Our flight to recover ANITA was canceled again today, due to weather at the crash site. Hopefully we'll be going tomorrow.
Yesterday, because my flight to Siple Dome was canceled, I was able to tag along on the recovery of the pulsers at Taylor Dome.
The recovery crew. The pilots brought over our deep field survival bags just as I snapped this shot, and I think Rich is just about to help grab them. Shows what a .3 second delay can do.
You may recognize McMurdo in this shot. If you look carefully you can see the icebreaker working through some of the broken ice. It has to do this to keep the ice from refreezing.
Regardless of what you may think, there's a lot to talk about in this shot. You can see the path the icebreaker cleared, and then you can see the deep blue of open water. From the top of Arrival Heights, which is short hike that gets you up high, you can barely see the blue of the first bit of open water. When I hiked it recently, I had thought that that was the edge of the ice pack but as you can see it's not, and neither is that second bit of deep blue.
Mount Discovery in the background. I believe it was a volcano some time ago, and so this would be the lava flow from it.
And here is that lava flow.
Looking down at the sea ice. The deep blue is open water, the light blue is probably an area where wind keeps snow from covering the sea ice.
Here is Taylor Dome as we found it.
Here is a shot before we left the first time.
Here's how it looked yesterday. As you can see that solar panel wasn't doing much. This was part of our back up pulser, which was not working but not only because of the drift.
Before.
After.
The remains of our snow wall.
Some of the items were buried pretty deep, but thankfully the snow wasn't too hard.
And this is how it looked when we left it yesterday. I don't know that anyone will ever use that borehole again, but it should be clearly marked for the next five years or so.
The icebreaker leading the tanker out. The cargo ship is due in next week, I'm hoping some curious penguins will follow it in.
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