On our way home, we flew up the ice breaker channel, which is now all the way in to where the ice runway used to be, and caught a nice view of the two boats. The channel is wider than usual (about 500 feet) due to the "team work" ice breaking. The Swedish vessel Oden has a wide and heavy bow with water jets mounted on the front. It basically hoses down the ice to make it slippery as it rides up on top, then crushes it from the weight of the ship. It also has two large ballast tanks that can be manipulated if the ship becomes stuck.

The Polar Sea, which is the Coast Guard ship, was about a mile behind making wedge cuts along the side of the channel. With a stiff south wind, the ice has really been clearing out quite quickly. The Polar Sea doesn't operate like the Oden; however, it simply cuts like a knife and breaks the ice to each side.

Flying overhead gave us a pretty neat view and the "penguin bowling" was pretty entertaining as well. (Don't worry, we didn't actually hit the little guys, they just like to scuttle off towards the water when they hear the helicopter coming.)

It looks like I'm scheduled to go back out to ITASE on Thursday of next week for a few days to close up the traverse for the winter. It will be in a much different location than where they started at Taylor Dome, since they are almost half way to the South Pole. However, the traverse was stopped a bit short of the original ending point when some confused ground-penetrating-radar readings turned out to be a 90 meter deep crevasse 15 feet in front of the piston bully (remember Snuffy, the boom mounted piston bully?) It will be kind of cool to see the crew again after helping out with their last minute preps before pulling out of Taylor Dome. Hopefully that shower continued working, otherwise, they're going to be a stinky crew.

I’m also slated to leave the ice February 9th, which is just about a month... wow, I can't believe it's that close!

~G