Update (Nov 9th)
It has been a while since my last update, so, here is what is new and happening down here.
ANDRILL has just crossed the 500m depth which is cause for celebration. Apparently tradition has us march around base in our underwear. Photos of that might be posted once the parade happens.
I’ll be leaving sometime soon for a week or two in the field. “Mini ANDRILL” is a seismic survey looking for future drilling sites. I’ll be camping on the sea ice, drilling holes, and setting off “explosions” of air bubbles under the ice which bounces sound off the layers of rocks under the sea. The return echo is recorded and timestamped to generate an image of the inside of the Earth. I don’t know when I will actually join that trip because the mountaineer is stuck in Christchurch.
A lot of people are stuck in Christchurch. We’ve had unpredictable and mean weather here for the past few days. It is nice for a few hours each day but windy and white the rest of the time. We’ve been in and out of Condition Two and even went to Condition One for a few hours one night. Therefore there have been no flights down for almost two weeks which sounds like it might be approaching a summer record. Unfortunately, no flights means no fresh veggies, no mail nor packages, and no mountaineer. The weather has also caused all the day trips to the drill site and the Dry Valleys to be postponed. Such is life in Antarctica. We were told, repeatedly before coming down, that we would need to hurry up and wait, and be very flexible with our schedules.
I’m switching discipline teams today or tomorrow. I’ve been working with the diatomists for the past month and will spend the rest of my time (when I’m not with Mini ANDRILL) on the curatorial team. That means I’ll be splitting and scanning the core.
The core has been very interesting and beautiful recently. We went through a layer with a lot of shells, and here is a picture of a drop stone. When we see a rock like this among very find grained sediments, and it has deformed them slightly, the story the geologists tell is this:
The fine grained sediments are deposited in a deep sea low energy environment. How does a big rock land there? Glaciers far away on land grind down a mountain, picking up debris as they move. They get to the ocean and calve into icebergs. The icebergs float away and melt, and as they melt they drop their debris to the sea floor below.
