Location: **Ice Station Belgica **Latitude: 70° 01 Longitude: 93° 09 Air temperature: -17.8 °C (0°F) Wind chill: -44.3 °C (-48 °F) Barometric pressure: **976.7 mBar **Wind speed: 25 to 30 knots
You remember the fairy tale - the children leave a trail of breadcrumbs on their walk through the forest to find their way home. We didn’t use bread crumbs to find our way home yesterday, but we did use a trail of Kool-Aid! We were working at our remote site remeasuring snow depths along the transect lines we had established a few days earlier. We mark every five meters along the line with a spot of Kool-Aid. This probably sounds like a pretty non-scientific method of marking, but it’s almost always too windy to lay down a measuring tape and measure in a more traditional fashion. The Kool-Aid is easy to spot on the white snow and doesn’t take too much time to put down.
Weather conditions change rapidly in Antarctica – one minute blue skies and sunshine, the next minute snow and clouds. While we were "Kool-Aiding” one of our lines today wind speeds increased and visibility decreased rapidly. Loose snow was blowing quickly across the flat expanse of ice, and before long we weren’t able to see the ship less than half a mile away. Not to worry, we thought, we’ve got radios and a tent we can get in if conditions get too bad. Before long visibility was down to less than 50 meters – I could barely see the person at the end of our 25 meter measuring rope. We finished marking the line, but when we turned around to walk back all we could see was white – white snow on the ground, white snow in the air, even a white snow petrel flying around us. The only spots of color in the landscape were our bright red Kool-aid spots in the snow. So we picked our way back "home” by following the Kool-aid trail we had left. Before long conditions improved and we were able to go back to work. I’ve been in white outs before, but this was the most extreme!
John and Penny’s self-portrait during the white out.
Meanwhile, the Belgian-Canadian group has been hard at work in the field and in the lab, and the geophysics group has continued field work on our transect lines.
Jean-Louis and Jeroen work on ice coring in the clean area.
The geophysics team works a transect line.
We celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving Day Monday on the ship in honor of the two Canadians on board – Keith and Beverly. Keith told me about the traditional Canadian Thanksgiving meal and holiday. It turns out that Americans and Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving the same way – turkey, dressing, cranberries, sweet potatoes, even pumpkin pie. Thanks to Bill and Ale for fixing such a great meal and Happy Thanksgiving to Beverly and Keith.
That’s all for now; plans for tomorrow include a visit to what we’re calling "the zone of death” – a really thick section of snow and ice on the other side of the floe we’re planning to sample. The thicker the snow and ice, the harder the work, so tomorrow should be interesting!
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