Antarctica 2022

I'm writing this at 1 am. I've had three hours sleep after crashing into bed at 10 pm. But yesterday was such a big day that I've woken up in the middle of the night excited to write about it… The day prior had been useful but ultimately unsuccessful. While Jacqui and Svenja remained at camp to process the samples from Wednesday; and Craig, Ollie, and Greg headed west to redeploy our seafloor-mounted mooring; Ken, Neill, Nina, and I ventured onto the new ice to attempt our high-resolution platelet cores, all under the watchful eyes and ears of Vanessa and Adam's cameras and microphones. This meant using the platelet coring system to collect our samples in 25 cm segments, giving us a sense of what we're missing when we later reduce down to only three samples per core. Everything had been going surprisingly smoothly, right up to the point where it came time to siphon off the first of the sub-samples. Things had been going so well, and the weather so amenable, th

Wind chill is a major hazard in Antarctica – even a relatively mild -10 degrees can become dangerous when the wind gets up. The wind can also get the snow skating across the surface of the ice – the faster the wind, the more snow it is capable of moving. When the entire plane of ice, as far as one can see, is subjected to this type of wind, it can be quite a beautiful sight. And all the more so when it is lit by late and low evening light: the surface becomes a sparkling and moving luminous hazy carpet. We've just had ~48 hours of continuous wind like this, with the snow skating across the surface for the better part of Friday night through Sunday afternoon. A few steps away from the camp brings a fairly unique perspective – standing amid a wide, shallow river of snow, and the only part not in constant movement as far as the eye can see is within the wind shadow of the camp itself. The wind shadow stretches for several kilometres, leaving a narrow wedge of undisturbed surface.