Setting up camp at New Harbour
Exploration ICEBLOCK
A collaborative exploration of the Chilly Continent
We made it to New Harbour after an amazing flight over the 80km of sea ice and onto the coast of the Dry Valleys. We are able to use a small camp base from the Americans which means I have internet acces to put up these photos and email everyone! Setting up camp is lots of work...
The New Harbour American camp base. We can use this for cooking and eating and some of the team can sleep in here.
The rugged 10year old sea ice at New Harbour. The Haglands with the sledge train couldn't come over this and had to stop with all the gear about 10km away.
A closer look at that rugged, tortured sea ice. This sea ice has been freezing and expanding for so long that it is pushed up and down to create these crazy sculptures! The brown stuff is lots of dust and sand blown down from the Dry Valleys.
This shows how the ice cracks and is pushed up when the dust and sand layers warm up from the sun.
The Helicopter slinging the loads from the Haglands and sledge train to our New Harbour camp and dive site. If you click on this photo you can see that this slingload is a skidoo!
Food boxes delivered by slingload from the heli - all frozen rock solid!
More loads dropped off by the helicopter near the dive site.
Unpacking our food. It all got frozen on the journey over here. These jars show frozen olive oil and peppers.
Here's all our food for 2 weeks, neatly shelved.
Look how we melt our frozen water... over the gas heater.
Boiling fresh water in the small pots and melting sea ice/snow for dish washing. We don't want to use fresh water for the dishes because we had to carry all the fresh water in from Scott Base since there is no clean fresh snow around here.
Sink system in the hut. We have to collect all our grey water. This gets evaporated so the sediment only is left, which gets sent back to NZ for processing.
What do you think this is that we found in the floor?! HINT: cold air sinks. All the frozen food we want to keep frozen we just store outside!
Solar panels for charging the radio phones that we need to communicate with Scott base and eachother (from the dive site to the camp site).
Our toilet house and lab hut at our camp.
Super shadow in the midnight sun. How do you think my shadow gets to look this long?!
Horay, our tents put up and ready to sleep in. This photo was taken close to midnight - see how light it is at night!
