Ice diatoms!

Today has been a day of preparations, as tomorrow we hope to leave McMurdo Station and head out on the sea ice. Our mobile sled is almost ready for deployment: the carpenters who work for the US Antarctic Program are quite amazing, and our sled has filtration racks for separating different...

Sea-ice class

Today Abigail Noble and I took a Hagglund transporter out onto the Ross Sea to learn the basics of sea ice safety and ice dynamics. The sea ice on McMurdo Sound can be 2 meters thick, but this ice is constantly changing, and when you drive along its surface, you can't assume that it is...

Happy Camp

Our project on the Ross Sea will take us far from heated facilities of McMurdo Station, so all members of our team need to attend "Happy Camp", a two day course on snow camping and basic Antarctic survival. Happy Camp is held out on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, and it is an immersion program in...

McMurdo Station

Entering McMurdo is like entering a modern mining town: lots of exposed rock and unpaved streets, above ground utilities and bare-bones architecture. Utilitarian. From the airport we were taken to a briefing room, introduced to our science coordinators, and given our shcedules. Since I am...

Transport to the ice

Wednesday morning started with a 5AM taxi ride to the US Antarctic Program's processing center at the Christchurch airport, where we had to repack our bags and put on our emergency cold weather gear for the flight. Our plane was the C-17 Globemaster III, a large military transport plane more...

Polynya opens in the Ross Sea

A helicopter pilot recently sent us an image of the area we are planning to sample, and the stable sea ice we intended to use as a platform for drilling and sampling is now a giant stretch of open seawater! A large opening like this is a polynya, a term borrowed from the Russian...

Christchurch, New Zealand

Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand, the anteroom to Antarctica. My colleagues and I have been here for several days now, running last minute errands, getting equipped with cold weather gear, and waiting for a flight south to McMurdo Station. The flight here was remarkable only in it's...

Why Antarctica, and why now?

So why are you going to Antarctica, and why are you going now? A very logical question... basically we are traveling to Antarctica to study microscopic marine plants known as phytoplankton. These organisms range in size from bacteria to diatoms to colonial algae, but all phytoplankton have two...

Trip preparations (inaugural posting!)

Well, we have less than a week left, and we are finalizing and shipping the chemicals and equipment we will need for sampling below the sea ice in the Ross Sea. We have already shipped out several hundred pounds of gear, and more await us in storage down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica....

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