First Update From the Field

17 Jan 2014

We have been having email problems, but hopefully they have been resolved so I will be able to keep you updated more regularly during the last half of our field season.

We arrived 10 days ago and had an interesting time setting up camp – digging out the depot from last year took hours of shoveling! Getting the tents set up, dinner cooked, and beds ready took the rest of the evening and it was almost 2am when we finally got to sleep. Luckily, the sun is up all day so we never have to worry about running out of daylight!

The science has been going well so far, but not every day has been beautiful weather. On our bad weather days, we have been spending our time catching up on sleep in our individual tents, taking care of any maintenance that needs to be done, organizing our research notes, and eating very well. It may be a bad day for field work, but all the fresh snow was perfect for making ice cream! Our field assistants are quite talented chefs, taking the regular dehydrated food provided in the man-food box (one point to the first person to explain why it’s called man-food) and turning it into something reasonably good! With only a few extra ingredients, the typical meals can turn into gourmet-feeling dishes (well, in comparison anyway). It’s amazing how good a homemade cheese sauce on pasta with a bit of spam can taste after eating only dehydrated food for a while.

On our good weather days, we all meet in the tent for the sched (scheduled check-in with base) at 10:15am.  Then we have another cup of tea (it is a UK field party, after all!), pack our bags, and get ready to go. We pack up the skidoos and the sledges (which haven’t changed much since the original sledges used in the early field expeditions!) and head out to the appropriate mountain range for the day. The work varies depending on the weather and the day. We have a list of our priorities and we’re working our way through. 

We’ve been in the field for at least part of 7 days, had three bad weather days, and used one day to initially get camp set up. It’s been productive so far, but we need another 4-5 good weather days to finish all that we had hoped to do. The chances are good that we will get most of that done, but we could be looking at leaving the field as early as Jan 25, so potentially only another week here - we will just have to make every day count! Of course, given weather and plane availability, it’s also possible we could be here for another 3 weeks, so we will just have to see how it goes…

From the Australian Museum Victoria, one of the original sledges used by
Ernest Shackleton while exploring Antarctica in 1907

I had planned to incorporate more science into this post, but I want to be able to send this off without slowing down the system too much, so more on the science and other details in future posts. Thanks for all the support while we’re down here!