Now we are twenty...



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 scientists and support staff from the ship. The video is a short one that was just made for a science focused high school in Chile.

But now we are just twenty...

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