Update 7: Green Light -- Red Light!

[Paul Summers]

Howdy Y'all,

This southern update is coming to you (mostly) live from McMurdo again. I've been a little slow to take photos since my last update, but thankfully I can borrow some photos from others! 

After getting all our cargo checked into the system for our coming flights, it has been mostly quiet for me which is very nice. I've been getting lots of music and podcasts organized and onto my phone, preparing for any possible storm days where I'd be staying in the tent for most of the day.

 Another fun local event was that yesterday we had a mini-science conference here in McMurdo called AGU for Antarctic Geophysical Union, a play on the 'American Geophysical Union' (AGU) which hosts a very large scientific conference every year in December. It was very exciting to hear all about the cool science other scientists here are working on, characterizing sub-soil biomes, listening to ice fracture through ice quakes, and looking for the oldest ice in the world (which might be millions of years old!). I didn't present, which ended up being for the best as I was actually rather stressed/busy working on re-submitting a paper of mine, but I also got that submitted yesterday which I am very happy to have wrapped up for now. I should definitely have taken photos of AGU, but I was too excited about all the talks and forgot, my apologies. 

And now for some borrowed photos, an unexpected fun surprise this week was that a science team working for polenet (https://polenet.org/ another science group down here maintaining a constellation of seismic sensors all over the world) flew to our campsite, T2. 

Antarctica is a big place, about 1.5x times the size of the continental US but it has far fewer airports which can make it difficult for small planes to fly between the existing bases. For this reason, having fuel caches around the continent is very useful to extend the service range of the smaller aircraft (like the Twin Otter here), as well as providing more safety margin and alternative refueling stops if planes are diverted by weather. T2 happens to be a logistically useful place, and so has been built up as a fuel cache in addition to being our designated campsite. The Polenet team stopped by as a refueling stop between Byrd Glacier and Union Glacier (about 1200 miles). The barrels here are all jet fuel for the plane to refuel with, the green ones were air dropped 2 years ago, and the red ones came another way, likely driven in by a traversing resupply team. As they knew this was our campsite, they stopped for a bit to snap a few photos and show us how our other cached supplies fared the winter. 

This photo is the view from the air, where you can see the generally flat nature of the ice sheet, as well as 4 little dots that are the berms all of our equipment was left on at the end of last year. These berms were about 10 feet tall, rising above the surface at the end of last year, and were made by some pistonbullys (https://www.pistenbully.com/en) which in addition to grooming your ski trails, are quite good for driving around Antarctica and shaping snow. The purpose of building up these berms so tall is that every winter about 10 feet of snow falls at this location so if we build the berm and store our stuff on top, hopefully when we come back this year everything will be nicely sat at surface level, no digging required. An alternative is to mark your stuff with flags, let it get buried in 10 feet of snow, and have to dig it up but this is much slower and harder. Anywho, that's why the berms, and since you can see them so nicely from the plane it looks like they're working well! 

Up close, you can see that the berm worked exactly as intended! I'm sorry I can't seem to find a before picture for this, but if you can imagine the surface everywhere being about 10 feet lower, but this berm and all the boxes at the same level, 10 feet in the air, that is what it looked like. At this level you can also see the sastrugi (shockingly not pasta, but a very gluten free wind blown snow feature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sastrugi) or firm, rough snow, not unlike the small features of wind blown sand you've seen at the beach. This is the main/only snow feature we encounter, but they usually set the speed limits for our snowmobiles and can trip you up on a cloudy day as they are impossible to see without the sun to cast a shadow. I'll also point out that this is STUNNING weather, I really hope everyday will be like this for us, but it likely will be a bit worse.

Speaking of flights, as you may have guessed from the title I am not flying tomorrow, but rather we are in a holding pattern again. The plan changed over 3 times yesterday alone, so I will spare you the details of what the possibilities are, but I think it is safe to say we are hopeful some of us from TIME will make it to WAIS Camp this coming week (likely later in the week) and I might be one of the last ones to make it this week if things go well. If that all happens, the rest of the team would follow the next week. Besides the stop-go,wait, no go!, nevermind-try-tomorrow nature of all this being a bit tricky to plan around, we also have to mask in common spaces and eat our meals take-away as a precaution 5 days before our departure. This can be tricky as the plans change much faster than a 5 day timescale, so it is a bit of dance. 

Thankfully we all brought lots of tupperware and are adaptable, so we're making the best of the situation! Pete even masked up for a bit, though the sizing seems a little off. There is actually a quite concerning outbreak of avian flu this year (with impacts for wildlife, not humans to be clear https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/first-confirmed-cases-of-avian-influenza-in-the-antarctic-region/) so his reasons for masking are a bit different, but I'm glad he is staying safe. 

For the start of the week, there is some bad weather coming through town, snow and stronger winds, which will make recreating and science work a little harder. Danny and I kept a very small amount of science equipment out for use for more calibration and testing with any extra delays days, so we are hoping to take advantage of this extra day to test out some questions we have about our antennas, weather permitting. If the weather doesn't allow, I'll probably try to get some crafting in the craftroom done. I haven't had much time this year, but they have a fully stocked craft room with sewing machines and I'm excited to work on a little project or two! 

I'll be sure to keep you all updated on any changes to the plans, but otherwise I hope December is treating you well!

Sending my best,

Paul