I was supposed to be back in McMurdo by now, but due to weather (both here at camp and at McMurdo), we haven’t been able to get out of the Allan Hills yet. Every day since Friday we’ve been scheduled to fly out; every morning we wake up expectant and then get the cancelation news. Our work is done, our bags are packed, the food is running low (don’t worry, we won’t starve), and we all really, really, want to take a shower.
But let’s focus on the positive for now. Since we hit bedrock with our shallow wet drill right before Christmas, we have gotten a lot of other science done.
We drilled a second Blue Ice Drill borehole, just down to 25 meters, to get more samples of a particular layer of ancient ice that we are interested in. We were drilling a shorter core that only took a few days, so we did this work without the drill tent, out in the open!
Setting up the Blue Ice Drill for our second borehole, no drill tent required
We drilled four hand auger cores each down to 20 meters, using a hand drill and a small three-inch diameter core barrel and a series of 2-meter poles.
I don’t know why this is my only picture of the hand auger set-up. It was a snowy day and you can barely see the mountains in the background
We did several line transects of surface samples for water isotope analysis (check out the COLDEX Instagram post about this process, featuring me!).
And we completed several kinds of geophysics measurements of the ice sheet. High precision GPS measurements taken each year allow us to measure the ice flow (turns out it’s about 50 cm per year!), while the ApRES (Autonomous phase-sensitive Radio Echo Sounder) allows us to measure the vertical movement of the ice sheet. And GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) is used to image the structure of the ice.
Setting up the ApRES instrument
We’ve also had a lot of fun, including:
a lovely Christmas celebration, with lots of decorations, good food, and fun
Our LEGO Christmas tree!
a New Year’s Eve party in an igloo built by one of our ice core drillers in his spare time
The entrance to the “Blue Gloo”
the inside of the igloo
and assorted nonsense that starts to seem normal after you’ve been living in a remote Antarctic field camp for a couple of months, including yelling, clapping, and snapping our fingers down the boreholes as well as making adorable voodoo dolls with our own hair.
Meet Allice and Allan
On Thursday, camp take-out began, with four flights taking lots of cargo and our four ice core drillers. It was a chaotic and exciting day, and we were looking forward to heading to McMurdo ourselves the next day. We spent the evening finishing up our packing and cleaning out our tents.
Loading up two planes (Twin Otter on the left, Basler on the right) with cargo before saying goodbye to our four ice core drillers
That was four days ago. We are still waiting to leave, and the weather forecast for the next couple of days doesn’t look very good for flying either. Since then I have read two books, cleaned up my email inbox, sent my husband endless lists of things I want to eat when I get home, and gone on a nice hike to look at cool rocks on a nearby moraine.
A moraine is a mass of rocks and sediment carried and deposited by a glacier.
These kinds of delays are expected in Antarctica, and I knew it was extremely likely. Still, it is disappointing and difficult to wake up every day and find yourself still in the same situation as the day before. I wonder what lesson we need to learn before we can leave!