Glacier Daze

Backing up a bit, our Monday 11/28 flight was again cancelled but Tuesday morning we flew to the ice shelf. BTW, I've learned that it's all glacier and you use "ice shelf" if the glacier is over water like we are, and you use "ice sheet" if it's over land. So we flew on Bell 212 helicopters for about an hour South over the bay, Black Island and Minna Bluff. Here are some shots of the trip: (at the helipad, Joulien squeezed between Nate and Julia, the sea ice of the bay, landed on the ice shelf)

I'm using my cell-phone as a camera and that scans a CCD to get the image electronically rather than photographically. The result is the blades of the helicopter move before it finishes scanning down the image making it look bent in a really cool way. Basically we jumped off and started unloading gear under the spinning blades, then they simply took off and there we were many miles from the nearest landscape feature besides flat white snow. As you step in it you sink about 6", and the first 75 meters down is frozen old snow called "firn". Beneath that is about 500 meters of solid glacial blue ice, and beneath that is the ocean. Kevin completed the crevasse safety survey and returned to McMurdo. The rest of us (me, Jordan, & Joulien from UCi8 and Bija, Julia, & Nate from McMurdo) spent the rest of Tuesday setting up camp and searching for the remains of last year's ARIANNA experimental station which was buried under the snow somewhere.
You can see our initial pile of supplies on the left and our camp after we set it up on the right. The 6 small tents to the right are our individual sleeping tents, the white pointed "Scott" tent is the toilet, and the big yellow one is our kitchen, workroom, etc. To the left of that you can see the food and equipment cargo lines. The mountains in the background are over 20 miles away I'd guess.

We soon discovered that the internet link back to McMurdo was not operational. We had some access a few days later on Saturday, but again lost it until Tuesday a week from when we arrived on the ice. So I'm doing some catch-up blogging here (on Wednesday 12/7 local time). More later.