12 October
Stacy writing
Sunday is the one day off of work for most of McMurdo Station.  The support staff work 6 days, 10 hours a day.  So on Sunday, a delicious brunch is served, with “round eggs” – as opposed to the “square eggs” we usually get, out of a box.  There are also Belgian waffles, lots of fresh baked goods, AND the usual options.  We took the morning to finish our personal unpacking and getting settled in our rooms, enjoyed brunch, and then started work in the lab.  The last of our big crates were delivered yesterday, so we had lots to finish unpacking and organizing in the lab as well.  We had a team meeting to pull together our immediate plan and priorities and then got started on our real work.  My contribution was to fix up the web page, which had not been updated since last year.  Jon Witowski at MLML had directed us to a template that made it easy even for me.  Let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements!

The pallet of luggage on the plane to McMurdo. The small yellow case visible in the corner of the very bottom layer contains one of our computers. Look at all the stuff piled on top of it!

-

Here is Lisa and her “pickle” which is what these very flexible tracked forklifts are called. She is delivering the very last of our crates to the loading dock outside our lab.

In the evening we attended a science lecture by Dr. Steve Peckar, a professor at Queens College, CUNY.  He is leading a large team of 18 people to do seismic and gravity mapping offshore from New Harbor, an area on the other side of the sound that we will visit later in the season. His group will use the geophysical data to map the sediments below the seafloor, and develop a drilling strategy to recover these sediments.  This area is interesting because it is a depositional basin that was protected from ice disturbance, so the sediments should be layered in time, and not mixed by glaciers dragging over them.  They hope to recover sediments from a time span that will cover the Greenhouse World to Icehouse World transition that occurred about 34 million years ago.  During this time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were as high as has been predicted for this century, and what we can learn about the ocean chemistry and biology from the cores may help us prepare for the future.

Right before dinner we went on a short tour of town, just to familiarize the FNGs with the locations of the buildings and so I can send them on errands ☺. The nicest place to visit was the Greenhouse, where the tomatoes are already doing well! And all we had to do was step outside to visit the Icehouse.

We walked out of the lecture at 9:30 pm to bright sunlight.  It takes a little adjustment to get used to the daylight at night, but I like it.  The sun moves around and around the sky instead of up and over as it does at lower latitudes.  We can tell what time it is by what direction the sun is, and it does dip toward the horizon in the middle of the night though it never gets fully dark.  We will not get to see any stars for the whole time we are here.

Enjoy a starry night because you can!
Smiles, Stacy