DC on The Ice 2: November 2009

It's been quite a full-on week this week. Family members from the Erebus tragedy are at base at the moment. They tried to get to the crash site on Friday evening, but the weather prevented them from landing. They'll hopefully try again in the morning before flying out tomorrow (Monday) afternoon. There was a very emotional service held here at base- very intense.

Right, another mix of photos this week. We start with some photos from a birthday party at McMurdo which we crashed cos the drummer in the band is a kiwi!
Then some more skiing ones, just cos I've been doing a fair bit of it.

We spent a night out at Scott's hut from his Terra Nova expedition at Cape Evans. The Antarctic Heritage Trust conservators are there at the moment, so we stayed with them. The vortex generators that I talked about in last years blog haven't worked as well as hoped, so there were also some base staff out for the day fixing them.

They've got a kite out there, so I had a decent play with that- sooooo much fun!

Finally, there's some photos from another wander up Crater Hill.

We're hopefully heading to the Darwin Glacier tomorrow- should be a really good trip. Rachelle is due to head back to NZ on Wednesday, then I'm out to Cape Roberts to help fix and calibrate our broken tide gauge there (it's claiming 0.8m of sea-level rise per month at the moment). Then I'm due to return to NZ sometime around the 10th. So it's all gone pretty bloody quickly really!

Lizzie, Fran, Me, Rachelle, and Lucy

Well, I've got quite a range of photos this post...
It's been a pretty busy time since my last post. We've mainly been supporting some gravity measurements as part of the POLENET project. This involved measuring absolute gravity at Scott Base (which meant setting up a temporary hut in front of base which had to be heated to >15°C - easier said than done) as well as relative gravity at Cape Roberts (which involved two half-day-trips out in a helicopter).

The first few photos are of the takedown of our GPS receiver which we setup out on the sea-ice as part of our tide-gauge calibrations. Rachelle wasn't feeling too well, so I roped in Jess to help. She studies Marine Science, but her father is a surveyor, so it was the best I could find! :-)

Then there is a photo of some scoria/gravel being bought in so that we could create a bit of a flat surface to set the gravity hut up on.

We had a bit of a storm last weekend as I mentioned in another post. It cleared enough on sunday for me to get out for a ski, so there's some photos from that. We had over a foot of snow in places. Unfortunately it was so soft that I was sinking most of the way up to my knees even with ski's on (they're skinny cross-country ski's), so it was a bit of work! Also a photo of a C17 landing, as seen from Arrival Heights.

Then more photos of the hut being put up, and the instrument (apparently worth 350,000 Euro) installed inside. It usually runs for about 2 days to obtain a really precise value for the gravity, but some strong winds came up, and some snow was getting inside the hut after only 24hrs of measurements. The French guys- Yves and Nicolas- who were responsible for the instrument decided to take down the instrument so that it was not damaged.

Some photos follow of a walk up Observation Hill- it was myself, Rachelle and Sandi- the base medic.

Also, pictures from Cape Roberts doing the relative gravity. This instrument is a fair bit more robust, and we just needed to put a cardboard box around it to keep the wind off it. The sea-ice is considerably closer this year, to the point that we had to go around the edge to get to Cape Roberts (the helo's aren't allowed to fly over open water).

Then some photos from a trip to Scott's Discovery Hut at Hut Point.

Finally, our second trip to Cape Roberts, including photos of a science camp which we stopped at at Granite Harbour- just around the corner from Cape Roberts. It's pretty cool- 3 big Rac tents for eating and science, and a heap of polar-tents for sleeping in. It's got wind and solar power, as well as some generators for backup. Pimping. There's also a shot of the gravity hut in front of base from the air.

Hope you enjoy the photos, some of them might look a bit weird- I'm not sure if it's the screen of the computer I edit them on, or the one I upload them on, but they definitely look different!