On Thursdays 05.12, 06.02, 05.03, 02.04, 07.05 and 04.06, from 17 to 21h, Happy Hour at the Museum: you visit our exhibition Antarctica and the Dinosaur Gallery, discover new scientific information and presentations on Antarctica, and sip an "Antarctic" drink offered by the Museum. And for the hungry, there is the DinoCafé.
Prices: €9.50 (adults) | €7 (4-17 years old)

06.02.2020: ANTARCTIC ADVENTURES with BRUNO DANIS

With a multinational crew, which included the famous explorer Roald Amundsen,the original Belgica set sail from Antwerp on 16th August 1897 under the command of Adrien de Gerlache. This expedition was the first scientific expedition to reach Antarctica, and the first to overwinter in its extreme conditions. 

In the framework of the RECTO project (Refugia and Ecosystem Tolerance in the Southern Ocean), and funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office, I lead my team on these tracks to carry out a thorough biodiversity census in the Antarctic Peninsula, a region experiencing one of the fastest‐paced environmental changes on the planet.
The Belgica 121 expedition has chosen to use a sailboat as its research platform, in order to limit its environmental impact and to reach areas which large ice‐breakers cannot access. In February 2019 the expedition set sail from Ushuaia, Argentina, and headed South and cross the Drake Passage to the Gerlache Strait (West Antarctic Peninsula), where the team will stay for six weeks. 
The main objective of the expedition was to explore and catalogue marine biodiversity in a region which is both challenged by fast environmental changes and for which major knowledge gaps persist. The team focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest warming regions of the world. Climate change, invasive species, and increasing pollution levels pose extreme challenges to the Antarctic organisms that are adapted to very specific ecological conditions. This expedition aims to create an ecological census baseline in order to better understand this under-sampled ecosystem. 

More information can be found on the B121 website.