Flight over Mt. Erebus and sea ice edge

Yesterday we had bad weather in the morning and so it was a good opportunity for the NCAR guys to work on the OH instrument. We were thinking about doing a test flight in the afternoon, but things just got a bit too crazy and then it started to snow again, so we had to cancel it. Good news is that today we went for a 4 hour flight and it is easy to say that it was a best flight of the season. All the instruments are working really well. The weather was quite nice. While the winds were not quite blowing exactly as we wanted them to, we still go a lot of good data. With only a few days to go, we are just happy to get a bunch more data. I gave my camera to our pilot (Chuck Slade) and he took a bunch of really nice photos. Here are a few of them. The top one is a view of the Mt. Erebus volcano with a bird's eye view of the plume of volcanic gases. Today David and Sae Wung measured quite a lot of SO2 in that plume. For the 2nd half of the flight we flew along the edge of the sea ice looking to sample trace gases that are emitted by the ocean. While the winds were blowing from the ice to the ocean (and not from the ocean to the ice as we were hoping) we still intercepted a few patches of air that had elevated levels of some of the marine gases we were looking for. Here is a cool shot of the ice sheet edge (with the shadow of the Twin Otter). This gives you an idea of how thick the ice sheet is. Someone told me the ice sheet where the Willy Field runway is (not this photo) is 25 feet of snow and 240 feet of ice on top of 1800 feet of water. In this photo, sure looks like the ice is over 200 ft thick. Tonight after dinner Fred Eisele gave the Sunday Science talk about the ANTCI project. We have a science talk every Sunday night and the idea is to tell all the non-scientists (and other scientists) here in McMurdo what we have been up to for the past month. There are also Wednesday Science lectures in the Crary Library, but the Sunday talk is geared towards the general public. I was encouraged to see how many people were interested in hearing a talk about the "Antarctic Tropospheric Chemistry Investigation" and really surprised how many good comments and questions the talk generated. Nice job Fred. On the way back to my room I almost stepped on this Skua. He or she really has a good camouflage. Then off the back porch of my dorm I saw a big seal hanging out on the McMurdo floating ice dock. It was starting to get cold and I didn't have on my heavy jacket so I didn't get a good photo of the seal, but I'll check to see if he is still out there tomorrow. Tonight we also found out that one of the C-130s that was going to take a bunch of McMurdo people back to New Zealand is have some major mechanical problems. So chances are not all of us are going to get out of here before Christmas. This is really tough for everyone. Not sure how it is going to work out, but we only have a few more days of flights and then packing up. But would be good to know when our flights will be. Anyway, not much we can do about this. Take care. Barry