It’s been just over 24 hours since we touched down on the Ice, and unfortunately my writing skills are not refined enough for me to explain how amazing it is here. The view are so much more than I was expecting, and I was expecting a lot. The people are fantastic. The food is good. It’s definitely not as cold as we all we thought it would be (although the temperature has been hovering around -15 ºC, it doesn’t feel nearly that bad). And the shuttle trip out to the balloon base (a solid 7.5 miles from McMurdo on the ice shelf) is breathtaking.
View of the Ross Ice Shelf and McMurdo Sound, with Scott Base in the foreground. You can actually see the divide between the sea ice that melts every summer and the permanent ice self.