Arrival at WAIS Divide

[We had no internet at WAIS Divide from Jan. 3 to 22, so I'm retroactively updating this blog with reports from our field work over the past few weeks.]

The LC-130 flight crew on Jan. 3rd let two of the scientists on our flight sit up front in the cockpit, so Dr. Kiya Riverman (working on the Thwaites MELT project) and I sat in the cockpit during take-off.

LC-130 at Willie Field near McMurdo, preparing for departure.

It was pretty neat getting to sit in the cockpit for take-off and part of the flight.

Our LC-130 had only 6 people - 4 people from MELT and 2 from TIME - but we had quite a bit of cargo for our seismology projects.

The TIME and MELT teams were very excited to land at WAIS on a sunny afternoon to start the next phase of our field work preparations. While we gathered our personal equipment from the plane, the WAIS camp staff unloaded our cargo. First we gathered in the galley for a brief camp overview by James, the Camp Manager, and then we headed out to "Tent City" to pitch our little Arctic oven homes for the next ~2 weeks.

Moving luggage by snow machine from the snow runway to the main camp at WAIS.

My Arctic Oven tent in "Tent City". We each set up an Arctic Oven, so the City had about 30 tents - one for each person in the camp.

The WAIS galley and recreation tent. Anna, the amazing camp chef, cooked many delicious meals here.

Camp office and communications building (left), science office (2nd from left), and mechanics shop and tent (two buildings on the right).

We had a TIME field planning meeting with James, the Camp Manager. The forecast suggested a weather system would be moving in the following day that would significantly reduce visibility and include wind and blowing snow. We decided to flag the entire route to our field site to ease the commute in poor weather, so we packed a few field gear items, including a 10'x20' Arctic Oven tent and went out to our field site to flag the route and set up our "field base" tent. We spent the rest of our evening on that first day organizing our field gear and cargo that was offloaded to the WAIS cargo lines.