On the Way and Arrival

Time to go to the ice! I packed my bags on Monday night and went to bed early as I had to catch the shuttle at 5:30 in the morning. When we got to the airport we had to get dressed into our ECW (extreme cold weather) gear to be allowed to get on the plane! Then we could get a bit of breakfast before they herded us onto the C17 Transport. It is a huge plane that you can move
tanks with but they had it filled with seats in the front and cargo in the back. We got off in good time and we landed on an ice runway close to McMurdo after about 5 1/2 hours of flying. Notice how big the plane is - that is a large loader taking palettes out the back of it on a ramp that lowers down.







The picture is of me with my colleague Dr. Thomas Wonik - he is a scientist from Germany. We will be carrying out a lot of wellbore measurements together with two other colleagues who you will get to meet later. We will all be taking 'Happy Camper' safety school together where we have to sleep in a tent or a snow trench so there will be lots of good pictures from that in a couple of days.




Here is another picture, on the left is the labs where my office is to share with my 3 colleagues in what is called Crary Labs. Can you see the mountain - it is a long ways away and is called Mount Discovery.













Here is another picture, this is of my small 'dormitory' room that I share with Dave from Salt Lake City - he is working on the well logging too - I will tell you about that in a few days. Grade 1's - why do I need to have such a thick cover on my window??? (Hint - it is spring in the Southern Hemisphere and I am south of the 'Antarctic Circle').

Oh - that is right - Flat Stanley also shares this room but he is messy and snores. Look, he left both beds unmade!





Finally - here is some of the exciting stuff - this is a picture of rock samples that the drill rig has brought up. There are many flags to show where different scientists are making many different measurements from the rock. The reason we are drilling here is to try to find out about what the earth's climate was over the last few millions of years. The rocks can tell you if the place we are drilling was open water (and the whole earth had to be warmer than today) or whether it was ice covered like today. So, it is very important to know how old the rocks are. Some scientists try to do this by looking at the tiny tiny fossils in the microscope, other do it by looking at the tiny magnets in the rock and how they line up can tell us something about the age of the rock, and others will do fancy chemical analyzes to see how old the rock might be. We are also going to get some of these samples (are my graduate students reading this :)) after they first go to Germany. We will measure how much of the samples are just open space - that is, we will look for how much pore space is in the rock. We will also measure how fast sound waves go through the rock - this is very important to try to better understand seismic measurements that have been made here.

Do you see the big stone that is in the rock at the left side of the picture??? How do you think it got there?? Let me know what you think (this is intended for the grade 1's but anyone is free to answer)