Happy Camping on the Ice Shelf

I am back and I survived although I am very tired. We had our Antarctic survival camp. It was a busy two days. First we learned about frostbite, hypothermia, etc. then we got trucked out to the field site and basically told to go build a camp! The camp consisted of building a snow shelter called a 'Quinsy' (I slept in one of those for the night - can you see the hole to crawl into it with steps leading up into the sleeping area), putting up some mountaineering tents, putting up what are called 'Scott' tents after the Scott in the last blog (who did not make it!), and a wind wall out of snow blocks - Phew - that was a lot of work but it was so cold (it may have made it to -50 C with the wind chill) that you did not want to stop working at all. There was no place to warm up either. Once that was done we boiled water to make hot chocolate and cider and to (yuk) try to make our dehydrated dinner palatable (I had rice and black beans but it got cold before the beans and rice were soft!) But we could eat as many cookies and chocolate bars are we wanted as your body burns a lot of energy just trying to keep warm. I think I was able to mostly keep warm during the night, the Quinsy is pretty sheltered but it was still very cold inside. It was amazing that none of us got frozen. Flat Stanley was not allowed to go as he could have blown away (plus he did not bring his ECW (extreme cold weather) gear). My heavy duty Sorels won the day - my feet did not get cold ever - the people with the bunny boots were not all so lucky.
When we got back to McMurdo we had to then learn about helicopter safety (how to use the cool helmets and how to buckle yourself in).

In my few spare minutes I made an Inuksuk (I was the only Canadian of course!). The picture on the left has a distance view of our camp. The 'pyramids' are the Scott tents, they are highly suited to the wind at the Antarctic. Grade 1's, I took two pictures of an Inuksuk (do you know what that is?) from the same spot about 10 hours apart. Why is the sun in such different places??? Can you see the smoking volcano called Erebus in the back of the sunny picture? It is a real volcano and that is actually steam coming out its top - it is quite a site! Erebus is one reason it is good to drill here - every so often it dumps some magma (ash, bombs, flows, etc) and this goes into McMurdo Sound as part of the sediments - and one can readily date these kind of rocks so they help the geologists build a model of the age of the rocks being drilled versus depth.

We get tommorrow off then back to the ice - Monday is a 10 hour outside course in sea ice safety training. I need to take this as the drill rig is on the sea ice this year.

By the way, they will be showing lots of pictures from here on NBC Today show on Monday and Tuesday as well as the Tuesday evening news on NBC. The camera crew went out out to the drill rig too so you can see a lot of the people I am working with.

Next blog after the sea ice training. I hope I get to drive a 'Pisten Bully' too - more later.