A mixed day at the Darwin Glacier (Nov 19)

Ok, so I'm still trying to catch up here, its been a hectic week, and now its my 25th birthday today! It was the Scott Base Skirt Party last night, so everyone was wearing a dress or skirt. It was a good night, and a lot of laughs. It's a tradition as old as Scott Base, and dates back even further to Captain R.F. Scott's expeditions. So yeah, that was a big rowdy on the red wines! A few of us even did a sojourn to the wine bar at McMurdo Station for a quick drink (sans the dresses).

Anyway, the day after our return from Cape Roberts, we had a whole day of helo time to go down to the Darwin - Hatherton Glacier systems (around 80°S), to extend our mapping control. The area is one of the key parts of the Latitudinal Gradient Project (see their page here), which is a multidisciplinary project looking at how ecosystems change as you go further south, and also from sea level to the high plateau at the different latitudes. Because of this, there's a lot of kiwi science taking place in the region, so we're doing some mapping to support that.

The Darwin is about a two hour helicopter flight from Scott Base over some pretty impressive country, including Mt Discovery. It's a medium sized glacier by Antarctic standards, but its still pretty big! The mapping is done from satellite imagery, however we need to be able to fit the images to their position on the ground, so we go out and GPS features that can be identified on the images.

Unfortunately, the weather in the Darwin isn't very good. Last year they had a lot of trouble getting in and out of there, and while this year is a bit better, it can still be quite fickle. The glacier goes from the polar plateau to the Ross Ice Shelf, and consequently gets a lot of katabatic winds (winds that are caused by the dense colder air flowing down hill). So on our day, it turns out the katabatics were blowing, meaning that we couldn't get to the key sites that I wanted to. We hovered above one of them, and the airspeed indicator said we were still moving through the air at 50 knots! So thats not the sort of weather that you want to be standing near a cliff in!

Luckily, I'd picked some other sites which were lower priority, but there was no wind there, so we were able to do some work! Better than flying down for 2 hours just to refuel and fly back! It was crazy that these spots were completely calm, when we had all this wind in other locations. Especially when the ones that were calm were generally the high altitude sites. I guess its to do with the katabatics.

Anyway, onto the photos. There's not many, as the landscape really demands panoramics, and I haven't gotten round to tidying them all up yet. I've added one though, so let me know if you want to see more of them! I really suggest you click on the pano to see it in full screen.


Billy, our field safety person looking out over the mountains. The Ross Ice Shelf is to the right.


Flying south. This is the Mulock Glacier (i think thats the right spelling). It took us 10 minutes to fly across it!


Refueling the Helo. The fuel cache had been dug out the day before, which was good! We had to refuel when we first got down there, and again before flying back.

GPSing our first point (that rock on the left)

Another shot of the first point.

At the second point- where the panorama at the top was taken from.

Walking back down to the helo from the second point.

View over the Hatherton from our third point.

Our helicopter sitting on a frozen lake!! And the side of the glacier is above it!

Flying over one of our points. That's snow being blown over the side of a cliff! There was a heap of cold dense air going over that cliff.

On the way back we flew quite high to try and get out of the rough air. We were so high that we flew over the top of Mt Discovery. On the top there's these amazing cauliflower-like snow formations. They're truely stunning, and about 3-4 metres tall!

More of the formations

Epic.

With Mt Erebus in the background.

Pretty.