8 June, 1998

Good morning all!

A glorious day in beautiful, quiet (compared to Chicago!) Maine. Today Brenda Hall helped me begin to generate a list of things to bring and things to not bring for life in Beacon Valley. It will be quite primitive and I am imagining that the primitiveness will be offset by the beauty of the valley and having frozen peanut butter for lunch!

Brenda has been to Antarctica many times and has good advice about what to choose in Christchurch and actually how little I will need to bring from home. We will be limited to one orange bag (the bags that are issued in Christchurch) on the helicopter from McMurdo to Beacon Valley. So everything that I will need and want while we are there must fit in that one bag. There will be more about this later!!

I will fly from Chicago to Los Angeles and then to Aukland, New Zealand. This last leg will take 18 hours. From Aukland we fly to Christchurch where we will try on our ECW (extreme cold weather gear) and prepare for transport to McMurdo. We will likely fly on a C130 Hercules. This will be like flying on a B52 equipped with skis. The ice will be breaking up by the time we get there. We will have to wear our ECW gear while on the plane.

The group I will be going with will include some people from Boston University and some students from Maine.There will be five of us at first. Dave Marchant from BU will be the leader. Later George Denton from Maine and David Sugden from the University of Edinburgh Scotland will also join the group. Marchant is a geomorphologist and specializes in analysis of volcanic ash. Denton has been working in the Dry Valleys for more than 20 years. He believes that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has been stable for some 10 to 15 million years. Sugden has found a slice of ice that has been dated at 8 million years old in the Dry Valleys.

In the afternoon we began to talk about the project, why we will be doing it and how some ideas of climate change have evolved. I will discuss these general ideas tomorrow.

Adios y vaya bien!!!