Sightseeing Anyone?

Well today we went to Cape Evans and the Scott Hut. This was a recreational trip. We journeyed to the site using a Hägglund. A Hägglund is a Swedish tracked vehicle that is also amphibious meaning that it can go through/over water. You see a lot of these vehicles in Antarctica, and I don’t know if you see them many other places. The tracks mean that per square inch of track they put less pressure on the snow than a skidoo, but they can carry about 10 people or 5 people and a lot of gear. The Hägglund has a front and rear compartment. Below is the Hägglund near an iceberg on our way to Cape Evans.

 

The Scott Hut we visited was built in 1910 and was used as the base for Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. This is a historically important hut and so has been preserved. There is old food and many artifacts inside the hut and outside. The hut still has the original asbestos and mercury. It always strikes me that either the men were smaller in this time or just made small beds for themselves out of necessity.

Nearby is the Barne’s Glacier which flows down off of Mount Erebus. Our guide drove us closer to the glacier so we could have a look. I feel this is your typical Antarctic glacier ending, in that it is a sharp drop.

On the way to this point and near where we camped yesterday is the Erebus ice tongue, which in the satellite imagery I have showed in previous points looks very impressive and dramatic, but when seen from the endpoint is much lower and unimpressive than I had expected.

Well that is all again today, sorry for the lack of science info, but it has been very busy again today, and the internet here has been excruciatingly slow, probably due to the weather we have been having. Tomorrow we head out on skidoos and sleds to cover 70+kms with the EM31s and set up two more GPS stations. Talk tomorrow.