Update from McMurdo and Blog Entry for December 20th!

Hello again friends,

First, an update from McMurdo. After arriving here late Monday night, our primary goals (after showering and laundry, of course) have been to sort through all of our cargo and (a) prepare all rock samples and scientific gear for shipment back to the States, and (b) return all of our gear to the appropriate offices on station. I'm proud to report that we are DONE with those two tasks! Our rocks will travel by boat to Port Hueneme, California. We'll get a telephone call when they arrive (around April!), and we will arrange for ground transport to Greg's sample processing lab.

This morning we had our final outbrief with the science support staff on station, and I just submitted a detailed "Environmental Disturbance Report" which provides GPS points to the Environmental Staff here for every location that we disturbed while in the field. Phew! We're now officially cleared to return to Christchurch on an early Saturday morning flight. We are really looking forward to sun sets, seeing and smelling plants, wearing flip flops and eating fresh fruits and vegetables.


Let's continue with our expedition in the Schmidt Hills! After our reconnaissance hike in the Schmidt Hills on the 19th (see previous post), we then began to flag safe snowmobile travel routes from our camp. These flagged routes enable us to continue to work even when weather conditions deteriorated (pictures of that later!). Here's how to flag a route for scientific work in Antarctica!

Chris leads the way, checking the terrain for crevasses.


Once he determines a route is safe, he drops flags every half of a kilometer.

Snowmobile passengers following Chris then place the flags where he dropped them.

We also record these locations using handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) units, as Greg is doing in this picture.

Safety first! Here Greg and Kat are illustrating the difference between a XXXL helmet, and a L helmet. Greg continues to track our route on his handheld GPS.

Lunch! What's on the menu? Looks like GORP and crackers in this photo. Much more on our food in a subsequent post! 

Heading back to the snowmobiles after lunch. The dark areas you see in the ice are meltwater features! The surface of the ice is frozen, but meltwater flows just beneath it. In some areas, we could hear the sounds of a babbling brook!

Camp in view! Always a wonderful sight after a day of work. 

At the end of each day, we would top off the snowmobile fuel tanks!


We consumed 385 gallons of snowmobile fuel (called premix because it contains a mixture of gasoline and oil) during our trip. The pump in the top of the drum is called a "hurdy gurdy," and you operate it by simply turning a crank not visible in this photograph. More pictures of this in later posts!

That's all for now! My next entry will cover the scientific work we did in the Schmidt Hills, and in future posts I'll show you our Christmas celebration, our only bad weather event, and the day we all became snowmobile mechanics (under Greg's leadership!)!

Hope all is well with everyone,

Claire