Two days ago, I asked Bob if he thought it was likely that the helicopter flights would be canceled. His answer was: anything can happen, this is Antarctica. The weather had been so beautiful for the last couple of weeks, I just took it for granted and thought it was going to last forever. Well, today, the helicopter flight was canceled again due to high winds and low visibility, and we are grounded in McMurdo. I guess it is true that anything can happen in Antarctica. The problem is that we left all of our equipment at Heald Island, and we won’t be able to go there until Monday, because the helos are not flying this weekend. We are especially worried that our current meter may get trapped under the ice. This current meter barely fit through the hole in the ice when we deployed it so if the hole shrinks too much, it will be stuck and impossible to recover. Oops.

The weather really is nasty today, it’s very windy and overcast.  But it’s ok, there is still a lot we can do. We decided it was a good time to put together SCINI 2 (SCINI 1 is at Heald island) and to test it a the jetty hut. I spent the morning making some final adjustments to some of the parts, and assembled SCINI. It’s almost the same as SCINI 1, except for a few improvements. It has two camera sensors instead of one. One sensor looks straight forward while the other looks down. The former is for the pilot and the latter is for science images. Scott also made a few improvements to the software.

After an early lunch, Scott, Bob and I drove down to the good old Jetty hut, where we did our early deployments of SCINI. It’s a really convenient place to work, it’s warm, spacious and only a five minute walk from the lab, so if we forget something, it’s not a big deal.

Of course, not everything went smoothly, this is the first time we are putting SCINI 2 in the water after all. We had troubles getting the navigation system working, the ballast was not quite right, there were some glitches with the software… Nothing we can’t solve fairly easily. We managed to get SCINI up and running later in the afternoon and it worked pretty well. Ken, a good friend of the SCINI team joined us and drove SCINI for a little while.

After dinner we returned to the jetty hut and deployed SCINI again. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fly it for more than a few minutes because the generator ran out of oil of stopped working. It was time to go to Norb’s party anyway, so maybe it was for the better.

I didn’t take any pictures today, but let me share a few pictures that I took in the last few days at Heald Island, one of the most amazing places I have ever seen.

And if you want to see more of my pictures, check out my personal blog too.

Late in the summer, the ice melts at the surface and forms this incredible maze of melt ponds.

Our camp, in the center of the Barranca. North West of the camp is the Royal Society Range, with Mount Lister towering at 4025m, and at the south East, Mount discovery.

A historic moment: the first ROV dive under the ice shelf.

This is still the ice shelf, floating over the ocean.The dirt gets blown by strong wind from the continent and forms these amazing black dunes, sharply contrasting with the deep blue melt ponds.