Part 8 Tremors from Home Our seismometers measure earthquakes and icequakes that ripple through the planet and make the ice beneath our feet tremble. Sadly, we heard a report of a 6.2 earthquake off the eastern coast of New Zealand that is has stranded thousands and has transformed the city of ChristChurch into a refugee…
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 6 The Cloud of Unknowing I mentioned in an early blog that it is difficult to get a sense of direction here. North, south, east, and west could be any direction. The time of day is also impossible to judge without a watch because the sun plods a slow oval around the sky, never…
Part 7 Measured by Music Momme, the German physicist on the team, explained to me today that the seismometers have been gathering data for two years on the ice shelf’s reaction to infragravity waves from the sea below. Momme is also a jazz guitar player, so I have the luxury of a musical scientist helping…
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.”…