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.
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