(The events described in this blog occurred between 28 Nov. and 5 Dec. This will be a long post. Due to technological issues – or operator error, I am not going to specify which – I was unable to post from the field. That is all I am going to say on that issue.)
McMurdo had good weather on Monday, 28 Nov., as did our planned field site in Victoria Land. After four days of delay, John and I got off on our reconnaissance visit to the Elephant Moraine icefields. The objects of the recon were to sweep through some areas where ANSMET had not finished searching to see how productive they might be, and to check out some areas visited by ANSMET 20 or more years ago to determine whether there has been substantial recharge of meteorites via ablation removal of ice. This was my first trip north of McMurdo, and my first look at the edge of the continent in that region. The mountains, glaciers and dry valleys are absolutely spectacular! My eyes were glued to the window of the Twin Otter the whole trip. (Unfortunately, photographing through an airplane window never gives the clearest of views and the older the window, the worse the image. I did what I could for our faithful readers.)
When we “put in” at about 10:30, the air was cold and the winds were moderately strong, but nothing to daunt two grizzled veterans of life on the Polar Plateau when tasked with setting up camp! John and I had the tent up, the stove lit, and a check-in the McMurdo Operations done in no time. Seeing that we just might survive, the Twin Otter took off for McMurdo to bring our second, and last, load of gear. They returned around 14:30, dropped off the rest of the gear, took our names for proper notification of next of kin, and headed back to McMurdo. (Just kidding about the next of kin thing.) It did not take John and me long to finish setting up camp, so by late afternoon, we set out on a short exploratory skidoo sweep of the blue ice to the north of camp. Within a very short time, we scored our first meteorite! That was enough fun for the day; we returned to camp, thawed and cook supper, made hot chocolate, unrolled sleeping bags, and lapsed into comas only ANSMET veterans (especially older ones) will appreciate.
Tuesday (here I might normally write “dawned”, but that would be totally absurd in this situation) arrived when I opened my eyes. I could hear the wind on the tent – it seemed to be a bit less than the day before, but the air was cold. Nevertheless, this was working weather. We went out for a few hours sweeping through the icefield to the north of camp, and located on the order of a dozen meteorites. We did not collect them at that time; we just flagged their locations for future harvesting. After a hot lunch in camp, we set out again in the afternoon. This time we swept through the icefield west of camp and located just over a dozen more meteorites. We returned to camp feeling proud and pretty darn cocky for two old men.
During the night, when I periodically awakened, I noticed the tent-flapping sound was louder and quicker. By morning, there was one thing I knew for sure: I was not going outside!
About the weather: The air was rather frosty in the mornings. Typical temperatures when we woke up were around -24 C (-12 F). But of course, that is the air temperature. When you factor in the estimated wind velocity, the wind chill temperatures on the windiest days were in the neighborhood of -40 C (also by coincidence, -40 F). (Little known fact: John can accurately tell wind speed to within 3% uncertainty just by listening to the pitch of the hum coming from Scott tent guywires.) Considering our work of collecting meteorites requires several minutes for each meteorite of kneeling on the ice with bare hands exposed to the climate, perhaps you will forgive us for deciding to spend such days in the tent. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were “tent days” for us, where we lay in our tents wondering why we were so stupid to come down here for this.
This was bad. We had been in the field for five days and while we had located over two dozen meteorites, we had not yet collected a single one! We were scheduled for pull out in just three days! We then caught a big break. Early Friday afternoon the winds seemed to be diminishing, and by late afternoon they were low enough that we decided to go out and harvest rocks. About 17:00 we set out and spent the better part of three hours collecting meteorites. We came back to camp around 20:00, had supper and warmed up a bit, then went out again close to 22:00. We harvested meteorites like madmen until about 01:30 Saturday morning, but we had picked up the rocks we had found on Monday and Tuesday, and found a few more to boot.
Needless to say, we did not get up very early on Saturday. Saturday arrived with very calm air, almost a novelty in Antarctica. Once we were back among the living, we geared-up and went out hunting space debris again. We search a couple of areas east of camp that ANSMET had harvested back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, some areas they had not systematically searched before. All told on Saturday, we collected around another dozen meteorites.
On Sunday, the winds retuned but they were not too bad; we sortied out. We planned a short outing to sweep ice to the south of camp, and end by collecting a meteorite that we had come across in the wee hours of Saturday morning when were too exhausted to collect another single rock! Once that was accomplished, we returned to camp; work done. We felt both satisfied with the trip – for the 46 meteorites collected and large area of ice examined – and disappointed for the four days we lost at the front end of the trip due to bad weather in McMurdo.
On Monday, 5 Dec. we were scheduled deep down the backup lists for two Twin Otter crews. This time, the Antarctic weather gods must have been pleased with us and angry with all the other teams vying for air ops, because we were the first on one of the lists with good weather! We landed in McMurdo around 18:30 or so, and by 19:15 I was opening the door to my dorm room. And what if we had not been the team with the clement weather on Monday? Well, today it has been snowing all day long in McMurdo. John and I would be sitting in a tent on the Polar Plateau, wondering when we might get pulled out. And eyeing our diminishing food supply.
LYAN
Posted by duck (a.k.a. Dave Mittlefehldt)
Image 1: Looking west into the interior of Victoria Land from roughly above the coast of the Ross Sea.
Image 2: Elephant Moraine (middle ground), the namesake of the icefields we explored.
Image 3: Our lonely tent on the Polar Plateau, home, sweet home for four great days and three crappy ones.
Image 4: Selfie taken on the Twin Otter flight out to Victoria Land, 28 Nov.
