As of this afternoon, we now have three TIME team members on the ground at WAIS Divide - TJ, Mike, and Kirah. Mike and Kirah traveled with one of the Twin Otter planes out to our T2 field site and dug several snowmobiles out of the snow. Apparently, the digging was tough, and the snow in places seemed more "like a rock" than like snow. They have now returned to WAIS Divide for the night. TJ flew from McMurdo to WAIS Divide along with an electrician and a utility technician who will help with the continued camp set-up. We are very grateful for the opportunity to start moving towards our field sites when WAIS Divide is still setting up for the season due to weather delays for their camp put-in.
One of the most amazing sites I have seen in Antarctica is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Camp. A small band of 8-10 incredible camp staff create a comfortable community in the middle of the flat, white, inhospitable environment near the continental drainage divide in the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet at 1800 m (5895 ft) elevation. The WAIS Divide is an ice flow divide, a boundary that separates the regions where ice flows in different directions toward different Antarctic coasts.
In a typical science year, WAIS Divide will have a number of science teams moving through or based at the camp to complete research projects on glaciology, earth science, seismology, meteorology, hydrology, and more. I last visited WAIS Divide in Jan. 2019 for seismic source and instrumentation testing as an early part of the TIME project. There were about 25 people (10 camp staff and 15 scientists) at the camp when I was there (perhaps 35-40 total scientists passed through WAIS Divide that year). This year, there are 8 camp staff and fewer scientists working in West Antarctica due to continued impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Other than TIME, another International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) project, TARSAN, will be passing through WAIS Divide as well as POLENET.
This year, WAIS was notable as one of only a few locations in West Antarctica that was inhabited for the Dec. 4, 2021 total solar eclipse! We heard reports from the group there that the total solar eclipse was "amazing", "worth the hype", and they experienced sunset, darkness, and sunrise in about two minutes! They were very lucky with a clear weather day in a place that frequently experiences clouds, fog, and blowing snow.
We are hoping the TIME team will reunite at WAIS Divide in the next few days and proceed to have a safe and successful field season at the Eastern Shear Margin of Thwaites Glacier.
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