Some of you might be thinking, wait just a minute, why is the Thwaites team still blogging? Aren't they supposed to be huddling in a tent drinking hot cocoa and staging field equipment near the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?!? Well... our flight today was delayed until tomorrow. There are a lot of moving logistical parts here, and flight operations and the logistical coordinators are working hard to get all of the science groups out to their field sites. Flight delays are part of life down here, and we just adjust as needed. There is no shortage of things to do between packing the passive seismic equipment (see previous post), refining field area maps, working on a proposal, upcoming conference abstracts, and scientific papers related to other projects.
We have a scheduled flight tomorrow morning, so hopefully we'll get out to WAIS Divide tomorrow. However, we'll see what the weather does. The Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System appears to show a system of heavy clouds moving into WAIS sometime tomorrow. If we can land before the clouds roll in, we'll be good to go. But if we can't get there before the clouds, we may be looking at days of delay as the thick clouds are expected to last 3+ days...
Either way, everyone is doing what they can, and we'll keep working and hoping we get out there soon!
