Postcard from the Field #2 : Expedition to Antarctica… Getting ready

Preparing for a deep field expedition to a remote site in Antarctica is a complicated process, and we don’t want to leave anything important behind! Our camp at Mount Waesche will be about 950 miles from McMurdo Station, as the crow flies, so we need to bring everything with us that we will need for our multi-week field season. This process takes a while. Including the heavy drilling equipment that we will need for our research, we will have over 20,000 lbs of cargo to take to our field site. In addition to the science gear, we’ll take the tents that we’ll live in, all of the food that we’ll eat, camp stoves to cook food and melt water, snowmobiles, sleds, fuel, and many other items. Before packing everything up, we went out on a “shakedown” trip, where we tried out our camping gear to make sure that everything was in good shape. The day that we chose for our shakedown was windy and snowy, which gave us a good opportunity to test putting up our tents in the wind without having the tents, or anything else, blow away. We also practiced putting in and traveling along rope lines between the tents. While we hope that we’ll never need these in earnest, the lines will allow us to move safely between the living and cook tents in case of very windy conditions at our Mount Waesche camp.