It was a pretty nice day here in Mactown and I decided to stroll out to Hut Point to see if I could catch a glimpse of the ice breaker, The Polar Sea. Sure enough, she was there out on the horizon, pretty far off still, but I bet it will be in town by the time I get back next week.

I have also been poking around some of the melt pools above McMurdo and have noticed a variety of algae growing at different depths. I think I'll do a bit of sampling when I get back and see if I can discover any new species back at the lab... haha.

~G

Here's a couple looks back towards town from hut point. The first one was in October and the second was a couple days ago. Pretty much all of the snow is gone from McMurdo. Temperatures are warmer now, but can easily be down in the teens if it's cloudy or windy.

The ice breaker reached the edge today and should start breaking its way in to town tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to snap some photos from the helicopter ride to Lake Bonney on Friday. I should be out for about a week and hopefully get to do some good hikes.

Happy new year!

~G

Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas! It's very rare that all four members of room # 251 are in town together, but there couldn't have been a better time than now.

The station really has a lot of Christmas cheer and it's been a surprisingly warm holiday here in McMurdo, with a tree and all!

(left to right: Ben Urmston, Greg Albrecht, five Adelie penguins if you look closely, Travis Senor and Joe Mullens)

~G

We had some Christmas eve visitors today down on the sea ice and I'm not talking about Santa Claus, elves or even reindeer. Although elf-like in many ways (short, flightless, appearing to lack knee joints) these little guys were none other than ten Adelie penguins!

Some spectators were not so easily convinced of our little friends' true identities, but most concerns were quieted when I reminded the crowd of onlookers that elves only live at the north pole and we are of course in the south.

~G

It's almost the end of the week and that means Christmas is here! I am excited to be part of the town festivities, since I was away for Thanksgiving.

There will be a big party Saturday night and the the choir will be singing for everyone. We sang over at the Kiwi base last night and had a pretty good time there, I think there are about 30 of us!

Sunday will be church (and with additional accompaniment from the piano accompaniment for the first time), the big meal, which is divided into four sittings with candles, roast, lobster and no blue cafeteria trays!

I don't think there is anything special on Christmas day, except for the Ob-Hill-Up-Hill, which is the race to the top of Observation Hill... hmmm, I foresee some unnecessary strain involved in that one... I think I'll just watch.

Once the feasting and relaxing has concluded and everyone has to go back to work on Tuesday, I will have the wonderful pleasure of boarding a C-212 helicopter and heading to Lake Bonney for the week to start phase 1 of the new helo pad construction. It should be a pretty nice trip and just short enough to get us back to Mactown for the new year party and ICESTOCK 2007!

~G

Today marks 8 months until Annie and I are married! I love you Annie!

~G

We left the ridge top around 5:30 and were out of the valley just minutes later. However, my excitement really began to build as I noticed the pilot was heading more and more in the direction of the ocean and less and less in that of McMurdo. Sure enough, we started passing icebergs and seals and I found myself squirming like a 5 year old in a car seat looking from window to window to try and take it all in.

The pilot did a little maneuver he liked to call, "threading the needle" in which he flew right between two icebergs at a pretty quick speed just a few hundred feet off the deck. The faces of the bergs were probably several hundred feet high, but we were so low all I could see was ice!

After swinging up out of that little move, he headed straight for the ice edge where we spotted and circled a large group of emperor penguins. And if that wasn't enough, he even landed on a berg and claimed it as "carp shop B-15" (since it, along with all the others are pieces of the B-15 berg that broke up last year.)

Wow, what a ride! Sorry, for the ill-framed photos, it probably serves as an indication of just how excited I was to be zipping around the big ice and the deep blue.

~G

I got the wonderful opportunity to go do some work on top of Mt. Newall today. We flew all the way across the sound and up the coast a bit into the heart of the Wright Valley.

On the way in we flew the entire length of the Onyx River which is the largest river in Antarctica and the only river in the world that flows it's entire distance away from the ocean starting at the Wright Lower Glacier and traveling 30 km to Lake Vanda. It was pretty impressive.

We dropped off a couple carps down there at Bull Pass to do some work and started up the mountain with just three of us left. We took inventoy of the survival cache and hut, tested the heaters, sorted through some things, fixed a door and packed up a bunch of trash... THEN we went hiking!

We had a good four hours to walk the length of the ridge line and even enjoy a little boulder tumbling and some high-mountain napping. The views were phenomenal and the weather couldn't have been better. We could see Erebus, New harbor, the Taylor Valley, the plateau, Wright Valley, Piedmont Glaciers and all the way out to open ocean with icebergs abound!

Tune in tomorrow for part two of the trip... OPEN WATER!


~G
Pictures:
1. Ventifact cliff face seen on the flight in
2. Wright Valley, Bull Pass to the right of Lake Vanda
3. Meserve Glacier tongue
4. A neat rock pinnacle with Erebus and a tiny bit of open water in the background
5. The camp in the Mt. Newall saddle
6. Onyx River flowing into Lake Vanda

If the weather holds up, I'll be headed up Mt. Newalt tomorrow on a helo flight to do some inventory/carp stuff. The mountain has a radio tower and a little hut on top, but that's it. We should be able to see open water from up there since it is down the coast quite a ways.

This shot is actually from New Zealand... I get pretty excited when I start thinking about warm weather, waves and that green stuff they vegetation.

~G

I toured the pressure ridges by Scott Base a few days ago and was able to shoot a few pictures. The Ross Ice shelf, which ranges from 50 to 200 meters in thickness is supposedly advancing about 9 feet every day due to the glacial flow from the mountains above which feed it.

The McMurdo ice shelf, much smaller in size and less active, sits nestled in behind hut point peninsula and is actually what we were standing on during the tour.

The pressure from the Ross shelf is not directly aimed into the McMurdo shelf, but acts more like a shear zone. This pressure is what forms the giant rollers, which eventually crack and can expose sea water in some places.

~G

Awe, aren't they just the cutest.

~G

Here's the photos from the sled incident and of course, the seals.

~G

Today's ice excursion was much more eventful than yesterday's with all kinds of fun things happening. We left for Hutton Cliffs this morning and it took us quite a while to get out since the ice near town is deteriorating so much. It made for a bumpy and slow ride, but once around the point, it was pretty smooth sailing.

We packed up camp pretty quick and Regina, the biologist studying Weddell Seals at the camp, showed us all around. All I have to say is WOW... pretty amazing stuff.

On the way home, we made a quick stop so that I could drop my plankton net a few times and get some samples to play biologist with. This is part of the whole internship deal that got me down to Antarctica in the first place. Actually, I had pretty much given up on doing my research proposal, since Raytheon wasn't really making it very easy for me to get out on the ice; however, the foremen in the carp shop are all pretty great so we just took a little detour on the way home. I probably won't get to sample again, so as far as any real research or correlations go, I don't have much (3 samples from 3 depths: 15 feet, 30 feet and 50) to compare, but it will be fun sneaking into Crary Lab, finding a scope and identifying all the specimens. Luckily I've got an inside connection.

And so, as if seals and plankton weren't enough for one day, we ran into some "problems" on the way back to town, starting with Regina getting pitched off her snowmobile and into a melt pool when she broke through. Luckily it was only about 3 feet deep and not connected to the ocean. After getting herself out and on the "road" again we had to stop because one of our pisten bullys had gone in a little deep and the sled got stuck under the ice. But the real icing on the cake was when Geordan broke through up to his knees while walking towards his stuck sled... it was pretty funny.

No worries though, everyone was safely on top of 10 feet of ice and we all made it back with all parts and people in tact... a little wet of course.

~G

I got to spend yesterday and today pulling out camps from the sea ice. Yesterday, we went to the Big Razorback Island camp and filled up three sleds with fuel tanks, solar panels and an outhouse. We towed all the stuff back with pisten bullys and the big CAT brought all of the huts on skis back in a big train.

We had a bit of time to go poke around the seals hanging out by the island. It almost seemed more like a graveyard, though. However, we did get a little show from a rowdy little fella that decided to take a dive off a big ledge.

Erebus was looking nice in the beautiful clear sky and smoking away as usual.

~G

Looks like tomorrow, I'll be heading out to Big Razorback Island for the day to pull out a field camp there. It will only be about an hour drive on the sea ice in a Piston Bully, but if we're lucky we might see some penguins.

My roommate Ben headed off to the Dry Valley's today to help a limnologist take samples at Lake Bonney. If I'm extra lucky, I might get a chance to get back out there in the next few weeks to help build the new helipad, which is being swallowed up by the rising lake... but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high.
~G

On my last night at Taylor Dome, the Herc came in rather late in the evening and it took us until almost midnight to actually leave for Mactown after some failed cargo loading attempts.

The pictures kind of lay out the sequence of events over a 3 hour time period. To start, it was a pretty foggy and windy night, making for a nearly aborted landing, but they ended up coming down after about 5 passes. The C-130s can't stop their engines while at deep field camps as a safety precaution, so as the plane makes its taxi, it drops cargo out the back. Once it stopped, Drew proceeded to hop into the dozer-CAT and begin work on the snow ramp, which was necessary for loading the unusually large pollated sleds. There were about 15 of us all out there shoveling like the dickens for a good 30 minutes while the engines covered us in diesel fumes and windburned any exposed skin.

Our fist attempt was unsuccessful as the flight techs were worried about the ramp collapsing and causing the sled to damage the aircraft since we only had a few inches to work with on each side. As shown in the fifth photo, the two CATs were trying to pull the sled over as it slid off the ramp.

After aborting that attempt, we doubled the length and width of the snow platform and tried again; however, there was trouble once more. Additionally, the pilots were running low on fuel, so when it was all said and done, they only loaded up a small pallet of ice cores and just flew Paul and I home... oops.

Apparently, they went back later that night and were able to load the pallet. I bet that was a late night for the ITASE folks.

~G

The environmental team made some cool discoveries while out at Taylor Dome. They were given a treasure map with locations of over 50 fuel drums and several other buried items. They ended up finding an old freezer cave from 1996 buried under 15 feet of snow. It was pretty neat to climb down in there and see all the huge ice crystals. Unfortunately the cheese was badly freezerburned and there was no milk for the corn flakes, the crackers were alright, though.

The next day we cut our way down with chainsaws and pulled the two Air Force pallets off of the roof to be taken back and used in Mactown. Apparently they are worth 2,000 bucks a piece and are in high demand right now.

Earlier in the week they dug down to expose about 30 feet of this 42 foot radio tower. They cut it off and left the rest due to firmly packed ice that just wasn't worth their effort.

~G