Update 10: Let it blow, let it blow, let it blow

[Paul Summers]

Hello all again from WAIS Camp.

It has been a somewhat un-eventful 10 days since the last update, which is disappointing as we were hopeful to be at T2 after only a few days at WAIS, but delays are a part of working in West Antarctica. The heart of the delays here have been weather related, either because weather was poor elsewhere (preventing planes from getting to us) or more often poor weather here preventing flights from flying here. Poor weather is typically characterized by steady winds over 25-30 mph which blows snow (if it is not also actually snowing) reducing visibility to under 1/2 mile. The temperatures have been fairly warm, around 5-10F for these storms, so it has been OK to walk around from place to place. In WAIS we have a number of heated spaces to stay, either the galley or the science module, so it is a good place to weather the storms. We still sleep in unheated tents, but my sleeping bag keeps me plenty warm enough.

Here is a photo of my sleeping bag and tent set up inside. Pete has a nice little pocket to hang out in, and the yellow hue of the tent is pretty easy to get used to. Also, my phone broke after arriving here, the screen appears to have lost connection to the rest of the phone, so I'm using a 5+ year old Pixel 2 that hates the cold as my only phone, so sorry the photos aren't quite as easy for me to take. My favorite neck gaiter also walked off at breakfast.... It's been a rough few days here.

In more exciting news, the rest of our science team has made it to WAIS, bringing the total population here to over 60! This makes camp a little crowded, but we are glad to all be together again. I got some fun photos of the LC 130 coming in, they are very impressive planes. As you can see in the last photo, we offload from the plane with all the engines still running. This is a loud welcome to camp, and a little intimidating, but thus far we've all managed to avoid the propellers on our way out.

As we've been at WAIS for a few extra days now, we were able to help out another team, the Automated Weather Service (AWS) team who has a weather station here at WAIS that they needed to be taken down. It was only a short 5 min snowmobile drive away, and we took all the equipment off the tower and packaged it in a nice little crate to be sent back to McMurdo for them. Not our primary task, but it was nice to do something productive.

With our other time, we've been prepping our equipment for the trip to T2, the first photo here is Danny and Andrew repairing some breaks in fiber optic cables we are using for radar experiments. We've also been packing all our equipment, science and camp stuff, for our flights to T2. That flight will most likely be on a Twin Otter, which has a payload of around 2500 pounds, so we are putting our items into piles of 2500 pounds to make packing up the plane as quick as possible. T2 is a 1.5 hr flight away, so if we're efficient we can get 2 round trips per day. We want to be as efficient as possible with this as we have over 24 flights worth of cargo! We are hopeful that a Basler airplane will be available to us soon, as it can carry over 6000 pounds of cargo in 1 flight, so that would greatly reduce the number of days needed to fly our cargo to T2.

Camp has been decorating for the coming holidays, which is fun and raises our spirits here despite the delays and poor weather. This is a photo of the galley tent in all its decorated glory! You can see the tent is quite spacious, but remember 60+ of us are sharing this space as our primary eating and relaxing space. The 2 large heaters generally keep the tent VERY warm, most people actually complain it's too hot, but I guess that is a good problem to have, especially during the stormy weather we've been having recently.

That's all the updates for now, I'll try to get more photos of camp life here like how we make water and how we stay entertained on stormy days. We do also take down the Starlink when the weather is really bad, so I can only send updates on goldilocks days like today when it's too stormy to work, but not stormy enough to risk damaging the Starlink antenna. Hopefully we will be at T2 by Christmas, keep an eye on my Garmin Mapshare at this link, I'll try to update it almost everyday with a short update!

https://share.garmin.com/somonesummers

You may need to change the "Date & Time Range" to "last 7 days" to see the recent messages, the filters by default seem to be a bit restrictive.

Thinking of you all and wishing you all a warm and merry holiday season!

Best,

Paul