It’s been a few days since anything really happened. There was the New Year, which was ushered in with much hilarity and scotch, and the helo-hanger party where the blue grass and rock bands from Ice Stock played again. And there was the visiting members of Congress that we had to talk to, and several fire drills, but conspicuously there wasn’t much work to be done.

Weather has not been our friend, and we have had some logistical knock on effect from the plane crash that our group was involved in earlier in the season (Google "Antarctica Basler", to read-up on it, if you are so inclined).

I’m writing this from the belly of a LC130 ski-equipped Hercules aircraft. Four of our team, myself, Brian Bonnet, Don Voigt and Thomas Nylen (yeah him again) are lucky enough to be going to Patriot Hills today. The rest of the team will languish in McMurdo until tomorrow. We split into two groups just to try and get moving into West Antarctica, sitting around the Crary Science Lab was doing us all in at varying rates. On our flight we have about 15,000 lbs (6000 kg) of gear, seismic sensors, GPS systems, tents, etc. Nowhere near the whole shebang. We need at least another flight this big to get all our gear to Patriot Hills.

My ipod lasted about half the flight, we now have another hour or so before we will see the Ellsworth Mountains. It’s the first time I have been in this neck of the woods and the time difference is doing my head in. So we fly four hours, and cross from New Zealand time to two hours ahead of East Coast US time? And we take off a day after we land? Weird.



Patriot Hills is run by Antarctica Logistics and Expeditions, a private contractor, so we will have to see how smoothly things go there. I will try to upload this blog through a slow satellite modem, if you’re reading it then it has worked.

All the best,

Mike