Drake Passage, which is named after Sir Francis Drake, a 16th-Century English explorer who had also been involved in the slave trade.

Most people have never been to the Drake Passage.