Part 4 “The Ross Sea” Readers of my blog know that I have been reading Ernest Shackleton’s memoir South during my Antarctic trip. Had his ship Endurance been freed of the ice in 1914, Shackleton planned on crossing Antarctica and arriving here in the Ross Sea region. Instead, his ship was crushed by sea ice…
Part 5 Rime Here on the ice shelf, water takes many forms and shapes. There is the huge chunk of ice below us and the blanket of snow that covers it. There are the clouds of every shape and size and the snow that falls from them. There is the steam rising above the pot…
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….