Hi Friends!
I hope your week is going well! It's Friday evening here in McMurdo. We're almost completely finished with our cargo preparations! We have a few items to pack up tomorrow morning, and then we will be done!
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| Today we entered all of our GPS, or Global Positioning System, equipment into the cargo system. The Global Positioning System relies on satellites to determine locations on the surface of the earth. When in use, units like the one above transmit information to these satellites to determine the location of the unit at the time of operation. We will use these GPS units to measure precise latitude and longitude locations of stakes we left in the ice last year. When we compare the locations of the stakes this year to the locations of the same stakes when installed last year, we can calculate how far the ice flowed since last season. |
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| These cases contain all of our required GPS equipment! |
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| We will use this hammer drill to install one GPS "base station" in a bedrock outcrop in the mountains we are studying. This base station will be powered by a solar panel and will communicate with satellites for the duration of our season to generate extremely precise location information against which we can compare all of our other GPS data. |
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| Once again, we packed gear into large, three-layer cardboard boxes called triwalls. |
In between packing cargo, we also completed our frozen food pull so it too could be entered into the cargo system. To do this we visited the large freezer shown below:
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| It was a chilly, snowy day today in McMurdo! |
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| Frozen vegetables? 35 nights worth, please! We pulled frozen potatoes, carrots, asparagus, broccoli, spinach, green beans, cauliflower, and corn. |
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| One of our favorite lunch time and snack time treats is Tasty Cheddar, a New Zealand specialty. We ordered 20 blocks of this Tasty Cheddar, and 12 pounds of butter. |
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| Shredded cheese is good for tortilla-based meals, and for our favorite breakfast: cheesy bagels! I'll show pictures of Cheesy Bagel production in a later post. It's a field camp delight! |
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| 120 tortillas! |
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| 36 salmon steaks! |
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| We will also eat beef, but not very many nights because not everyone in our group enjoys it! The Cornish game hens in this picture are for Christmas dinner! |
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| An extra special treat in camp is frozen berries. We save these for special desserts such as pudding or Kat's baked goods. |
When we arrive at a field site, we will dig a ~3-feet-deep pit in the snow and store all of our frozen food in there. We will use a sled or a pallet to cover the freezer to prevent sunlight from melting our food.
We also pulled bagels, tofu, tempeh, bacon, and beaten eggs. Tomorrow, we should receive a final report of all of the food that we pulled. I'll share the final values when I know them!
Have a great Friday!
Claire
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