“hurry up and wait” is an expression the 2012 ANSMET team is learning the true meaning of lately.
Today we finished packing the last of our supplies; frozen food that we will consume over the next 6 weeks (picture 1). The packaged food was then marked for shipping and moved to a cargo staging area where it will remain until we deploy sometime next week. Prior to being moved to the staging area we measured both the mass and size of all of our packaged gear in order to ensure that we stay under the approved weight limit, and also to assist in proper weight distribution on the aircraft. Tomorrow we have a final meeting to discuss scientific topics, which Saturday’s blogger will discuss in more detail, but for the most part we all ready to go and now anxiously await our deployment to the field.
I think the second picture, which was taken during our shakedown a few days ago and shows a panoramic view of the McMurdo Ice Shelf with a snowy cloud-drapped Mount Erebus at back-center and a dense weather system moving in at right, personifies the mood of the team at this point. We are anxious to get to the field locations we have “seen in the distance” and are patiently waiting to see if weather will alter our deployment plans. As Marianne and Tom mentioned in previous blogs, weather did foil our plans on the day this picture was taken, but we are hoping our deployment is not disrupted by a similar system. The panoramic picture also shows New Zealand’s Antarctic Scott Base, a small group of green huts along the shore in the foreground below the left flank of Erebus and seen in one of Tom’s pictures from earlier this week. The ANSMET team visited Scott Base last night for American Night and got to learn a little bit about the history of the base, which was built in 1956.
We are scheduled to “put in” to the field almost all of next week, with flights scheduled Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Given the amount of gear we need this season (~12 tons), both the systematic and reconnaissance teams will need two flights to fully deploy to the field, hence the four days of scheduled flights. We will be using four US Air Force C130s to deploy to the field, two examples of which are shown in the third picture (cargo van included for scale). As mentioned previously, weather is the dictating factor from here on out, so we wait patiently and hope that in seven days from now the 2012 ANSMET team will be in the field collecting meteorites!
-Andrew Beck, 7 Dec 2012, in McMurdo
