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Letters Home from McMurdo Station

Spring has sprung!

Hello!

I think that spring has finally reached McMurdo. There were actually running rivulets of water in the roads here and last night I even could nip between buildings without my down parka. Yay!

It seemed as if we were in a permanent winter pattern. Earlier this week, in fact, we were smacked with another enormous snowstorm. I never thought that I'd say it, but I wished I weighed more. We had gusts of wind that reached 60 MPH. That made it very difficult for me to walk. Each time I tried to lift my leg to step forward, the wind blew me off balance. I finally had to half crawl in order to make any forward progress. Having a little more mass would have made things a lot easier, aesthetics notwithstanding.

The first twelve hours of the storm were very exciting since it was so fierce, but as the storm continued, it simply became boring. We were essentially trapped in the huts for two days, going outside only to check on the birds periodically. What was truly amazing in this storm was our solar power pod. I can't recall if I mentioned that all of our electrical power comes from a huge solar array that was set up outside our huts. We never lost power, even though we couldn't see the sun for two and a half days. The storage capacity of the solar pod must be enormous. Of course, our power needs are relatively modest. We only have a few computers and a few battery chargers for camera and experimental devices. Still, it has been wonderful to eschew the noisy, smelly, gasoline-powered Honda generators. For a place as pristine as this, solar power is definitely the way to go. Well, I guess I should amend that. It is definitely the way to go in the summer. It wouldn't work in the winter, of course.

Our group now has two more members. Walter Campbell and Monica Bustamante arrived yesterday in McMurdo. Walter is here to do the penguin census at Cape Washington and Monica will help with the penguin chick camp that will be started soon. Jaime will be pleased to know that Monica is a scientist from Mexico. She works with the endangered turtles down there and collaborates with Robert in his project on the Hawksbill turtle. Their study site is on Mona Island, Puerto Rico.

The other night we did our own "boondoggle". We drove out to the sea ice edge on snowmobiles. I guess we justified this trip to the edge because of a change in the penguins' diving behavior. All of a sudden the penguins were making extremely long dives. Normally, their dive duration at our camp is between 4 to 6 min., but Thursday afternoon they started doing 10 to 13 min dives. Paul was concerned that cracks were starting to form near the camp and that the birds were searching for an escape route. Fortunately, we didn't spot any cracks on our way out to the edge.

The ice edge was so beautiful. There were the requisite penguins, both Adélie and Emperor, out there, but what struck me was the sheer majesty of the place. You could see icebergs in the distance, one of which had just calved recently from the edge here. In fact, it was interesting, as we went out, we stepped over a small crack in the ice to reach the edge. (The ice itself was quite thick, over 6 feet.) By the time we returned, about 15 min. later, the crack had widened noticeably. I think that soon another iceberg is going to be launched.

That still leaves us with the small mystery of the birds' dive patterns. Paul thinks that since it was an overcast day, the birds were taking longer to locate fish, and thus, staying down longer looking for prey. Once we recover the time-depth recorders from the two instrumented birds today, we might have a better explanation.

That's the news for now.

Kathi