25 February--New Plans, More Time on the Ice

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.

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.



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



18 February--Last Night Kept on Giving

This Adelie seemed to put up with a lot of folks invading its space.

I went down to Hut Point again in the evening and things were even better than they had been that morning.  From the hill with the Vince Cross, people had been seeing 6 or 7 Orcas cruising around the Sound.  There were several Adelies shivering as they molted.  The near shore area was getting  coated with ice underwater, giving the area a tropical paradise azure blue hue.  Surrealy blue. There were also blocks of sea ice that had been thrown up on the shore and then coated with layers of glare ice.  The shore itself was coated with layers of the same white ice, but the layers were arranged to make it look like the layers of travertine like in Havasu Canyon of the Grand Canyon.  But the highlight was when a Weddell seal hauled up about 25 feet away from us.  It gallumphed across the "travertine" ice and the coated blocks over to its mate.  I got several great pictures of it, but they got "lost" somehow in transferring from the memory card to my laptop.  I've asked a friend of a friend to try to retrieve them, but they're not here for you to peruse.  Looks back in a few days and it might be here.  Devastating!
Note: through the generosity of Blake Holt, I have 3 photos of that seal hauling out.  They're at the very end of this post.  Thanks, Blake!

Adelies seem to have a certain similarity to moles and voles.

A Weddell seal over by the Ice Pier.

These are the images Blake let me use from that Weddell seal hauling out near us.

I went back to Hut Point last night, hoping that the seal had a schedule that it adhered to.  I was able to see several seals, but they never hauled out while I was there.

17 February--Packing in a Few More Visual Treats. Wiki-Leaks Magnitude Download

The weather has been definitely turning colder and colder.  The austral winter is nearly here.  The last 2 of the 6 LC-130s left today.  The last ship will leave tomorrow.  All the field camps are shut down and people pulled in.  The South Pole is now cut off until November.  Only 5 more flights will go north before McMurdo is cut off, too.  The water along the near shore has been freezing into odd shapes and then is blown north by the winds.  It will take several months before the sea ice will be fast to shore and relatively safe to walk on.

This ice reminds me of the giant water lily pads in the Amazon with its slight ridge along the edge.

Multi-depth lenses of ice.  The surge and current were jostling these back and forth.



The molting process isn't always pretty.



A molting Emperor penguin.  Note how thick his down coat will be.  Toasty.



The sun keeps getting lower and lower in the sky and has dipped below the Royal Society Range peaks several times now.  The official first sunset is on the 20th.

This is the most active I've seen Mt. Erebus in my 5 months here.  The trail of sulfur fumes extended miles downwind.

Skuas ground nest while here.

Winterquarters Bay of McMurdo Sound (of the Ross Sea) opened up 2 days ago in front of the station.  Most of the sea ice melting is the result of relatively "warm" currents, not from the sun hitting the surface.  So even though it has been getting much colder, the melting is still going full speed.  The blue colors against the white and grays of the ice were spectacular.  Hiking the Ob Hill Loop today I saw a Minke whale surface and heard it breathe deeply.

"What the...?"  Nature sculpts; man does his best.

Pressure ridges highlighted by the low angle sun.





3 February--Penguins Most Artful

I volunteered again this morning to run a tour out to the group of 14 molting Emperor penguins near Half Way House on the road to Pegasus.  These follow a very long 12-hour shift but it's really gratifying to see how much the people enjoy them.  Some people are desk-bound in McMurdo and seldom get out, leading to the question: why bother coming down here?  Economic necessity?  Wanted by the law?  Perversity?  It was very, very cold out there and some people retreated early to the heated van.  It's not entirely unselfish on my part; I thoroughly enjoy being out there.  it's one of the major reasons i came down here.



Advanced molting.  It looked like you could have grabbed fistfuls of feathers.  One website said it took an average of 34 days for an Emperor to molt.





Penguins seem to really fascinate people.  Kneeling, laying down or otherwise getting low seem to set them more at ease.



There are some very talented people down here and it shows in their art: several outdoor metal sculptures; paintings and ceramics displayed in the library; crafts displayed and for sale.  Penguins and other birds are a common theme, perhaps because there is so little life on or above the ice.  (Below the sea ice and the ice shelf life, it's entirely different.  The Ross Sea is wonderfully rich; the algae and bacteria support an unimaginable richness of krill that feed fish, seals, whales, and other life.)



This is titled "Skua Wants A Cracker."



"Snow Petrel"



Walking house of Baba Yaga, Russian witch of fairy tales.



One year's worth of food waste for retrograde to Port Hueneme and composting.  For scale, each of these Tri-Walls is about one meter on a side.  Any food that leaves the kitchen to go to the serving line and is not eaten must be discarded.  Leftovers can only be made from food that stayed in the kitchen