Dusting it off

It's been an embarassingly long time since I've written a blog post, but now seems like a good time to dust it off, as I'm returning to Antarctica for my seventh time since the 2003-04 season when I wintered at the South Pole for a year.

This time around should be a little more special. Andrea is also headed back to the Ice after a five-year absence. Unfortunately, we'll be about a thousand miles apart, as she'll be at the South Pole Station, while I'll be mostly stationed at McMurdo. We will reunite briefly in mid-December with a few hundred other people for the 100th anniversary of when the first people reached the bottom of the world. It's promising to be quite the party, with the prime minister of Norway expected to be in attendance to celebrate his countryman Roald Amundsen's historic achievement.

Unlike last year, when I had the privilege of traveling to a deep-field camp in the mountains, I'll spend most of my time around McMurdo. There's lots of cool science under way on the nearby sea ice where seals and penguins can be found, though the ice has been difficult to work on because of cracks and weather, so we'll see what happens there.

The journey south is a familiar one: I fly from Denver this afternoon, then to LAX, where after a rather long layover, I'll head to Auckland, landing across the International Dateline and into the future on Wednesday. Then it's a short hop to Christchurch on the South Island. I'm excited about the trip but not looking forward to seeing a city I know has been much altered by the earthquakes of the last year, especially the one on Feb. 22 that wrought great destruction on the central business district. But apparently this weekend parts have reopened in makeshift containers ... Kiwis are incredibly resilient folk. (Hmm. I re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the weekend, and I seem to be writing in Middle Earth-ese.)

We only get two short days in Christchurch before flying down to McMurdo on a US Air Force C-17 cargo plane, though it seems as if weather and mechanical issues invariably extend that time by at least a day or two. It'll be a busy two days for me, as I have an interview set up with the head of the Antarctic Heritage Trust, which is working to conserve the historic structures in Antarctica, including Capt. Scott's hut at Cape Evans from which he launched his bid for the South Pole in 1911, losing to Amundsen by about five weeks -- and losing his life, along with his four companions, on the return journey.

Here's a few photos from my deployment last year to whet your Antarctic appetites: