So it has been a while since I’ve updated, things have gotten quite busy here.

In the past 2 weeks we’ve visited 5 stations,  I’m going to talk about the first 4 in this post and will have a separate post for the Cape Hallett visit.

The first day we flew in a Twin Otter plane to 3 stations on the Ross Ice shelf. The stations were Sabrina, Tom, and Elaine. All of these stations were repair/raise visits.

It was an amazing day on the ice shelf, with warm temperatures(in the low to mid 20’s) and calm winds at all of our stations.  Most of these stations you can look in every direction and see almost nothing on the horizon, which when the wind is calm provides a very surreal experience.

It was a long flight, and it required stopping off at a fuel cache, which was windier and colder than any of the other stops for the day.  It ended up being a long day, but a very successful one.

Last week we also went to Windless Bight.  This is a station that is relatively close to McMurdo, so we took snow mobiles out to the station, which was quite a bit of fun.  Again this was a raise of the station, so we took all the instruments off the station, added tower sections and raised the instruments up.  When we got there some of the station was buried in the accumulated snow, which meant a lot of shoveling.

I will try to do another update on Cape Hallett shortly, I’m currently waiting on a few pictures from some of the other people that came along.

Prior to Cape Hallett Number of Penguins seen: 0

Skua: 0