Twin Otter

I apologize that I have some catching up to do on the blog. I will get to more on that in the next post. Before Shelley and I went out to West Antarctica, we had a day trip out to the Vito and Emilia sites. These sites are farther away than the ones that we were visiting at the beginning of the season. Therefore, we got to fly on a Twin Otter. These planes are great. You can see in the picture above that they are ski planes. The pilots are a fun bunch out of Canada and have great accents. In these planes, the cargo is loaded right into the cabin with us and the seats fold down from the sides of the wall. We had a great flight out to Vito. We flew along the edge of the ice shelf and could see the open water of the Ross Sea. The darker blue part in the middle of the picture is the ocean. I could see an iceberg floating out there.



At both sites, Vito and Emilia, we did tower raises. Due to snow accumulation, the towers on our AWSs need to raised every couple of years (how often depends on the site location) in order to keep the instruments above the snow. This involves removing all of the instruments from the tower, adding a 7' tower section to the top of the existing tower and then reassembling the instruments. We were lucky that we had two morale people to help us on these tower raises. The morale group are a list of people who work in McMurdo and do not have a chance to get out into the field. If we have extra room on our trips, we can take a few people from the list. We had Levonne and Jason to help us and they were great! Here is a group pic.