Back to Antarctica- Roosevelt Island

Greetings once again!  I'm headed out again, this time to Roosevelt Island, a small ice rise in the Ross Ice Shelf. I'm part of an international team of scientists working on a project known as the Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) project. A team of drillers from New Zealand have already finished drilling a core over 700 meters (metres here in NZ) down to bedrock on the island, from which they expect to extract a climate archive. My component of the project is, not surprisingly for those who have read many of these posts, borehole logging. I'll measure temperatures and optical stratigraphy in the main borehole, and set up a continuous logging temperature string in a shallower hole, that we'll collect next year when we return for another round of logging. More on the science later. Right now, I've just arrived in Christchurch, NZ, and been issued with my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear. The US antarctic program operates a warehouse here with all the things a person needs for cold weather. I didn't have my camera handy when I was there, but here is picture of my colleague and friend Rolf Tremblay with his ECW gear (this was way back in 2001, but the gear is pretty much the same, though they don't give us as many pairs of socks any more!).

I've also been informed that, as per usual, flights are delayed getting South- sounds like the weather is actually too warm and the ice runway is getting soft! And, of course, the airlines lost my luggage. So the delay in getting to the antarctic is actually not too bad, as it will hopefully allow me some time for my baggage to catch up to me. We'll see how that goes!