Happy Holidays

So it's that time a year again, time to put up the decorations, have parties and all other sorts of fun things. We do a few things here. The first bit of Holiday cheer was the Mcmurdo Player's present "A Charlie Brown Christmas" That's right we staged our very own production of that great Charles Schultz classic with yours truly in the role of Snoopy. It went off great (that or people are really easily amused)

Now for the not so good news. This little tidbit of info makes me think of How the Grinch Stole Christmas......Someone absconded with our Christmas dinner. That's right some low down dirty thief skulked into the kitchen and made off with a couple cases of the Christmas prime rib. So it looks like turkey roll for everyone....yay. I mean really who steals a couple hundred pounds of beef? what will they do with it? This sounds like it could be made into a made for TV xmas special.

To end things on a positive note I went out to the pressure ridges today for a tour. This is where the glacier meets the sea ice. The collision causes huge ice upheavals that look like ice mountains. It's really quite beautiful. go take a look at the photobucket site.
Clay

science lecture update

To answer Dick's how did water get there question. They don't have a definitive answer but there are 2 main theories.
The first is that it's a very briny saltwater from mineral leaching. This lowers the freezing point enough that it can stay liquid
the 2nd theory is a bit more interesting. When ice is compressed some of it will turn to liquid. ski's and ice skates actually glide over a microscopic layer of water produced from the weight of the skater and the friction of moving across the ice. They extrapolated that theory out in a couple of directions. they think that the weight of the ice sheet pressing down helped create a layer. that's combined with the thermal insulation provided by miles of ice (think igloos it can be -40 outside and 32 inside) and then add on geothermal heat from the earth's crust could cause liquid to form.
Hope that helps

science lecture

The latest lecture was on the Antarctic Gambustev Province, or AGAP for short. Basically what's going on in east Antarctica is they've found a mountain range completely covered by the ice sheet and are doing seismic surveys to actually map out the range. This is part of an International Polar Year project whichmust means it's a multi-national project that really costs a lot of money. East Antarctica is the least explored area of the continet and there are very few stations other than on the coast. So they're air dropping in supplies and setting up 2 basesto be used to conduct the surveys. What's fascinating is there appears to be liquid water under the ice sheet, They've already found several lakes such as Lake Vostok that were thought to be anomolies. As they condunct more research it appears that there is a whole set of lakes and rivers criscrossing the continent and are actually interconnected. No one knows what if anything might be down there and it will be years before they caneven put forth a hypothesis. Might sound a bit dry but hey I found it fascinating.
Clay

stuff

not much going on since I've been back from field camp. Just the usual work routine. I never did get out to the ice caves,the weather has been pretty bad. About the only exciting thing is there are some Weddell seals out on the ice by the Kiwi base, unfortunately they're too far away to get a picture of.