This part of the Antarctic plateau is famous for crazy weather. While the typical katabatic (cold, dense) winds from the south blow here frequently, there are also many warm, calm days as well as clouds and sometimes snow. Any Miller Range veteran can tell you about a snowy day,...
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A big hello from 83 deg S 157 deg E a.k.a our beloved Miller Range Camp!
Remember the Crosby, Stills and Nash song... "We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year carbon...."? I find myself humming it a lot when I'm working late in the lab and I...
Greetings All,
We celebrated New Years (not that we saw midnight) last evening with a pizza party! Yes, the talented few of us (not me) created some fabulous pizzas last evening, and even managed a dessert pizza. We played a the game "Pass the Pigs" (formerly known as Pig Out)...
A few posts ago I updated you on end of season plans. I had the opportunity to talk to both Jim and John extensively last night, and while the conversation was wide-ranging (everything from who's going to win the football games tonight to where we're staying at March's...
Winds were perfect yesterday for getting a kite cam up in the air. You can see our four main tents, the poo and science tents, our skidoos, a red sled, some fuel and cargo depots. The distant horizon at the top continues much like this for 350 miles to...
Today we woke to 35 knot winds, with snow blowing everywhere, covering boxes, and bags and drifting in our tent doors. After the initial scramble to cover the skidoos, there was nothing left possible to do outside, so we crawled back in our warm bags. When the winds are...
Hi all, Ralph here. In addition to the post "ANSMET by the numbers" I got some details on the pull-out of the team, which effectively has begun. In the simplest terms it's a reverse of the put-in, with the team shuttling in smaller planes (Twin Otter) back...
2 Days left in the season and this my first and last blog so I thought I would give you ANSMET by the numbers, a kind of primer on the program and generally fun factoids concerning our mission!
1912 Year that the first meteorite was found in Antarctica, by Mawson's...
Today was a highly productive day of meteorite hunting, and we've now found over 300 specimens! We collected several beautiful achondrites, one of which is particularly intriguing and has gotten all of the ANSMET team especially excited. We woke up this morning to 15-20mph wind blowing so much snow...
Every night, Johnny reads to us from the journals of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, mainly from a book "Race for the South Pole" by Roland Huntford. We hear what each of these parties did on the same calendar date we are in. I've heard everyone remark at some point...