hello from Antarctica! I’m currently on board the Aurora Australis, which is acting as a giant chisel, chipping our way in to Davis station. It’s been an amazing trip – we’ve been all over the place trying to get different personnel retrieval jobs done. Thankfully everything is under control, and we’re now resuming the reason for being here.
Unfortunately for our science group, we’ve had no time to do things on the sea ice – but we have succeeded in one instrument ground truthing exercise on the fast ice and we’ve done plenty of aerial surveys over the ice edge and the Vestfold hills.
But at least, we’ve got something done. The Australian Antarctic season has been reshuffled and some science scheduled to happen later on has just been dropped outright, so we’re thankful to have something done.
All that aside, its quite surreal to be writing from this amazingly, devastatingly beautiful place. Lots of penguin and iceberg watching to do, and just soak in being in this vast white wilderness…
I hope all is well in the north.. its certainly fine here.