Skidoo Training

After an excellent nights sleep last night and a quick shower (navy style, get wet, turn water off, soap up, turn water on and rinse off: targeted water use is less than 3 minutes), I have had a good day.

After breakfast this morning we had our event “In Brief”. Every science campaign is called an event, and the briefing this morning was between our team and the base coordinators to make sure both groups know what the other wants, expects, etc.

After that we started preparing equipment such as the EM31, our ground based electromagnetic induction sensor.  We have two here, one of ours ( a short version) and the standard version from Wolfgang.  There were also two ground penetrating radar units to set up (Wolfgang’s and Pat Langhorne’s) and numerous GPS stations.

We also started to work on our airborne electromagnetic sensor (HEM bird or Rosie) but discovered that whoever tightened the bolts last really put them far too tight and several needed to be drilled out to get them out.

In the afternoon, we had skidoo training, getting people familiarized with how they work, some simple maintenance tasks and a little driving session.  It was nice to get back on a skidoo.

Our Antarctic Field Training course begins tomorrow and will involving skidoo and  camping out on the ice and learning about some of the safety aspects of our work and some survival training. We will use the field training activity to visit one of the sites where we wish to deploy a GPS station to monitor the tides during the duration of our visit.  We will also tow the two EM31 sensors ground sensors along with us, and maybe more equipment as well.  It will be good for people to get used to pulling the sleds holding our equipment and a good way to familiarize/refresh people with the equipment.

This evening we quickly tested the EM31s on the sleds, and we are ready for tomorrow.  Unfortunately I haven’t had time to write any science or get anyone to write about what they do.  There are 9 people in our team, and I hope to get all of them to write a short blurb about what they study, why they are here and what their favorite thing about Antarctica is, so stay tuned.