29 October, 2004

Flight delay.

We had a great time talking to the students of 7C1 this morning. While it was 10:30 a.m. Thursday in Newport, it was 3:30 a.m. Friday here! Dave Bresnahan, who is the National Science Foundation representative here at McMurdo, and has been here for 33 years, got up to join the broadcast. So did John Deaton, a teacher who is currently working as a driver here at McMurdo and working on communicating with school groups. Also present as an observer was Jean Pennycook, who coordinates the education programs here at McMurdo. She came here as a TEA (Teachers Experiencing Antarctica) in the 1999/2000 season and worked on a project studying Mt. Erebus. Her web journals from that experience can be seen at: tea.rice.edu/tea_pennycookfrontpage.html.

I did a few things in the lab, went to breakfast at 5:30, then back to bed for a few hours. I went to check the flight board on the way to lunch - flight delayed 24 hours. Returning from lunch, I was happy to find that the team had returned. We loaded the equipment from the sling load onto a pickup truck to be returned to various places around town. Jennifer, Kathy, Bob, and I went to the Berg Field Center (BFC) to return the camping equipment. The BFC holds all the field camp equipment - from tents and sleeping bags to kitchen gear.

While we were there, Kathy remembered that there was some good art to include on her web update, so I took some pictures.

We unpacked the tents and sleeping bags and hung them up to dry. They will be used again when the team goes over to New Harbor on the other side of McMurdo Sound.

1. (From right) Dave Bresnahan, John Deaton, and I speak with students at Thompson Middle School during our early-morning TEA audio conference.

2. Fish print art at the BFC. This Antarctic Cod (Dissostichus mawsoni) was caught by Dr. Art DeVries, whose aquarium is located right outside our lab. Fish printing, or gyotaku, is a traditional Japanese art in which ink is put on the fish and then paper is carefully pressed over it. The doorway at the bottom of the picture provides scale to show how large the fish was.

3. A live mawsoni (Antarctic Cod) in Art DeVries's aquarium. Our limited experiments showed that mawsoni are not interested in citrus fruit.

4. Penguin art on the side of a box at the BFC.

5. Life-size "Macopoly" on the floor at the BFC.

6. Our Scott tent drying in the back of the BFC. All the other tall yellow things are Scott tents, ready to go out to field camps.

7. LOTS of sleeping bags at the BFC.

10. I will just miss the big McMurdo Halloween party - if my plane, rescheduled for 3:00 tomorrow, actually leaves, that is. This is a huge event, and people get very creative. Here's Kathy's costume from two years ago. She was a sludge worm, and the sign says "Eat sludge. Yum!"

9. Erin, who works at the BFC, showed us some of the ugliest clothing they have there - a bright red hat with a pom-pom, shiny blue leather gloves, a weird face mask that looks like something Hannibal Lecter would wear. But our favorite was the ancient, scary down face mask that Bob is demonstrating here. It is almost Halloween....