A sun dog over our camp.

So at the end and after another set of long Skidoo rides to prep the GPS stations for next winter and pick up the passive seismometers, the Basler came and picked us and our gear up and whisked us off to McMurdo. And after a few days of returning equipment and shipping other equipment home, we left for Christchurch, which is where I am writing this update.

Now that the Antarctica portion of the journey is over, you would think that the drama and excitement is over. However, with science, that’s not the case! Because our instrumentation is so sensitive, and we have collected so much data, it is often hard to know immediately what your data will yield – that’s why we have the rest of the year to toil in front of a computer screen! Our group is just now on the verge of making our little discoveries, because all the data must now be processed and interpreted, which is the fun part! It’s the scientific intrigue that brings people by the hundreds down South and the discoveries that come from that which makes all the bodily abuse worth it. The Antarctic continent has infinite mysteries still left to discover and we can only chip away at them one long and brutal field season at a time.

Professor Slawek Tulaczyk examines the data while still in camp.

The other science component of the project is to image the subglacial lake underneath Whillans Ice Stream. To do this, we set off a series of explosions, with instruments called geophones to measure the waves emanating from the explosions. Because the waves bounce off all the layers of the subsurface, we can then figure out how deep all the layers are and eventually produce a cross-sectional map of what lies beneath the surface! Have a look at this video of the explosions.