Special Update From Parker Levinson, Project PhD Student and Returning Field Team Leader:

I wish I was writing this update from Antarctica, but the team and I are still in Christchurch, New Zealand, waiting for our flight to McMurdo Station. We were supposed to leave a week ago. 

Delays like this aren’t uncommon. Some years it’s just a day or two. Other times we can be waiting for weeks to fly down. Why is it so hard to get to McMurdo Station? For one, there are very few planes that can even make such a flight. Of course, those planes are heavily used and need to land in challenging Antarctic conditions, which sometimes results in them being grounded so small repairs can be made and flights can be safely conducted. Plus, the weather at both McMurdo and Christchurch has to cooperate with good visibility, limited winds, and relatively high cloud cover.

Then, the runway we land on in Antarctica is made of ice and snow, and it requires many hours of work by people in heavy machinery to prep the runway for a gigantic plane to land. Each morning, the pilots wake up and check the weather, they talk to the people in charge of the runway, and they make a call on if the plane will fly or not. We get word in the wee hours of the morning if we’ll be flying to Antarctica, and recently, as soon as we get the news of a cancellation, we roll over in bed and fall back asleep. But while we get to go back to sleep, employees at the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) have to find us hotels to stay for the additional night and rebook our transportation. We often focus our blog on the science and the logistics that happen once we get to McMurdo, but there’re so many moving parts before we even step foot on the continent. 

So what have we been doing with all our free time? We’ve been catching up on sleep, training and spending time together as a team. We went to the Antarctic Center and experienced our first Antarctic storm. We sat on some decommissioned snowmobiles and got sneezed on by a seal during the 4D extreme theater showing.

We went to a rugby match in Christchurch and perhaps figured out all the rules to the game right as the final whistle blew. We even went bowling and played mini golf!

Let’s just say it’s good we’re all biologists and not professional bowlers. We may have even accidentally starred in a reality tv show when we went for our morning coffee and saw Amazing Race contestants running through Christchurch. Of course, we’ve also done some good training for the field. For example, today we hand drew maps of the study area and sea ice cracks from memory. We’ll probably have to review this once we’re in the field….

Right now, with the weather, staffing constraints, and runway conditions, it sounds like we’ll have a few more days in Christchurch. But things can change within minutes and we’ll keep waking up each morning hoping that today is the day we get to fly. 

–Parker Levinson, PhD Student and Returning Field Team Leader