Please hold...

Another day without arriving in Antarctica. The RNZAF B-757 was fixed on Tuesday and had a successful test flight yesterday (Wednesday). So we were all set to try again today (Thursday). Once again, we all got up early, completed our RATs before 0500, and got out the door at 0615. We arrived at the Antarctic Passenger Terminal (APT) and checked in. All was looking good for an imminent departure.

Then the call was made that the flight was cancelled - bad weather at McMurdo has closed Phoenix airfield. Both our B-757 flight and the Italian Herc flight were simultaneously cancelled. In a sense, this is good news: The B-757 has the most conservative weather conditions requirements for landing of all the Antarctic aircraft. So, iffy for the Herc, certainly means no-go for the 757. We didn't even board the plane, and certainly weren't subjected to the hours-long boomerang flight of Monday.

Of course, we are all super keen to get to Antarctica. But the time spent here all together has also been very valuable. We're a fairly large, interdisciplinary team who haven't worked together before, and actually haven't even all met each other in person before. So the house has been full of interesting scientific back-and-forth, resulting in the emergence of a pretty detailed plan for sampling.

In a 'normal' year, we'd have had this pinned down long before now. But there have been various factors preventing this from happening this year:
- McMurdo Sound has had an extremely unusual year in terms of sea ice growth, so it was only about six weeks ago that there was finally confidence that we could go and do some science (on the tiny 'crescent' of ice available to us);
- An assurance that we can actually camp at our main sampling site (on sea ice) rather than on the nearby ice shelf (requiring up to 2 hours commute time each day) has only come through this week;
- It was not known whether the site at which we deployed a seafloor mounted oceanographic mooring last season would be accessible for recovery this season, until Brett, Neill, and our support person (the fantastic) Blake McDavitt were able to head out for some reconnaissance work on Monday this week.

So many unknowns so far into the season! But now we're ready to hit the ground running when we eventually do arrive. In the meantime, we're all doing what we can to keep busy - we'd all settled into the accommodation and got to work within minutes of returning to our accommodation.





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