?We?re trying to change the world.? Those are the first words you get from Dr. Damian Lopez when you ask him about his work.

It?s meant as a joke, but beneath the laughter is a bleak environmental reality of a slowly warming planet.

Dr. Lopez, 33, is the Chief Scientist for a project called Antarctic Mission - a sailing voyage aboard the Sedna IV that took a crew of 13 to Antarctica in the dead of winter.

On the way back to Quebec, Canada, the Sedna crew stopped for a three-day layover at Penno?s Wharf in St. George?s.

Even this far from Antarctica the slowly melting ice caps down there play a role in warming the ocean around Bermuda and rising the sea levels on our coast.

Wherever the Sedna goes in the world, the crew can get a conversation started about climate change. The topic is on the minds of many ? including Bermudians who happened past the vessel while it was docked in St. George?s.

?Especially with all the stuff people can see with the weather changing,? said Dr. Lopez while standing in the below-deck laboratory of the Sedna. ?After the huge tsunami, and hurricanes, and the winter being milder in some places - the weather, it?s all changing. The issue is getting more and more on the spot now.?

Quebec is one of the places where the winter temperatures are progressively warmer.

This issue is so critical to Canada, the Government funded the Antarctic Mission and enlisted logistical support from the Government of Argentina.

Dr. Lopez is an Argentine with a PhD in chemistry. He works closely with Sebastien Roy, a 27-year-old biologist and doctoral student from Quebec. The two not only worked side by side for months, but were also cabin mates in an uncomfortably small space on the lower deck.

A sense of humour was essential ? a feat much more difficult than you might think because the men communicated in English which is a second language for both of them. Together the job of Roy and Lopez is to study the effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) on the ocean and the organisms that live there.

CO2 gas is widely believed to be the main cause behind global warming. There have been missions like this before, but never to Antarctica in the middle of the winter, according to the Sedna crew. ?It?s never really been done in the winter, no one has done it like this,? said Dr. Lopez.

And for good reason.

The temperatures hovered near negative ten degrees Fahrenheit and the water was a frozen tundra that stretched for miles in every direction

?Some of it was really difficult during the winter,? said Mr. Roy, ?it was an adventure.?

?Especially because of the changing ice condition,? interrupted Dr. Lopez. ?Sometimes we had a lot of ice and we were able to go on the ice, but sometimes it was too loose to go walking on it.?

On another occasion they had to manually shovel a 100 metre path of snow in order to get their equipment through. The shovelling took half the day.

They remember pulling all of their instruments through the snow and ice on a series of sleds tied to a crew member?s waist.

It was like a human Iditarod team treading along in bone chilling temperatures.

But the truth is: it used to be colder on the Western side of Antarctica where the crew travelled. They estimate the negative ten degrees they witnessed was more like negative 20 degrees 50 years ago. The sailing scientists also measure what CO2 emissions are doing to the ozone layer. A depleted ozone layer means harmful UV rays from the sun could surge through and damage life forms on earth - not only humans and their skin, but plant life as well.

The Antarctic Mission is designed to study how CO2 and UV rays combine to warm our climate and our oceans. On the way back to Quebec the Sedna crew has hundreds of samples stored in a couple of giant freezers which the scientists watch very closely. ?It?s like our little children,? jokes Dr. Lopez.

The chest of tiny tubes and canisters represents almost 1100 hours of work and more than 15,000 kilometres travelled at sea. Some of the samples are kept at temperatures as low as negative 80 degrees.

?Which isn?t so easy,? the Argentine scientist explains. ?If this shuts down we lose all the work. Half of the sampling is here. The other half is downstairs.?

Dr. Lopez sometimes had to scold members of the crew for using his laboratory-style ice chest to make frozen desserts.

Once the delicate samples (the scientific ones not the treats) get back to Canada they will go through months of testing for conductivity, salinity, temperature, just about everything a someone in a lab coat can dream of.

?When you put all that together and add some mathematical models you can estimate how these things are going to evolve in the future,? Dr. Lopez explained. That will be valuable information to help protect living organisms both at sea and on land.

The scientists admit they aren?t quite sure what the data will show once all the testing is complete because there?s never really been a field study conducted under these conditions.

In tomorrow?s The Royal Gazette, the likelihood of stronger hurricanes hitting our shores as a result of climate change