snow/sun work/wait

Sunday wrapped up much the same as Monday and Tuesday. It's Wednesday morning now. The weather goes back and forth between cold/windy/snowing lightly and warm/calm/sunny, but the helicopter flights continue being delayed due to weather at the destination ice-shelf camp. So we are continuing to work in the Crary lab, eat in the cafeteria, and try to relax despite the anticipation.

Here's something odd that caught my eye in the cafeteria since Ross Island (location of McMurdo Station) is surrounded by a glacial ice shelf and a frozen bay.
("No Ice available. Sorry for the inconvenience")

Just a refresher: ice shelves are 100's of meters thick and flow like a fast glacier, slowly calving icebergs into the sea. There's an ice shelf to the north of us where we did snowcamp and where the alternate landing field is, and there's a huge ice shelf to the south across the bay and over the mountain range (Ross Ice Shelf) where we will be setting up camp and the detector. The bay is frozen over in the winter and used as the primary landing field but somewhat and partially navigable in Summer.

Last night I walked over to the main common building (#155) to check the helo flight schedule after watching "Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back" in the dorm common area with the guys (the one where they are fighting on a snow-world, of course). On the way the view across the bay was rather stunning. I need a telephoto to capture the immense grandeur of the abrupt mountains covered in snow and divided by a glacier or two. But maybe you can get an idea for the setting from these two pics. The first is a view to the SW showing the harbor here. All the flat white is the ice on the bay. They hope to free up the harbor in time for the annual supply ship to use it when it arrives in January/February. The runway (not shown, but also on the bay's ice) will be moved to the ice shelf to the north in a couple weeks when they decide that the sea ice has melted enough to be unsafe.
The second pic shows the Chapel of the Snows and on the left you can see a brown hut which is the old Coffee House and the Comms building behind it with one of its transmitter spheres on the roof. With such great beauty here, it's a shame they have to have wires on telephone poles, but I suppose the intense cold of the winter would destroy buried cables.