3 December, 1996

Dec 3, Tuesday

Up about 7 again and skip breakfast. Jennifer gets me an orange and a banana......some of the fruit they had for Thanksgiving that is still left. Otherwise we don't get fresh fruit here.

Worked in lab in AM until I got ahead of Suruj who is looking in the steroscope to try and find the microspheres. (My job is to melt and ice cores and filter the water so that any trapped microspheres get out of the beaker and onto a piece of filter paper.) Suruj uses a microscope to try and find them and count the number and color of each. We go through many samples with no microspheres, but found one blue sphere that had traveled 1.8 km down wind. That's incredible.

After lunch Jennifer and I decide to go to Willie Field and try and get more snow ripple data. We had hoped to go two days ago and confirm that the same features left at Ferrell ASW were also formed at Millie Field during that blizzard. Unfortunately, snow had fallen for the last two days and may cover any features that formed before.

Going in the field takes a lot of time. First we have to secure a van. Then we change into ECW and pack a few things to nibble on in our back packs. We may not get beck for dinner. Then we had to go to the Berg Field Center and get our 2 person survival bag out of the cage and put it in the truck. We add a few things of dried fruit and candy bars to the bag. We have to exchange the HF radio so that takes a trip to the radio center. The phone part of it was defective so they swapped it for another. But we will still need to do a radio check.

Now we check out the oil, water and gas on the van and fill the tank. Finally we're off to the field. We see many seals on the broken ice near Scott Base as we pass. The road is slippery and difficult

to drive on with the new snow. When we get to the automatic weather staton at Willie Field we first had to do a radio check on the new one we picked up. It is OK and Mac Ops hears us loud and clear. At last we were ready to collect data. Dr. Braaten will take this radio with him when he goes out in the field. (He had planned to go Wed. night, but the trip has been postponed until Thursday night.

The new snow that had been deposited left series of ripples, just as we had anticipated. We could use our apparatus to measure these. The snow features at Ferrell AWS were too high to use our apparatus. We took about 35 photos using our apparatus and then the sun went behind clouds. We ate our mixture of granola, candy, dried fruit, etc and waited for the sun to come out. No luck, so we gave up and returned to the base about 8PM. We had started getting ready to go at 1PM. The whole process took 7 hours for about 35 photos. Incredible.

We kept our gear in the truck and hope to get out there again tomorrow. Time is running short so it will be touch and go.

I worked in the lab a short time, but was exhausted. I was running a slight fever so went back to the room and washed clothes and got to bed by 10:30. An all time record for me since Oct.