Antarctic Journal
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Wrapping Up
Verdant Crozier: a lush mat of snow algae, the only green growing thing around.Our season is coming to a close. After I wrote about the last storm we had a week of gorgeous weather - blue sky, the ocean so flat you could see whales breaking its silvery surface 3 miles offshore. After several days in ...
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Stormy, Again
View from the hut door, Kirsten's Scott tent barely visible through the white-outThis time it's a real one. Storm force winds (64-72 mph), blowing snow, zero visibility. It's been difficult to count storms this season because they come one right after the other. Front after front we've been getting ...
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More on Leopold
OK, you ask, how do we know it's Leopold again? So far only one has been positively identified as having been here both years, and it happens to be Leopold. I had an inkling when I saw him on December 29th - that look in his eyes, the way he came over to inspect us and then lost interest, the way he ...
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Leopold Is Back!
Leopold is Cape Crozier's most prominent resident leopard seal. He patrols the beaches every day in search of unsuspecting penguins. Yesterday we watched him catch 4 in a row. The first three got away, but the fourth wasn't so lucky.Kirsten and I were standing on the ice foot on the beach, a good 6 ...
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How Google Saved The Day In Antarctica
It's been a busy week! Last week we had a second storm that kept us in for a day, and we've been playing endless catchup whenever we get a day down in the colony. Yesterday we hiked to the stone igloo, the only remaining testament to the aptly titled mid-winter journey from "The Worst Journey in The ...
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A Crowded Place
Last week we had Roger, Jess, and Ryan, who made it out of Crozier just in time before a wind storm swept in and kept us indoors for 4 days. Yesterday we were joined by a team of two from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute - photographer Chris Linder and science writer Hugh Powell. They will be ...
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Year of the Wind
Windy view from the hut (photo by Kirsten)katabatic - adj. Meteorol. (of a wind or air current) moving downward or down a slope. Cf. anabatic (def. 1) [191520; Hut day #4. The wind has been oscillating between gale force (3263 mph) and storm force (6472 mph) since Friday, with occasional foray ...
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The Most Beautiful Place In The World
I finally made it! I'm at Cape Crozier, my most favorite place in the world. Flew here on Monday with Ryan Miller, Jessica Reynolds, and Roger Hill, who are visiting for the week. Ryan and Jessica are here filming on an artists and writers grant and will fly out tomorrow. Roger runs Wildlife Compute ...
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Still at McMurdo...
I'm still here! Yesterday's flight was delayed until today which is delayed until tomorrow. I spoke to Grant by radio tonight and he says a storm is brewing at Cape Crozier, so I could very well be at McMurdo for another few days. This place if full of scientists, artists, geeks, world travelers, an ...
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I'm Back!
I arrived at McMurdo station yesterday, a gorgeous, sunny day. We flew over an endless expanse of pack ice - floes of all shapes and sizes pushed up against each other on a flat, steely ocean. Then it was mountains, and glaciers flowing from the frozen peaks into the frozen sea, and more pack ice al ...
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Penguin Science
See you in December 2007! In the meantime, we have been in the process of upgrading the project website. See the media section for more photos (many of which are mine) and some great new videos.
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Back to "Civilization"
The helicopter came for us last Friday afternoon. We were due to leave Cape Crozier on Thursday, but after two days of dazzling blue skies and above freezing temperatures we woke up Thursday morning in a cloud. Two days' worth of warm air had condensed over the cold ocean (the water here is always a ...
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Tales Of Wind And Snow
Sastrugi - Ridges of snow formed on a snowfield by the action of the wind. Also, zastruga. [183040; Our internet is out, so I am again attempting to post using the satellite phone, which is slower than slow. No photos this time but a story, excerpted from a letter to Camie and Jeremy that I wrote o ...
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It's 2007!
The new year slipped in almost unnoticed. Midnight caught us by surprise, and shortly afterwards, before most of the rest of the world has even begun the new year's festivities (we're at GMT +13, just west of the International Date Line), Valere mixed us delicious rum-lemon-sugar drinks while the wi ...
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How The Penguins Send Us Email
Its storming again. The Antarctic winds are sweeping the last of the Christmas snow seaward. The Ross Sea is a dark, hammered steel, with no sea ice save for the vivid white of the grounded bergs near shore. But mostly the thick curtain of blowing snow is concealing it all, revealing glimpses only ...
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White All Over
Pat's Peak, which is usually all dark, bare rock, shrouded in new snow. The orange box in the foreground is our survival cache, containing all essentials needed in the event that our hut burns down or blows away.We spent Christmas day measuring penguin chicks and then the snow came big, fluffy fla ...
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Back From the Antarctic Void
Were back! Our internet has been fixed for a week and were busier than ever, so I have had very little time to post. Were in the peak of our field season right now, and we seem to have barely any time left after sleeping, eating, collecting and entering data. No time to read, barely any time to s ...
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Documenting the Documenters
This year, as part of our project, we are making an educational movie about penguins. Ian and Grant have been filming a lot of footage of Adélie and emperor penguins and Weddell seals and recording sounds using equipment generously loaned by Cornell's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds.Here are some ...
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Hut-bound
The storm lasted a total of three days. We had barely begun to search for banded birds and GLS tags down at the colony when the storm forced the four of us inside our tiny 2-person hut. What does one do when itching to be outside yet stuck in an orange box in the middle of Antarctica with the wind r ...
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Back to Crozier, First Storm
We're finally at Cape Crozier, and this is what the view out of our hut window currently looks like:Cape Crozier white-outI stepped out very briefly and was immediately inundated with snowdrift swirling around me at 50 miles per hour. My camera lens was instantly coated with ice, so I quickly retrea ...
Antarctic Journal
