More beautiful days in the field

And then there were 4

Shelly took her scheduled flight back towards home on Wednesday so our smaller crew headed out for our first field day without her on Thursday.

I started the day with my usual call to the weather forecasters in Charleston. I talked to Chris that morning and after some discussions of wind speeds and potential gusts, I brought the information to the rest of the group and we decided to give it a try. If it's too windy, then ice shavings and snow blow into the hole while we are coring and can cause the corer to get stuck. Also, it's just a much less pleasant experience to do field work in the wind. Luckily, the weather was gorgeous on the ice. We had a bit of wind, but it was our warmest day yet and our lady ice bug (our pop up tent) provided shelter when we wanted it. The tent shelters our ice cores when we are doing temperature profiles as well as providing shelter for snacks and pee breaks (these all happen at different times).

Karen and Katarina cutting an ice core in the tent.

Our smaller but mighty field crew.

Adela vlogging in front of the lady icebug.

We are having some mysterious contamination issues in our artificial brine that we use to melt our samples. This is slowing us down quite a bit in the lab, meaning some longer hours this week.
I also learned how to weld this week, thanks to John, the welder on station. The results weren't pretty, but it was fun to do something that wasn't watching liters and liters of water filter in the lab.

Snowmobiles parked at our field site in front of Mt Erebus.