The weather is nice, without any clouds in the morning. I would estimate the temperature at about 70 degrees F (about 20 C). The difference between day and night is relatively modest compared to Tucson. A regular shirt during the day is fine, in the evening a sweater does its job.. However, it tends to get cloudy during the afternoon. Yesterday we even had some rain.
Christchurch is a very nice town, not too large with some nice old buildings. They drive on the left and the steering wheel is on the right. We do not drive, but even crossing the street is dangerous because the cars come from the other side than one would expect.
In the evening we went back to our bed and breakfast place to pack our personal belongings, had a last good dinner (it was really a fine dinner, I had a local fish and a lemon torte with lime-tequila sorbet) and enjoyed a long, warm shower. We heard that at McMurdo we only get 2 minutes of shower every other day.
We took off shortly before 9am, the scheduled time of departure. Once in the air, we could unstrapp ourselves. Some people moved on top of the cargo, so that we had a little more space. Inside the plane it was extremely loud and we had to wear ear plugs all the time. This made any verbal communication very hard. Each of us had a brown bag with some sandwiches, salad, fruits, chocolate etc. They also provided some fruit juices in the brown bag and cold water in a big container strapped to part of the plane. The temperature inside the plane was comfortable, at least in principle. The cold weather gear made it, however, rather hot. We therefore soon got rid of most of our cloth. Many people were basically just in their thermal underwear. The flight took 7 hours and 15 minutes, which is short because we had the wind in our back and no skis on the plane. We were allowed to go into the cockpit, from where I had a fantastic view of the Antarctic mountain ranges and the frozen ocean. The landing was very smooth on the ice.
On arrival at McMurdo, the weather was fantastic. No clouds and sunshine for 24 hours a day. The temperature was about -5 C. You don't feel it that much because of the sunshine. But I already noticed that, for instance, my ears got cold whenever they are in the shadow. We quickly changed from the cold-weather gear into more civilian cloths such as jeans and sweaters. We received a short briefing about waste management, fire hazards etc. Humidity here is only 3-5%, I need to drink even more than in Tucson. At 6:45 pm (we have New Zealand time here) we had dinner. The food was ok. We don't have to pay anything. They have a new library here with about 15 PCs, Macs and Sun workstations with fast Internet connections.
Luckily, we are assigned to rooms in a regular building. We are three people in one room, which is not too bad. There is not much space, but it is sure better than a tent. The rooms are more than warm, we had to open the window to get it down to a reasonable temperature. We heard that regulating the heaters is very hard and that most people open the windows to regulate the temperature. The Internet connection to Tucson is very fast, much better than from New Zealand, actually. It is a satellite link directly to the US.
The majority of the electricity is used to keep the water and sewage pipes warm enough so that they do not freeze. Electricity is produced in a power plant that burns aircraft jet fuel. The buildings are heated with steam. I heard that sunset will be on February 21.
Lunch was next. The food here is ok, we even get some fresh food like tomato and salad. There is always an extensive choice of things to eat. After lunch we had a tour of the Crary Lab, which is a large, modern building here (built in 1992) with a lot of nice facilities like the computers I use to send e-mail, copy machines, lab spaces, and office spaces. We finally got an office assigned. People here do all kinds of things like meteorolgy and sea animal studies. There are science talks every Sunday and Wednesday evening to learn more about what other groups do.
After the tour we changed into the cold weather gear and drove to Williams Field over the ice. The building that was destroyed looked rather poor, i.e. only the metal frame existed. Everything else including doors was missing (blown away). Our equipment is still outside in the shipping containers. We have some worries that the main mirror of the telescope might have been damaged in the transport box. We will check it out on Monday.
McMurdo is located on an island. The ocean around it is still frozen and about 12 feet (3.5 m)thick. Most parts here 'in town' are free from ice and snow. There is a lot of dirt and mud and the melting snow and ice do not help in this respect. Willy Field is on the Ross Ice shelf, i.e. the part of the ocean that is always frozen. The ice there is about 300 feet thick (90 m). The top 15 feet (4.5 m) are snow, not ice. Out there the landscape is just great. Close by is a volcano that is 13000 feet high (Mt. Erebus), i.e. the landscape has great variability. The temperature was around freezing, which is really warm. I took lots of photographs. They are still working on the building we are supposed to work in. I do not think that they will finish by Monday, but we might nevertheless start to do somethings in an adjacent building that we can use to set up our computers. The new building is made of wood.
In the future I will probably start to mention the names of people that you do not know. Here is a short description of the people in our group:
I share a room with Russ and Phil.
After reading and writing some e-mail in the Crary lab, we went for a brunch at 10 am. They offered everythin from French toast, omelette, bacon etc. to pasta and turkey. On Sundays they even offer orange juice. Food and drinks are, as usual, free.
At 2:30pm we went for the running race they do here every 2 weeks. We boarded 'IVAN the Terra Bus', a huge vehicle that seems to be able to drive over anything. It looks like a huge box on top of wheels. The box has the size of a Greyhound bus that is painted in red and holds about 60 people. The wheels are about 4 feet (1.2 m) wide. This vehicle brought us from McMurdo station to Scott Base, which is the New Zealand Antarctic station and about 2.5 miles from McMurdo on the other side of Ross Island. The New Zealand station is much smaller and all buildings are painted in light green. Most people then run back to McMurdo. We (Graham, Kim, Russ, Phil, Ashok, Harry, and I) used the opportunity to get to Scott Base and walked back. The road goes over the island and we had fantastic views of the Ross Ice shelf, the mountain ranges, and the various installations on the ice (Williams field for ballooning, the airport on the ice etc.). I took lots of pictures. The weather is still nice, but there are quite some cirrus clouds by now. Graham and I then walked out to Scott's hut, which is about half a mile outside of McMurdo. Scott was British and tried to reach the South Pole between 1901 and 1904. He built a base camp here. The wooden hut is still in excellent shape, surprising for the harsh environment here. Scott did reach the Pole, although after the Norwegian Amundsen, and Scott and his team did not survive the trip back to McMurdo. Out at Scott's hut the temperature was lower and there was a strong wind. We estimated the temperature with wind chill at about -25 C. I have some special gloves for photographers from Jack Harvey where you can easily have small parts of your fingers look out of the glove so that you do not need to remove the complete glove. Nevertheless my fingers got cold in a few seconds. However, the equipment we got really works well and there is no risk of freezing.
After coming back to McMurdo and warming up for some time in our room, I went to the Crary lab to write e-mail. Things are busy here right now since they have a pilot training course in the same room. Luckily the student pilots do not need the computers. After dinner there was a science talk on meteorite collecting in Antarctica. Dave caught a flu. I still feel fine. I still sneeze quite a bit. In New Zealand I started to get heyfeaver, which got pretty bad in the end, i.e. I had to take antihystamins. I guess that I still have the 'after-effect' of this hayfeaver.