Return from WAIS, But Not Wasted

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Glad you stopped by the blog.

The big bird came and plucked us back to McMurdo. The great white of WAIS camp was starting to feel like my new temporary home--strange. The camp staff there was swell and the smaller community was nice. But it was also nice to come home to Gretchen and hot showers and mountains and warmer air that now faintly smells of the sea. I was out there for 16 days.





The first 10 days of our stay there was mildly to moderately stormy which meant wind from 10 to 35 knots. The up side of that is that the temperatures were up to about -10 f to 0 f instead of the expected -25 f.


We put up RAC tents, Jamesways, and Polar Havens--all variations of quansit huts. We made bed frames and shelves galore. And at the end we has a small town. Here is the video from the same spot. I started from a different angle but the blue arctic chief is the common reference point. It is amazing how fast the set up can be considering we end up with a 16 by 70 ft galley, a rec room and wash room area, a science office, a communications office hut, and medical tent, 4 modular buildings on skis, and 5 more tents for sleeping and resting.

The deal is that if you leave buildings in a permanent location then they get buried by snow drifts in this high deposition location. The arch (where the snow core drilling takes place) is a testament to this.




It started at 30 feet above the snow and the top of the drifts it is creating are almost reaching the top of it. It was built there 2 years ago. The group is importing a D4 caterpillar (by cargo plane) to push snow away from the arch. They will use it for 2-3 months this year just for this purpose. In the end the process is futile because the basin created around the arch will fill in with more drifts, but the project hopefully will be done by then.

Enjoy for now, more later.

Ben and Gretchen

PS. So, for you close observers, I took the before video off the blog after I couldn't upload the after video. Apparently, there is not enough bandwidth here in McMurdo to upload without errors. Back to still pictures.