Part 10 The Comforts of Yesterday Camp We arrived an hour later at the sea ice airfield and hopped into the shuttle that passed by Scott Base (operated by New Zealand’s version of the NSF) and crossed over Ross Island to McMurdo Station. I was still clad in all the necessary layers of protective clothing…
Part 9 A Rushed Goodbye With the possibility of good weather, our project director Patrick hoped that we would have two teams out in the field today pulling seismometers. Ideally, one team would go to a long distance station in the plane and the second would go to a closer station on the snowmobiles. Unfortunately,…
Part 1 Arrival at Yesterday Camp I flew out this afternoon to Yesterday Camp with Cathy, Laura, and Momme on the second flight aboard a ski plane called a Twin Otter. These planes ferry science teams to and from McMurdo to their deep field camps. They are also embedded with those teams to transport people…
Part 2 The Noise, the Silence, and the Music It is flat here. Really flat. The horizon is identical in every direction. There is no geographic feature to use as a frame of reference. To complicate matters, there are two different systems of navigation that make “true north” the opposite physical direction from “grid north.”…
Part 3 “Second to the right and straight on ‘til morning” We loaded up the gear on our small fleet of snowmobiles and headed out into the open ice today. We drove about 15 miles to one of 30 seismic stations that need to be removed and returned to the researchers at UC San Diego….