Antarctica 2011 Part 4 - last minute training...

This week has been all about getting our cargo into the system. Everything we take into the field must be checked, packed, sealed, labeled, and weighed, before it is "TCN'ed" into the cargo system (In Mcmurdo, TLA's - three letter acronyms - can become verbs).

Once our cargo is in the "system", we'll all know how much it weighs, and how much space it takes up, so that we'll know if it will all actually fit on the two twin otters that are being provided for our transportation out to Field Site #1: The Holyoake Range.

We've nearly wrapped it up. But with the weather being as good as it is (the storm is long gone), we've taken the last two days to do some glacier travel and crevasse rescue training while still enclosed within the "safety net" of the Mcmurdo system. Earlier today we traveled out to the Silver City icefall to stroll around with crampons on, and to practice rescuing backpacks from crevasses.

A few photos...

Lars H (in black) watches Lars S(in red/black) practicing his self-belay and self-arrest techiniques. Christian (green) and Paul (red) watch from the background. Thats Mount Erebus way back there...

Glenn Brock lives in Sydney, so it took him a while to get used to living and traveling on so much snow.

Christian Skovsted up close and personal with some of the blue ice from the Silver City icefall.

These are Paul Myrow's old Koflachs from the 1998/1999 season. I was shocked that so much wear and tear could be put onto a pair of boots in one season. Paul explained that it was all about the sharp, abrasive limestones and fissile shales and siltstones - tearing rubber off your boots piece by piece...

L to R: Lars S, Christian, and Paul working on a bit of crampon technique in the Silver City icefall.

We parked the Hagglund at Happy Camper, and walked across the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf to the top of the Silver City Icefall with a rope on.

Julian Hanna, from FSTP, leads half our team down from the Silver City Icefall. The crevasses are quite easy to see here - in the distance behind Julian. Castle Rock is at the far upper left corner. Erebus in the background.

Antarctica 2011 part 2 - the planning, the prep, and the training...

 Today is October 28th, 2011 and we expect to be on a C-17 northbound to Christchurch on November 30th. This will be my shortest deployment to Antarctica yet.

Before we go into the deep field of the Trans Antarctic Mountains, there are heaps of things to do in town first. The team is now going through the normal entry-into-McMurdo routine - lectures, death-by-PowerPoint, training, more training, briefings, packing, eating, sleeping, and more training...

I need to fulfill my FSTP refresher obligations (except now I'm a student rather than instructor!), while the scientists I am working with need to take the two-day Happy Camper course - so that they thouroughly understand the camp equipment and deep field put-in procedures.

The Team - There are five scientists, and me - the field mountaineer. Here's a little more about the five I am working with:

Lars Holmer - the PI (principle investigator) is a professor of Paleontology at Uppsala Universtity in Uppsala, Sweden. He loves brachipods more than almost anyone alive. If humanity was forced to choose something other than gold as the world's reserve currency, Lars would prefer it to be articulate brachiopods. Lars wrote the proposal for this project "Hot Fossils in a Cold World".

Christian Skovsted - Christian is another aficionado of the lower Cambrian Small Shelly Fossils. He works at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm part of the time, and also at the University of Uppsala.

Lars Stemmerik - Lars is the department chair of the Geology department at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a man of few words, but many Carbon and Oxygen isotope samples.

Glenn Brock utters the phrase "small shelly fossils" more than any man alive. He speaks science in verse and rhyme. He is a professor of Palaeobiology and Invertebrate Paleontology from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His specialty is "stem groups from the lower Cambrian" - in other words - this Antarctic stuff...

Paul Myrow - Paul is a geology professor from Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. Paul is the comedian and musician of the group. Within one hour of meeting him he had given me two of his blues albums. Paul is the only one of us who has been to these field areas before. He's a sedimentologist, but with a keen handle of invertebrate palaeontology. Paul visited one of our sites 12 years ago with Dr John Goodge, who I traveled to Antarctica to work with last year, out of CTAM.

The Project: These five scientists who are interested in gathering "small shelly fossils" from limestone of the lower Cambrian (about 540 million years ago) during the "Cambrian Explosion" when diversity of invertebrate taxa (stem groups) accelerated rapidly (The "Cambrian Radiation Bioevent - if you like fancy scientific terminology). The title of our proposed project is "Hot Fossils in a Cold Land". We'll be examining reef and shallow marine carbonate  deposits that formed when the earth was warmer, but also when the Antarctic continent was further north - in a more temperate latitude. Other Cambrian marine fossils show that North America, Australia, parts of Greenland, and central Antarctica where all joined up along lower latitudes as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Do you read Swedish? You can read the team blog updates here.

Some photos: (of the planning, prep, etc...)

In Phase 2 of Crary Lab (the most expensive non-military U.S. building per square foot - allegedly) Lars Stemmerik and Paul Myrow get some work done. The view into our "office" in the Crary lab building.