As of last Friday, we finally have a weather port! This means we’ve been able to really get started working at LDB. The LDB site is about 7.5 miles away from McMurdo, so we have to take a shuttles to get there. Every day (including Sundays), there is a big shuttle bus, called the kress, that takes all the LDB people out there. Continue reading
Category: COSI’14 (Page 2 of 2)
The Crud
The infamous McMurdo Crud. Anyone who has been down here knows about it, probably too well. It’s your common cold &/or stomach bug, but it spreads like no other. It seems like there is no way of avoiding it. Hand sanitizer galore and vigorous hand washing can only go so far. It knocked me out for two days at the beginning of last week, it moved on to McBride, then hit Martin. Who’s next?! Only the Crud knows… Continue reading
We’ve been here a few days, and as expected, our weather port is still not done. We currently have a small space to work in the same building as the galley, or cafeteria, at LDB. We don’t have space to unpack the entire shipping container, nor do we want to, as we would then have to move everything into our weather port later. We unpacked what we needed to work on the flight computer, the card cage boards, and some other things. Today we got (very slow) internet in our space, which everyone is pretty excited about.
Brent and our temporary space, which we were in the process of unpacking
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.
We had two full days in Christchurch, NZ. Before being able to explore, we had to get our extreme cold weather gear from the US Antarctic Program office.
Abby, myself, and Carolyn trying out our extreme cold weather gear