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For surf trip

Body glide

Hey that's a dog!

Aloe

Bug spray

Day trip to Cape Royds

Iceberg stuck in the sea ice.

On Wednesday (Tue for you in the US) David, Katie, Jean and I took a day trip to Cape Royds, so David could give Katie a tour of the colony and Jean could set up her time-lapse camera to capture penguins and seals. It took us about and hour to drive out there on snow mobiles, over sea ice 5 or 6 feet thick. It was a beautiful day, with little wind, blue skies, and temperatures around freezing. We passed giant ice bergs frozen in place by the sea ice, rising blue from a flat plane of white. Mt Erebus steamed above us, one of the few volcanoes on earth where magma is exposed at the surface. We saw around 20 Weddell Seals basking on the ice near cracks or holes they use to dive for food.

Iceberg and mountains.

We arrived at Cape Royds to find the penguins dutifully getting started with the breeding season. Males had chosen territories and begun nest-building, and were displaying with flippers outstretched and bill pointed to the sky, hoping to attract a passing female. Some birds had formed pairs, and two nests already had a single egg each. The females will probably lay a second egg before heading out to sea to forage for two weeks while the male incubates. We searched the colony for banded birds, and got the camera set up for the time lapse shot. A highlight was seeing a Kelp Gull fly by, a species I didn't know came this far south, and that David said he has only seen occasionally here.

Adelie and steaming Mt. Erebus

The drive back was equally beautiful and somewhat uneventful as the drive out. The novelty of riding on a snow machine wore off fairly quickly, and then it was just a long, loud, uncomfortable ride.

Open water north west of Cape Royds.

The rest of that afternoon and for the last two days we've continued getting everything ready to go out to Cape Crozier. Jean and Katie flew to Cape Royds today, and we're set to fly tomorrow.

Unfortunately, it looks like we won't have internet out there, at least for a while. So this blog may be fairly short-lived. I may be able to get internet-via-satellite phone set up, but no promises. I'll update when I can, but it may not be until late January.

At this point I'm at peace with not being connected for a couple months. I appreciate the internet for its utility and entertainment value, but not having it will allow me to focus on other things for a while.

Until sometime in the future...

Arrived!!

We've arrived!



Two days ago we stepped off a C-17 military transport plane and onto ice. In that instant the travel to get here became a blur. The 20-odd hours from San Fransisco to Christchurch, dragging a weighbridge through New Zealand customs, watching marginal movies instead of sleeping. Then a rainy few days in Christchurch, sidestepping puddles, inspecting earthquake damage, safety training and cold-weather-gear issue, and a couple minor earthquakes in the night to puntuate our dreams. The 5 hour flight from Christchurch to McMurdo, loud and with few windows and strange-shaped cargo onboard, but finally we're over the continent and can peer down at glaciers pierced by meringue-like peaks. I step off the plane and am struck with the immensity of being here. Snowy mountains in the middle-ground hint at the frozen vastness beyond, a true wilderness. Closer is the bustle of McMurdo Station, dirty and busy, bureaucratic, funky. A frontier town stuck in the modern world. And the cold. It wasn't terribly bad when we arrived, around minus 10 C and 14 knots of wind, but any comparison to central California is a stretch.




Somewhere west of the Ross Sea.





Libby gets off the plane. I think that grin must have frozen on her face, because it didn't show any signs of change until we got inside a warm building.



We settled in and changed out of the extreme cold weather clothes we're required to wear on the flight. A post-dinner walk found Annie, Libby and I atop Ob Hill, overlooking McMurdo and Scott Base and all the wilderness beyond, rejoicing in our presence here. Then to sleep, with a dark curtain over the window to keep out the midnight sun. By some mysterious stroke of luck Libby and I somehow ended up with our own room, though there is another bunk in there so we'll likely get a room mate before long. David said penguins must have some influence we don't know about.



McMurdo colors.




Libby is standing on a rock, I promise. Atop Ob Hill, looking west-ish across McMurdo Sound, to mountains on the continent.






Yesterday and today we began preparations to head out to our field camps. We will be splitting in to 2 groups: Jean Pennycook and Katie Dugger to Cape Royds, and David Ainley, Annie Pollard, Libby and I to Capre Crozier. Sleeping bags, tents, fire extinguishers, shovels, hammers, toilet paper, GPS recievers, ice chests, backpacks and more all have to be sorted, packed, weighed and labeled for the helicopter flight.



Last evening's walk was out to Hut Point, where the Scott Expedition built a hut to overwinter on their fated South Pole bid. The hut looked remarkably well-preserved in this dry environment, though we couldn't go inside without a specially-trained guide. The clouds present since our arrival cleared and the wind was calm. Ice melted into mud on the roads. Two Weddell Seals lounged on the ice at the edge of town.









Libby and Annie chat with the Scott Hut (not to be confused with Scott Base) and McMurdo Station behind.











The rest of the week we'll be doing more prep: communications briefing, food-pull, tracking down missing gear. Tomorrow and the next day Libby will be in Happy Camper survival school.






More to come...

Last post from Antarctica

Our plane is on its way from Christchurch, and in 45 minute or so we will get on some sort of interesting transportation device for the 40-ish minute drive out to the Pegusis Airfield. This late in the season, the sea ice runway right in front of McMurdo is mostly melted, and what isn't has had a channel cut through it by the icebreaker. So we need to drive up onto the ice shelf for our departure flight.
Yesterday we had an amazing trip on the icebreaker out to Beaufort Island. Unfortunately I don't have time to give a full account now, but it was an exciting trip: feeling the ship shudder as it plowed through ice chunks; orcas and minke whales and some probable Arnoux's Beaked Whales (Davie hasn't decided yet); getting into and out of the shore-landing boat vial a rope ladder over the side of the icebreaker; jumping through small surf to get to the beach then banding 400 Adelie chicks with Weddell Seals lounging all around.
Its hard to believe my time here is over. With no natural day-night pattern, there is no scale for the passage of time and it seems to have passed in an instant and taken ages all at once.
This is an amazing place to have lived for a while. I hope I get thorough chance to share my experiences with you all beyond just photos and words here.
For now...

Photo page #2

Here's a random assortment of photos...



"Behind bars". The fractured ice along the beach early in the season was twisted and piled into great patterns and shapes. These icecicles were dripping down from a big block that was lifted 10-20 feet up.



Here you get a sense of the colony's scale. This is the eastern half of the main part of the colony. The smaller blobs of penguins on nests are the subcolonies.




Another view of the ice maze along the beach. This was changing all the time, and some days the Adelies had quite a time getting to the colony.




Grant walking down Pat's Peak, where we would do our sea watches. The Ross Ice Shelf is in the background.

The Adelies really seemed to enjoy this "kiddie pool", formed by the fast ice buckling down below sea level. Just 2 days before this was firmly anchored to the beach and I stood right where the penguins are swimming!

Return to Crozier and photo batch 1

Yesterdayday Annie, Jean and I flew back to Cape Crozier to conduct the final round of chick measurements there. Cloudy skies and unpredictable wind threatened our helo flight out, but eventually the pilot decided to give it a try. For once the weather at Crozier was better than at McMurdo, and we got 30 chicks measured in about 35 minutes. Chicks continue to be small even this late in the season, and seem not to be "catching up" from this year's late laying date. We were back to McM for lunch, and spent th rest of the day puttering around the lab and proofing some data. I've realized that I won't really make the time to go back through my previous posts and find appropriate pictures for them; and that could be tedious viewing for people. In stead, I'll start putting up photo pages of my favorite shots, with captions or descriptions of whats going on. I'll try to go somewhat chronologically through my time at Crozier, but I may also have subject-bases pages.

First things first, we had to set up the tents we would be sleeping in.

Early in the season there was a lot of fast ice (sea ice that's attached to land) for the penguins to hang out on in their comings and goings between the colony and the sea.

It's endless entertainment watching them fly out of the water onto the ice. Often they don't time it right and smack into a wall of ice or jump too soon and land in the water without hitting anything solid.

This big crack opened up and refroze many times before warm temperatures and winds from the right direction finally pushed the fast ice out. When those conditions did occure, all the low ice you can see here dissapeared in about 20 hours, and some chunks of the ice shelf (far background) disconnected and drifted off too!

The early part of the season can also be characterized by wind. This is looking out from the hut on our windiest day. Sustained winds were 80-105 mph for most of the day, and we had many gusts in the 110-120 range. The only ice in this photo is the big sheet; all the littler white specks are white caps!




The wind came up somewhat suddenly, and we didn't have time to take down Grant's mountaineering tent. In 100 mph winds it is difficult just to stand up, and there was no way we could go out and take the tent down once it really started blowing. Over an hour or so the tent was flattened and shredded and the poles were snapped in two!

That's it for now, I'll put more shots up in a day or two.

Back in McMurdo

The past few weeks have seemed to disappear like the melting snow, yet it seems like so long ago that I last sent an update. As the title to this post suggests, we are back at McMurdo station, after 2 months and 6 days at Cape Crozier. The final week or so at Crozier was spent checking nests to determine outcomes, daily weighbridge data downloads, chick condition measurements, picking rocks out of penguin-poo samples with bare hands then attempting to wash off in the cold ocean, and, on our second to last day, banding 1000 chicks. This last task was quite an event. We had 4 additional people come out to help with the job, David and Jean from PengiunScience, Elise a painter on the NSF Writers and Artist’s Grant, and Dave, someone David and Jean know from McMurdo. To catch the chicks, 2 L-shaped fences were placed together around a crèche, then the banders stepped in, removed adults and too-small chicks, then began closing bands on flippers. Inside the chick-corral was a cloud of poo-dust, fluffy down, and dander. David, Jean, Annie, Stephanie and I banded while Dave and Elise pre-bent bands and handed them out when someone’s pocket-full was gone. It was a whirlwind 5 hours of work, and 3 days later I am still recovering with sore thumbs from closing bands, a strained shoulder from lifting chicks and fences at weird angles, and a strange tingling from my left calf down and inability to lift my toes toward my knee.
The last day was spent packing, working on data, and saying goodbye to the penguins and this amazing place. Yesterday morning a helicopter flew out and Elise, Annie and I piled in with many hundreds of pounds of gear. As the helo lifted off I peered over bags and boxes at the place that had been my home for two months shrinking away below. First just the hut and tents filled my view, with Mark and Jeff waving from the hut door; then the surrounding snowfield and Pats Peak, then the white stains of the colony and the crystal-edge of the Ice shelf driving purposefully toward the horizon. I felt sad to be leaving Cape Crozier, and I know I will miss the place and the penguins and the utter simplicity of living so single-mindedly, completely engrossed in what I was doing. But in the last few days I haven’t been able to avoid thinking about the other world, the one I’m now on the verge of rejoining. I’ve marveled at how those things that have such great importance at Cape Crozier have such little relevance in the other world. For the past two months I’ve been consumed by looking at penguins’ left flippers for bands. That one pursuit has filled more waking hours than anything else. But at home there will be so many things vying for my attention, I will be unable to devote such time to any one thing. Already the other world is clawing at me, grabbing my thoughts and diverting my imagination.
McMurdo is a surreal place after two months at Crozier. Checking for traffic while walking around and taking a shower are weird enough. But the most bizarre is to find yourself at a giant party watching really good funk and old rock music, surrounded by people and free beer, having gotten off the helo just 8 hours previously.
I have around 6200 photos, so it is sort of an overwhelming task deciding which to share with you. I’ll go back through the previous posts and add shots that go with what I wrote. I may also do some sort of web album, or do some additional, photo-heavy posts. We’ll see.



Big chick looking for a meal.


Molting. They seem a little embarassed at their apperance.




Helping Stephanie pull weighbridge fence up to the hut.




Annie and Stephanie in the throes of data proofing. A couple of times we used the hut's only light when the sun was behind the ridge and there were dark clouds.