Vas at WAIS

Ice caves close to Cape Evans.

Vasileios Gkinis, PhD at Centre for Ice and Climate, is our man at WAIS 2010/11. He has just arrived to McMurdo in Antarctic where he is now waiting for the flight into the camp. Read  about his experience and follow the daily news from the WAIS Divide season 2010/11.

30. November 2010, news from Vasileios Gkinis at McMurdo 

McMurdo station is an Antarctic US research base located on the Ross island at 77oS, 166oE. The station provides support to the research activities associated to the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) and accommodates about 1200 people during the austral summer. The scale of operations taking place in and around the station is indeed very impressive. 

The first acclimatization of the WAIS divide core handling team to the Antarctic environment takes place here. During the past 7 days a series of courses and outdoor activities gave us a first impression of the conditions on the ice. In practice the weather over WAIS is not very different to what we have experienced at NEEM camp in terms of temperature and snowfall.

View from the lab in Scott's hut at Cape Evans. The hut itself and many everyday items and scientific equipment are preserved in their original condition and protected under the Antarctic treaty. Built in 1911 it served as a base camp for the Terra Nova expedition.

The flights that are going to deploy the core handling team to the WAIS camp are scheduled for this week (week 48) so we cross our fingers for some good weather during the next days. In the mean time we can enjoy short trips around the station entering ice caves, getting close to seals, or visiting some of the old huts built and used by the first polar explorers as Scott and Shackleton. A glorious dinner with a lot of turkey was also prepared by the cooks of the station to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, preparations in camp move smoothly forward and as of today (Nov. 30) the arches have been accessed and cleared from snow. Further activities are preparing the camp's infrastructure for drilling and core logging. The depth of the final core for last year's field season was 2563 m with the bedrock estimated to be around 3400 m. Several meters of drilled and logged ice core  have wintered at WAIS and waiting to be packed and shipped back to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, CO. This is going to be one of our first tasks and it is going to create the buffer we need to create before the drillers start pulling more new ice on the surface. 

Vasileios Gkinis, McMurdo

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