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Thursday, 01 January 2009 00:58
Dome A Traverse and Kunlun Station
Written by International Polar Foundation
Continuing his coverage of the 25th Chinese Antarctic Expedition, science journalist Jean de Pomereu reports on the departure of the Dome Argus (Dome A) traverse team from the Chinese Zhongshang Station in the Antarctic on the International Polar Foundation's SciencePoles website.
On 18 December following an official departure ceremony, a team of 28 men left Zhongshang to start the 1,220 km traverse into the interior of Antarctica to Dome A, the highest point on the East Antarc...
Sunday, 28 December 2008 19:10
Report from the YEP expedition to Antarctica
Written by Roswitha Stolz
My name is Henry Stanislaw and I am from the USA. Together with Maria Puig Ribas from Spain, Nora Hasselbach and Vincent Butty from Switzerland, Alexandra Le Dily from France and Carlien Wolmarans from South Africa, I joined the Young Explorer Program within Mike Horn’s PANGAEA Expedition.
This program is created to introduce young adults to exploration, but also to scientific working and learning about the environmental conditions and threats. The first trip in this program took us to Antarctica. Mike is starting his expedition here, where he will walk alone from the Peninsula to the South Pole and back.
For all of us this is the first contact with a polar environment. We started in Ushuaia / Tierra del Fuego, South ...
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Saturday, 27 December 2008 08:54
The Polar Rubics
Written by Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province Project
In order to move work teams to the AGAP camps we must move everyone through the South Pole in order to acclimatize to the high altitude. This has presented a bottleneck of sorts, and along with other delays is putting the project considerably behind schedule.
With equipment calibrated and people antsy to move out of McMurdo the next focus is how to move people through the next short stop at South Pole. A spreadsheet has been made and people have been moved back and forth on the sheet in response to weather delays and changing shifting. For days people have had bags sorted and checked waiting...
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Christmas is approaching fast and the NISSE team is busy, but let's have a look what happened few weeks ago considering the NISSE EISCAT activity. The longer the polar night gets the more suitable time it is for ground-based auroral measurements in the north. During a couple of weeks before the 'Above The Poles' day, several space physicists from the University of Oulu, the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, well wrapped to withstand the polar biting cold, were mobilized for the annual Finnish EISCAT measurement campaign. During the campaign, series of measurements were taken, including ev...
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Mt. Erebus is unique in being the world’s southernmost active volcano. What also makes this volcano special is the long lived lava lake that has been in the crater ever since people have been looking there, and probably much longer. The lava lake in Mt. Erebus is similar to only two other volcanoes on earth, Nyiragongo, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Erta’Ale, in Ethiopia. But the formation of the crystals on Erebus is similar to a couple of other volcanoes, including Mt. Kenya. And to make it even more confusing, Erebus has a composition of lava that is similar to one of the deadliest volcanoes on earth, Mt. Vesuvius! You can begin to imagine why Mt. Erebus is such an interesting place to study.
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Thursday, 18 December 2008 04:43
Ready, set, wait
Written by Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province Project
For several years we have been preparing for what seems an incredibly small window of a field season. Working as part of a six nation team we have coordinated our equipment, our personnel, our science plans, and our logistics until it seems we will even breath at the appropriate time! Our project, Antarctic Gamburtsev Province (AGAP), will map through the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, imaging the sleeping giant that lies below. This sleeping giant is a European Alp sized mountain range called the Gamburtsev Mountains, discovered 50 years ago by a team of Russian scientists as they traversed across this extensive ice sheet. Di...
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008 05:51
Polar preparations pick up pace
Written by McMurdo Sound Winter Sea Ice
The end of another week draws close, bringing with it the realization that there are not too many left before we head South to spend the winter at Scott Base, Antarctica. Scratch off a few of those weeks due to the Christmas holidays and we’ve got about 5 weeks left to pack and test everything we're going to need to study winter sea ice growth in McMurdo sound for 9 months. Over the last few weeks, we’ve sent off a flurry of purchase orders and the Physics Department's machine shop has been kept busy with orders for custom designs. Our collaborators at VUW, NIWA and IRL are busy preparing their components of the program and everyone’s inboxes have been brimm...
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Dr. Phil Kyle and Dr. Daria Zandomeneghi, both from the New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology, are trying to "CT" scan the inside of Mt. Erebus using active seismic waves. As a teacher, I have been invited to assist with the experiment through the outreach program funded by the National Science Foundation. Over the past few weeks the team has been installing temporary seismometers at specific locations on the volcano. These seismometers create a grid of stations that will record seismic waves from explosive blasts set off at various locations. The blasts will generate "active" waves in the ground. They are active ...
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Monday, 01 December 2008 04:56
NISSE - A Student Rocket Project to Study the Upper Polar Atmosphere
Written by The NISSE Team
Background
NISSE may evoke for some of us a short Elf type fellow with a long beard and a red knitted cap. According to an old tradition Norwegian farmers believe that if Nisse lives in their barns, they will be blessed. Therefore around Christmas when the Nisses are active, they prepare food for them and, believe it or not – it's always eaten up by the next morning!
Some other readers may be familiar with the name NISSE because of a Norwegian s...
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