Rest of the team arrives

Today the last 5 members of the ANTCI science team arrived via C-17 from Christchurch. They include the oldest member of our team (a retired professor from Georgia Tech) and the youngest (a student that recently finished his undergraduate degree and is thinking about graduate school). In addition, today we added two NASA scientists (one is a modeler and a measurement specialist), as well as a high school teacher from New York. In this photo they are arriving in the Ivan Terra transport vehicle which took them from the ice runway to the NSF headquarters on station.

This is a photo of me standing on the ice runway. The ice is about 5 to 7 feet thick this year, thick enough for C-130, C-17, and C-5 cargo planes to land on it. The blue ice shown here is the ice frozen this season. The white ice is ice that is left over from last year, and re-frozen in the bay the following year. Apparently the white ice is less "predictable" and bumpier than the blue ice, so this year when the ice breaker comes, they will try to herd all the ice out of the bay, so next season the ice runway will be almost entirely new blue ice.

Here are a few of the C-130 aircraft parked near the ice runway. They all have skis on them so they can take people and cargo inland to sites such as the South Pole and Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) divide. This special ski equipped C-130 fleet is operated by the 109th New York Air National Guard (out of Scotia, NY near Albany). They are the only air wing in the world that fly cargo planes with skis (http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/ang/109.html). Apparently NSF will be starting to drill another Antarctic ice core at the WAIS Divide next summer (see http://waisdivide.unh.edu/ for more information).

Here is a picture of Marty and Jason getting the last rack on the aircraft. Now we just have to finish hooking up all the inlets, do a bunch of tests, and perform some calibrations and we will be set for our first test flight (probably on Wednesday). The NASA water vapor instrument just arrived today, so we might need a few days to get completely installed.