A few videos

Now that we're back in Santa Barbara and slowly re-acclimatizing to (palm) trees, darkness and warm weather, we've had a chance to sort through all our photos and video. Here are a few movies to remind everyone of our adventures this summer. Well post a selection of photos soon!

Sad day for Antarcticans

We are saddened to learn of the discovery of the wreckage of a Twin Otter that crashed en-route from the South Pole to Terra Nova station. It appears none of the crew survived the impact. When we first learned of the missing plane we hoped and prayed that all would end well, unfortunately it was not to be.

We send our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the crew, and all those involved in the rescue attempt. We are especially thinking of all our friends at McMurdo, on the Joint American and  New Zealand Search and Rescue (SAR) team and the pilots and crew of 'our' Twin Otter who all played a key role in the search. We can only imagine how tough this is.

We've spent many hours flying with the incredibly skilled and dedicated pilots and crew from Kenn Borek, and it's easy to forget that they operate in the most extreme and unforgiving conditions on earth. These guys and girls are just some of the many, many people who work 'behind-the-scenes' and endure all manner of discomfort to make science happen in Antarctica. These people aren't in it for fame and fortune, they are genuinely dedicated to making a difference. Without these dedicated individuals, what we do would simply not be possible. For their efforts, and this case their ultimate sacrifice, we as Antarctic scientists, are truly grateful.

 John and the G-064 team 

Rainy Westland...

Sophie and I arrived in Westland a few days ago, but steady rains and low clouds have prohibited our access to the range that we are hoping to work on. Who would have thought that the weather would have been more cooperative in Antarctica than in New Zealand? Those who are from the notoriously wet coast are probably not surprised. Anyway, it is nice to be hanging out in a warm rainforest after spending so much time in a polar desert.

We had a slight break in weather yesterday and were able to find some outcrops up some small creeks that drain from the Southern Alps. We have beautiful weather this morning, so we are going to jump on a helicopter and get dropped off on the top of one of the nearby ranges. We will spend four or five days working the range top. Hopefully we won’t get too wet!

 

Sophie and her dad contemplate the geologic uses of a "grubber".

 

  

Tea in the field! I could get used to working in commonwealth countries.

Back in Christchurch!

Hello all,
We have arrived back in Christchurch! The last few days were a flurry of activity. We were stuck in the field for an extra couple of days due to weather. We were extremely busy in McMurdo hoping to leave the continent ASAP. We pulled it off! Yesterday morning we hopped on an LC-130 airplane at the "Pegasus" ice shelf runway. Eight hours later we arrived in NZ! The sensations of feeling humidity, hearing birds (other than penguins), and smelling vegetation for the first time in 9 weeks are indescribably amazing!

Forrest hopped on a flight early this morning to head home; Sophie and I are about to embark on another field adventure! We will be doing some work in Westland for about a week. We can't wait to leave the beds and pillows behind and get back to our sleeping bags!

Please stay tuned to the blog to read about our NZ adventures and our progress in the lab! We thank you for joining us this season!

Farewell to the field…

 Tonight is a special night– our last in the field. We are to return to McMurdo tomorrow via Twin Otter. The occasion is joyous, but the mood is sombre– not out of sadness, but with deep reflection of last seven weeks. It is easy to overlook the specialness of an experience when you are living it, and the realization of the wonder often lags. We now look back at all of the wonderful events of the last seven weeks– the majesty of the landscape, the extreme weather, the physical challenges, and the serenity of a small camp in Antarctica, hundreds of miles from another human. We flew over the TransAntarctics in small aircraft, climbed mountains, ran on glaciers, and came back to our cosy camp to have meals of salmon alfredo, Thai curry, and roast cornish hens. We have seen and done amazing things during this field season, and we have much to be thankful for and much to rejoice. We all feel a sense of success, and we owe much appreciation to all of the support from the contractors in McMurdo, the National Science Foundations for funding, and of course, to John, who made all of this possible. We hope that this will not be our last trip to this beautiful continent.

I know that all sounds very sentimental, but I assure you, we are all anxiously anticipating our extraction! Perhaps I should save the sappy blog updates until we have actually departed. The weather is unpredictable, and we may be spending the weekend in our tents eating the dehydrated meals that are left over. By the time you read this we will hopefully be in MacTown, groomed and warm. Wish us luck!

-Sophie, Forrest, Graham

G-064

Graham’s Snowy Day in Antarctica Cinnamon Rolls

Hello all! Snowy, windy weather has us stuck in the tent on one our last few days in the field… Time to bake! We made some delightful cinnamon rolls and would like to share the recipe with you!

Graham’s Snowy Day in Antarctica Cinnamon Rolls

Dough Ingredients:                                               

2  1/4 cups white flour

3/4 tsp salt           

4 tsp sugar

4 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup butter (softened)

1 cup powdered milk (or normal milk)           

Filling Ingredients:

1/2 stick butter (melted)

a bunch of brown sugar           

a bunch of granulated sugar

a bunch of cinnamon

bunch of chopped dates, golden raisins, almonds

Directions: 

Mix the dough ingredients in a dirty plastic bowl that hasn’t been washed in nearly two months. Soften butter on camp stove (or by any means) and cut into dry ingredients; when frustrated, mash the refrozen butter with your fork. Add enough cold water so that dough is slightly sticky (note: adding hot water from your “billy” will prematurely activate baking powder).

Preheat dutch oven (or any oven) to an unknown temperature. Clean off half of dirty, cold metal table with baby wipes and then wet paper towels. Sprinkle ample flower on the table. Roll out dough ball with purple Nalgene® bottle into a rectangle with a 2:1 x/z ratio that is ~3 mm (3x10⁷ Å) thick. Pour melted butter over dough and slather with filling ingredients.  Roll up the fillings into the dough and cut into 3 cm tall pieces.

Use Crisco®, vegetable oil, or butter to grease pan. Place rolls in pan, adequately spaced to accommodate a bit of rising. Prior to “burny” smell, flip rolls to other side (note: this step is probably unnecessary in a normal oven). Remove once rolls are the color of titanite (or slightly darker than staurolite in plane-polarized light) on each side and enjoy while warm with lots of tea!

Note: the cinnamon rolls should be vegetarian if not cooked in an unwashed dutch oven with 8 weeks worth of meat residue. Note: Sorry if I ruined anyone’s appetite by mentioning “meat residue” in a cinnamon roll recipe.

Enjoy!

By the way, I included a graph to help people visualize the stinky-sock lemma that Forrest introduced in the previous blog post.

A day in the field

So, what have we actually been doing in the field for the last 2 months? Each workday begins by starting up a snowmobile with a broken choke switch, which requires two pairs of hands, a set of pliers, and some love (i.e. Graham hauling violently on manual-ignition chord). Once parked near our destination ridge or cliffs, we dismount and set out for our farthest destination on foot and work back to the machines. “Empty” backpacks (i.e. without samples, but laden with sledge hammers, chisels, first aid kit, water, spare cloths, crampons, ice axe, etc.) are never lightweight, but the crampons are invariably necessary to climb off the glacier or up a hardened snow slope. 

When it comes to approaching fresh outcrops of rock, each geologist has there own style; Sophie, for example, crouches to look for minerals in her magnifying hand lens, whereas Graham takes measurements with his Brunton compass. I generally prefer the more direct approach of obliterating the nearest piece of rock with a six-pound sledgehammer. After heated debate of the geologic characteristics of the rocks---orthognessic? poikioblastic? porphyroblastic? pseudomorphic?---we scribble in yellow notebooks. The detail and thoroughness (and accuracy?) of my notes scale with temperature (1+ page at 25 F, 3+ lines at 5 F, and 1 line at -10 F), but I reason that writing with frozen fingers will yield illegible results anyway… Before stumbling to the next cliff, we chisel away and pack grapefruit-sized samples for extracting zircon, monazite, titanite, or garnet. Each of these lucky samples will have a scenic journey to sunny California onboard a freighter before being bombarded with electron beams and blasted with lasers.