APECS Oceania

APECS OCEANIA IN ANTARCTICA

Another week in Aurora Basin.
It was busy and quite a lot of changes in camp this week. It was not only a New Year,
but we had a changeover in our members, with nine people returning to Casey and six new members flying in to camp on December 30th. It was a sad moment saying goodbye to those leaving, with hugs, jokes, photos and promises shared. But it was exciting to have new people coming in. Our camp now became younger, and half of us are girls. We are waiting for our final member, Tessa, to join us and our camp population will be 16.

We have been having an unexpected problem with the temperature in our processing tent. Its not as cold as we expected - It has actually been too warm for us to work, with the temperature rising above 0 degrees during the day! Therefore the processing team Olivia, Chris, Holly and me are working evening till late night. Unfortunately that means we miss out on the chance to relax after dinner and join in the valuable sharing time with friends, but the work has to be done.

So far, on 5th Jan, we have drilled 193 m of the main core and 116 m using the Eclipse drill, processed 56 m of ice, scraped 27 m ice and analysed 16 m of ice for stable isotopes. We will begin drilling another core tomorrow!

I have one piece of sad news. Our precious, hottest friend Toby the heater passed away on the night of 4th Jan. He wasn't well for last few days but still working hard for us. The night, after dinner, his condition became unstable. Yet, he was waiting for us night workers to finish (Thank you, Mark and Meredith for fire watching!). When we came back to the kitchen tent at 1 a.m., he was in last stage. He was mumbling, puffing, suffering. Then suddenly, his little lid popped off and it was time to shut him down. This is how he died. We were sad and cold!
But next morning when I woke up, there was already new heater in the kitchen tent (Thank you Bloo!!). Toby 1 is now replaced by Kenobi (Jason 2014). So, we have a warm nice kitchen tent again.