October 30, 2016 Hanging out with scientists is really fun. I spent the afternoon with a team studying sea spiders. They dive under the 8-foot thick ice sheet to observe the behavior of spiders that seem to grow bigger in the cold water than their counterparts do in more temperate and tropical waters. The Antarctic…
Halloween Party in Antarctica Early Halloween Party here at McMurdo last night. It seemed better to have the party on the weekend, with a busy week of science work kicking off on Monday. My two favorite costumes were… Full-body pajamas with a Chicago Cubs logo-I wasn’t sure if the fellow wore it as a Cubs…
Big news yesterday! Cheers erupted after news broke that the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources has designated 600,000 square miles of the Southern Ocean as the “Ross Sea Marine Protected Area.” It is the largest marine protected area on the planet.
Oct 28, 2016 Dr. Gordon Hamilton died in a crevasse accident last week. Gordon was 50 years old. He worked as a climate scientist at the University of Maine for many years and became a fixture of the McMurdo community. We put the busy life of the station on “pause” for a simple, joyous memorial…
October 23, 2016 McMurdo Station Back home at the State University of New York at Geneseo, my Humanities students have been reading John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Locke argues for the replacement of the 17th c. British monarchy with a shared government by consent of the people. This represents the raw form of modern…