College of Arts and Sciences

Sometimes a place is unique because of where it is and what it contains, like the vast continent of Antarctica and our little, lone field site. Other times a place is made special because of who is there and the time you spend. We feel fortunate to share Christmas...

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Today was exciting day for me.  I worked hard all day preparing for christmas eve (Dec. 23) service at "Chapel of the Snows".  Since we are not able to fly out to our field,  I decided spending my free time playing piano. When I was playing piano at chapel...

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We continue to wait for the weather to break over the Royal Society Range, which is between us and Elephant Moraine, so that we can get into the field. As you can see, the place is still pretty socked in, and the low pressure continues to linger. I imagine...

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It is likely we stay here for Christmas. Jani, Minako, Jim and I went for a walk today. It was very warm, not windy, high clouds, visibility at least 40 miles.  – Alex Meshik from McMurdo.

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I'll bet ours is not the first ANSMET blog entry with this title... When you're in Antarctica, you can expect to get all gussied up and ready to fly, and then be left at the doorstop, day after day. This was the first day we were all really expecting...

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Hi everyone. It's Minako. Today was exciting Sunday here. We had a special tour of Discovery Hut, built during the Discovery Expedition of 1901-1904.  Now The hut has been designated a Historic Site or Monument.Once you enter the hut, your nose get stung from strong animal smell. There is...

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The alternate title for this blog entry is "The Waiting Game". We are in that state where we get together for an early breakfast, hopefully checking the flight manifest screens and typically seeing our flights up there (yeay!), but then peering around the wall at the outside weather and...

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Our cargo is now reconfigured for one 6-person team and we are ready to go to the EET camp. We need seven Twin Otter flights to transfer our team, all our gears and supplies, a small fraction of which is shown in the picture. – Alex from McMurdo.  

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Now that we're pretty officially headed for Elephant Moraine, which is accessible from McMurdo by Twin Otter, we got to see all our gear again, get it out of the big triwalls, weigh it, measure it, and put it back into the cargo stream. It was satisfying to get...

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