15 October--Continued Clear Weather

The good news is that the weather has continued clear and generally warm since yesterday.  It was predicted to get up to +17 today, though it later turned a bit windier.  The views of Mt. Erebus got even more stunning, if that is possible.  The vapor hanging around the summit stood out particularly stunningly.  The views across the sound to the Royal Society Range were similarly killer.

The most exciting thing was that at one point this evening while walking past one particular outside wall of the dorm, I heard a few drips of melting water quietly hitting the snow below.  Hallucination?  Harbinger of an actual Spring? 

The open water is around 10 miles out past two islands that are within sight on clear days.  That is 6 or 7 miles closer to McMurdo than normal.  Further evidence of global weirding?  The impact here is that as the annual Spring/Summer melting occurs, it will render the Ice Runway unuseable earlier.  That's a shame since the sea ice is smooth as the proverbial baby's butt, a dream to land on, and much simpler to maintain.  Simply blast away and groom the drifting snow and expose the ice.  The fallback position is to use Pegasus Runway, which is out on the Ross Ice Shelf, basically a floating tongue of glacier that's a bit deeper into the McMurdo Sound, closer to the Kiwi's Scott Base.  It's thick and very strong, but it requires a 14 to 16 mile trip to get out there.

On the other hand, the bad news is that the weather has continued clear and generally warm since yesterday.  Some of the ladies were sitting out on the deck outside the library at the end of lunch, sunning themselves, this under the Antarctic Ozone Hole.  Skin cancer and cataracts could be the long-term implications of those minutes on the sunny +17 degree deck.  The Ozone Hole is said to be self-repairing since the outlawing of the chlorofluorocarbons some time ago.  [Incidentally, the discoverer of the cause of that thinning, a now elderly British physicist, James Lovelock, is another of those issuing dire warnings on global climate change.  We've been warned--by someone with a pretty good track record.]

The last sunset of the season is coming this next week on 21 October and the phenomenon is not predicted to occur again at this latitude until around the same date in February.  Sooo....pass that sunscreen, which we just happen to have in a gallon sized pump bottle in the Shuttles Office.




The Golfball contains antennas that pick up data downloaded from polar orbiting satellites.  When they pass over, they have only 15 minutes of open time to fully download that orbits data.

 


I suspect that this is the second-most remote official US Post Office (after the South Pole)

 



Mount Erebus