Week 8: Sundogs in Antarctica
Jan 8: Eager to EAGER Today’s shenanigans involved starting up the EAGER radar early in the morning. Ellen and I planned to get out and complete a PulseEKKO and EAGER transect from camp to the 25 cm site. The PulseEKKO is a profiling radar which collects data of the subsurface in the direction that it’s […]
Week 6: We made it!!!!!
Dec 25: Christmas! After a lovely morning of sleeping in, the team gathered for brunch before the galley closed for the day in prep for Christmas dinner. We had signed up for a 5pm dinner timeslot so we had to survive off brunch and snacks until then. I opened some lovely letters from family and […]
Week 5: Wastemas in McMurdo
Dec 18: Stir crazy We woke to another cancelled flight message, which no one was particularly surprised about. Zoe had mentioned that the weather at Taylor Dome was not particularly great right now so we’re hoping for a Saturday departure. Our dorm room is in a state of chaos with mostly-packed bags strewn everywhere since […]
Week 4: Flights!
Dec 12: Penguins!! Today’s day started with another EAGER radar meeting with John and Knut. Ellen and I walked through the setup together with John and Knut on Zoom in the background so we could verify that we knew the procedure before starting acquisitions in the deep field. We also saw penguins for the first […]
Week 3: Cargo cargo cargo
Dec 5: Snow day!!! We woke up to a beautiful and dangerous snowstorm today! There was only about 1 inch of snow throughout town but weather was bad enough for the town to go into a special weather condition. Due to the bad weather, our meeting about food for our time in the field was […]
Week 2: McMurdo Station
Nov 28: Arrival This morning, we prepped for another flight with 6 am wake-up for a 9 am flight. Since we’d already checked our bags before our unfortunate boomerang yesterday, we could sleep in a bit. The plane was hot, stuffy, and uncomfortable again and the Italian Air Force was stricter about enforcing proper carry-on […]
Week 1: From Seattle to Antarctica?
Nov 19 – 21: Seattle to Christchurch Before leaving Seattle, I checked and double-checked to ensure that I had all of my gear. I checked in at the airport quite early since I’m carrying expensive scientific equipment and have some special paperwork to fill out with customs and border patrol. I met up with Ellen, […]
Week 0: I’m going to Antarctica!
Welcome to the start of my series of posts about my first Antarctic field season! I’ll be posting every week with some updates about what my team and I have been up to on the day-to-day. I’m a second-year PhD student at the University of Washington who uses remote sensing and machine learning to study […]