We’re still waiting for the balloon base to be completed, but we got access to some of our electronics and have set up a little “lab away from lab” in the loading dock of the Crary Lab, the main science building on station. Things look to have survived the journey!
Since we’ve got a little spare time in McMurdo while we wait for the Long Duration Balloon (LDB) site where we’ll be working to be ready, so the team signed up for a tour of the pressure ridges. These ridges are crazy ice structures formed at the intersection of the permanent ice McMurdo ice shelf, and the seasonal sea ice on the Ross Sea which surrounds McMurdo station. Our guide led us on a walk up to the ridges where we walked through crazy beautiful blue ice formations and melted ice pools. The area is a hangout for groups of Weddell seals which just plop in the sun on the ice. We had to turn around before completing our full walk since there were several seals lounging across our path. Just means we’ll have to go back later in the season!
After many days of delays, we finally made it out on Nov. 12th! The flight from Christchurch to McMurdo is just about 5 hours on the C17. The highlight of the trip was when we started flying in over the frozen sea ice and the Air Force crew let us come up to the cockpit one at a time to look out over the frozen continent. We landed at Phoenix airfield, a packed runway plowed into the snow on the frozen sea ice around McMurdo. We walked off the plane onto the snow into an enormous open field. Just foggy enough that you couldn’t see anything in the distance except white in all directions. Took a bunch of pictures, and then they hustled us over to a big “bus” (an enormous tractor pulling a big bus), and took us over to the base. We had a brief orientation where they gave us some maps, useful information, and training schedules for the next day or so. They also gave us our keys to our rooms.
Storms in McMurdo grounded all our flight attempts out of NZ. Ian and I were delayed long enough that the 2nd wave of the BLAST-TNG group, Gabriele, Javier and Paul ended up joining us in Christchurch. After five days of stressful waiting in Christchurch we were starting to get a little stir crazy, so we rented a car took a winding scenic drive out to Akaroa, a gorgeous beach town surrounded by crazy mountains.
We also stopped at Birdling’s Flat, a crazy rock beach right on the ocean
The constantly changing flight status means we can’t really stray too far from our hotel in Christchurch. Fortunately there’s lots of fun spots to hang around in the city, and awesome scenery. Most of the big buildings in the city were destroyed in the huge earthquake in 2011, and there’s still some crazy wreckage, a ton of amazing graffiti, and lots of new construction and buildings going up.
Nathan P. Lourie 