In a turn of events, we actually weren’t able to get to anymore AWS in the last 3 full days in Antarctica. We had planned to get to Windless Bight AWS on February 10th, but the visibility was too low for us to safely snowmobile. It was disappointing because it was the last AWS on our list that we needed to get to.  Then the 11th and 12th we needed to worry about cleaning up the lab/office, returning all our equipment, and packing all our personnel items.

There was also a bit of drama concerning leaving the continent. Larger wheeled aircraft still weren’t getting to McMurdo because the ice runway wasn’t ready yet. The week were trying leave many of friends had been delayed somewhere between 1 to 3 days since they were using the smaller LC-130 aircraft. We got very lucky in that we left February 13th, which was the day were originally scheduled to leave! I was the last name on the list of priority to get on the plane 🙂

In general, we had an extremely successful season thanks to a great team of 4 spread over 4 months! We are all safely back in Madison, WI and working on the various updates from the field season.

Cheers,

Carol