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| An ice Rorshach test. What do you see? |
During the course of the blizzard, more and more of the sea ice was broken up and sailed north. McMurdo Sound is more open now than old timers have seen in 20 years. Look at the photo below and concentrate on the floating ice. You should be able to see that some of the ice is sea ice, shown by its uniform thickness. A few of the other floes are considerably thicker. These have broken off from the Ross Ice Shelf.
During the storm the sea ice was nibbled back to the edge of the Ross Ice shelf and a little beyond. The open water is within 300 yards of the Half Way House. Part of the fuel line from near Scott Base out to Pegasus Field was thrown into the open water and an emergency recovery operation is underway.
This is a view north towards Cape Evans, site of Scott's second hut. At the beginning of the season we were able to drive Deltas north to visit it. The white sheet is the Erebus glacier tongue.
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| I'm not sure whether these Adelies dug out these slight shelters in the slope of snow or whether they allowed the blizzard to cover and insulate them. Poo like creamed spinach. |
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Open water all the way across McMurdo Sound. 
There were two All-Hands meetings yesterday to go over what is happening. Because of the emergency in Christchurch, we will be flown out on a USAF C-17 Sunday to Christchurch for a few hours to turn in our ECW gear and then will be flown on via a RNZAF Boeing 757 to Auckland. A second flight will do the same on Monday. There is an option to stay on in Christchurch, but they strongly dissuaded us from doing so. Water, power, food, sewage, housing, and medical care are all strained to the breaking point and our presence would only complicate things there. Kathi and I will be making plans to travel around the North Island instead
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