APECS OCEANIA IN ANTARCTICA
We are now close to finishing of the season (Jan 13). Kenobi the new heater is having a problem since being installed. He behaves well during the day time but not at night. Every morning, the kitchen tent is so cold and we find he is still sleeping. Waking him up becomes Bloo and Malcom's routine work in the morning.
We had a few days of strong wind and white out days, and now again we have clean beautiful blue skies. We saw a beautiful halo, rainbow and diamond dust at the same time. The environment here is so cold and harsh, but just awesome and amazingly beautiful at the same time. My vocabulary isn't good enough to explain this awesomeness.
We had a few days of strong wind and white out days, and now again we have clean beautiful blue skies. We saw a beautiful halo, rainbow and diamond dust at the same time. The environment here is so cold and harsh, but just awesome and amazingly beautiful at the same time. My vocabulary isn't good enough to explain this awesomeness.
Weather has been a problem for the flight since beginning. The first group of us got stuck in Casey for 3 weeks at the beginning of the season, and now Tessa has been stuck there for 10 days. Considering this lack of flight chance, station leader Sharon decided to start packing up and sending people back. Thus our process team finished our work on Wednesday and packed up our equipment on Thursday. We will fly back to Casey with the next available flight. We processed till 80 m depth of ice core. We had good team work.
While the process team are waiting for the flight, we worked on sampling snow pit, helping to set up Automatic Weather Station (AWS), and finding buried cargo and tents. All work mostly involves digging. Just digging. Keep digging. Digging digging digging. Finding buried cargo is actually fun. It's like treasure hunting!
Meanwhile, the main drilling team (Mark, Simon, Trevor and Meredith) reached 300 m, and French drilling team (Jason, Olivier and Nerilie) reached 100 m. We are now getting less ice core boxes, less drilling liquid and time is running out. On Sunday 12th January, considering our situation, Mark and Sharon decided to stop drilling. We got 303 m of ice core from main drill, 116 m of ice core from Eclipse drill, 103 m of ice core from French drill and 3 x 10 m of ice core from Kovacs drill.
APECS Oceania in Antarctica
APECS Oceania in Antarctica
Setting up AWS
Toby cleaning up
Snow pit sampling by Olivia
Snow pit wall
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