Guardian Travel Award - Last Chance to Nominate Us!

Enjoyed your holiday with us within the last year? Want to shout about your fantastic experience? Would like to recommend Discover the World to a wider audience?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then click here to nominate Discover the World in the Guardian Readers’ Travel Award 2009 and be entered into a prize draw to win £20,000 worth of prizes!

All you need to do is fill in a questionnaire about your holiday and potentially win another holiday – a great opportunity if ever there was one.

But hurry…your last chance to do this is tomorrow - Saturday 18 April! 

BBC Newsnight in the Arctic

BBC Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, has joined the Scottish Association of Marine Sciences (SAMS) onboard the British Antarctic Survey's icebreaker- the James Clark Ross for the final few days of their research cruise in the Arctic.  Their mission?  To capture a detailed scientific snapshot of life in the Arctic ocean.  The research cruise will investigate the tiny life forms that live in the icy Arctic waters, and hopefully gain a better understanding of the effects of climate change. The James Clark Ross will be exploring the area around Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago.  Already the scientists have reported numerous sightings of polar bears and walruses - you can read more about their observations of this stunning 'research laboratory' and wildlife encounters on their daily webdiary/blog, and see video reports as to their research and findings on BBC Newsnight's website. 

Spitsbergen & the 'Polar Circle'

For those of you who are looking forward to an Arctic Voyage this summer with Discover the World, the Norwegian Met Office's website has handy updates as to weather forecasts for the Svalbard archipelago, including Longyearbyen, Ny Alesund, Hopen and Bjornoya.  Remember, during the Arctic summertime there are plenty of daylight hours to enjoy the stunning scenery of the magnificent fjords and glaciers, and of course be on the look out for wildlife. 

The hours of daylight also dictate the lines known as the 'polar circles'.  Polar circles are found in both the northern and southern hemispheres and are defined as the lines around the globe at which the sun does not set for at least one night of the year.  Currently, this is the case north of 66.5 degrees northern and southern latitude.  The closer you are to the Poles (90 degrees), the more nights in summertime that the sun will stay above the horizon - about half of the year at the poles themselves.  This phenomenon of sunlight all around the clock is often called the 'midnight sun' or 'polar day'.  In central Spitsbergen, the polar day lasts for about four months without any sunset. 

The midnight sun begins in Longyearbyen on around 20 April, and stays until around 22 August.  The sun sits amazingly high in a bright blue sky on midsummer nights, even at midnight!  In high summer therefore, this is a very special time to visit and the stillness of a land excursion at midnight in such spectacular surroundings is simply magical.  True summer in central Spitsbergen lasts from late June to late August, when most of the non-glaciated terrain is free from lasting snow and plants are in bloom.  Get those cameras and sunglasses at the ready!

Incredible Journeys - Polar Bears in Spitsbergen

The team here at Discover the World have been enjoying Steve Leonard's Incredible Journeys series on BBC1 Sunday evenings.  Some of us have even been lucky enough to see Polar Bears in the wild, an amazing experience.  If you fancy seeing them yourself in the fresh crisp air of the Arctic, then here's how - we would recommend either an Arctic Voyage, such as our 'Around Spitsbergen Special' (the lovely Mr Leonard's latest offering was filmed there), or even from a tundra buggy in the outpost town of Churchill (up on edge of the Hudson Bay, Canada), with a land-based tour 'Kingdom of the Icebear' (he's been there too - on the Vets in the Wild series - gets about a bit doesn't he!). 

"Teeth as big as bananas"...Dinosaur fossil find in Spitsbergen!!!

I've always had a thing for fossils ever since I was little (it must have been that school trip to the Natural History Museum) and my visit to Lyme Regis a couple of months ago sparked off several hours of fossil hunting on the beach (I found several small ammonites!) and a good few hours visiting the Fossil Museum and boring my partner to death (he could pass for an old fossil hehe).

Anyway I don't think my fossil hunting adventure quite matches up to the one reported on the BBC News website a couple of weeks ago, where Norwegian scientists discovered fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs.  It reported that palaeontologists from the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum discovered the 150 million-year-old fossils during fieldwork in a remote part of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. (Now that's what I call fossil hunting!)

The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles - the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs, which were the top predators living in what was then, a relatively cool, deep sea.  One skeleton has been nicknamed 'The Monster' because of its enormous size. 

Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the dig, said he was taken aback by the sheer density of fossil remains in one area.  "You can't walk for more than 100m without finding a skeleton. That's amazing anywhere in the world," he told BBC News.   Ichthyosaurs bore a passing resemblance to modern dolphins, but they used an upright tail fin to propel themselves through the water.

  Plesiosaurs are said to resemble descriptions of Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster. They used two sets of powerful flippers for swimming and came in two varieties - one with a small head and very long neck, and another with a large head and short neck. The short-necked varieties are known as pliosaurs.  The discovery of a gigantic pliosaur, nicknamed The Monster, was one of the most remarkable discoveries of the expedition.  Its skeleton has dinner-plate-sized neck vertebrae, and the lower jaw has teeth as big as bananas.

The skeleton is not yet fully excavated, but its skull is about 3m long, suggesting the body could be more than 8m from the tip of its nose to its tail.  "What's amazing here is that it looks like we have a complete skeleton. No other complete pliosaur skeletons are known anywhere in the world," said Dr Hurum.  The fossil hoard comprises 21 long-necked plesiosaurs, six ichthyosaurs and one short-necked plesiosaur!

To read the full article click here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5403570.stm