Despite what my lack of posting might suggest, I'm not dead. I actually arrived in Antarctica on Tuesday afternoon. It's kind of spooky being back here because it feels like I left just a week ago. We had absolutely gorgeous weather--only -10F--for our flight down and for our first couple of days on base. I was able to walk around in just my jeans and Big Red parka for the first two days. On Friday, the wind picked up and things got a lot colder around here. I'm back to wearing my long underwear underneath my jeans and heavy fleece.
Things have been busy since we arrived which is the reason why I haven't been blogging--just too much to do. As you can imagine, a lot of work goes into to setting up and running a fairly large (~60 person) science operation in Antarctica. I'm happy that I only have to deal with the computer stuff, which is just a tiny part of the overall workload. Most of our cargo arrived today, so I suspect I'll spend tomorrow setting up computers.
Next week, I have to do a vehicle training so I can drive the various vehicles (trucks, mattracks, pisten bullies, and snowmobiles) down here. I am also heading out to the drill site to set up a Corelyzer system out there so the drill site scientists can look at the core images we generate in McMurdo. The other thing I'm hoping to do is test our video conferencing hardware. We brought down a Polycom system for doing video conferences with groups back home. The camera works, but the big concern is whether it will consume too much bandwidth. I guess only time will tell.
I've got a few pictures that I wanted to include in this post, but I forgot my camera cable in my room. So I'll include them in the next post, which will hopefully be tomorrow. Cheers.
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