Antarctica? Seriously?

...the Sub-Antarctic, and even a mid-summer greeting from our friends at Summit Station in Greenland. Hannah, who I've mentioned in previous posts, left on the last ship to go work summer season at Summit. In a previous post I explained the tradition of sending mid-winter greetings to all the stations on the continent that have people during the winter, and showed you the one we sent out. Here are all the greetings that we've received. They were all accompanied by wonderful emails wishing us all the best. One thing this really impressed upon me was how we're all just Antarcticans while we're here. What country we come from really doesn't matter, and we're all looking out for each other, doing good science. We've helped with medical evacuations while I've been here that have included Ukrainian, US, UK, and Chilean bases, US ships, and Chilean/Argentinian planes. No questions asked, just help out to get it done. As I watch what seems like the US and ...

Today is the the winter solstice down here. The shortest day, the longest night. From now on the days will get longer as we head towards spring. Currently we have a little less than 4 hours of sunlight a day, although we never actually see the sun as it never makes it above the glacier these days. Dawn or twilight for a few hours a day, take your pick. But the fact that we get any light at all during the Antarctic winter makes all of us here feel very fortunate. There is a tradition in Antarctica that all the stations that have winterover crews take a midwinter picture and send it to all the other crews on the continent on the day of the solstice. So far we've received pictures from the other American bases, several Australian and Russian bases, Chilean, Korean, and Indian bases. We'll get more throughout the day, and I hope to be able to do a post with all of them sometime. It's pretty special. In my last post I showed the pic we took here at Palmer, but wanted to s...

So the ship left for the final time this morning. As the announcements on the intranet today said: 0930-Laurence M. Gould departs 0931-Winter begins When the station is full and there is a lot of science going on, it can be pretty hectic. All the winterovers have talked about how quiet and mellow it will be when it is just us; but even so, there were a lot of tears shed when everybody was doing goodbye hugs this morning, mine included. There were supposed to be nineteen of us for the winter, but one of the scientists, who was delayed in getting down here earlier in the season, decided to winterover with us to make up for lost time. It's just us until the next ship arrives in October. I guess there is a tradition of taking a picture of the people staying at each of the Antarctic stations in the winter and then the station managers sending their pics to all the other stations. The pictures above were taken two days ago, and are of everybody at Palmer, including the...

First of all, my apologies for not posting recently. I don't know why, but for some reason I've had writers block. I'll try and be better about blogging. Anyway, I thought I'd write about what a typical day during the week is like for me. Stars over the VHF tower-Courtesy of Lisa Harding We start work at 7:30 in the morning, and who arrives when is all over the place. Some people get up early and come to the galley to have breakfast, read the paper, and do the crossword. We download the New York Times Digest and the New York Times crossword every day for the station, and if for some reason it doesn't arrive, the IT folks really hear about it. People are serious about their papers and crossword puzzles! There's also a group of bendy people that get up every morning at 6:30 to do yoga together in the lounge. I've been invited to join them, but told them that until they do yoga for full figured middle aged guys in Carhartt's, I'll pass. Their res...