Expedition: Western Ross Sea

Land is in sight! The transit has been remarkably kind to us, the weather seeming to behave more or less as forecast.

At 5 am on Monday, 45 days of science came to an end.

I asked for some wind, to disturb the forming sea ice and give us some open water and clean data. 40 knot winds and breaking waves was not what I had in mind.

You may think ice is just ice. White(ish). Frozen(ish). In the last six weeks (yes, six weeks today!) we’ve seen a whole host of many weird and wonderful forms that ice takes in and around the oceans.

We’re back in the west (or east, depending on which way you look at things). The 2nd leg of my part of the cruise has begun.

Just as there’s a whole new way of life on this boat, there’s a whole new language. Acronyms just start rolling off the tongue.

I guess before I left I’d been worried life on board would get monotonous. There is a world of difference, though, between routine and monotony.

After the first week or so, when objectives, locations, methods deployed, not to mention sleep patterns, were in a state of constant change, we’ve now settled into a phase of steady geophysics survey.

BBQ lunch, and an afternoon gathering up on the Bridge while we get play commentary over the phone.

Travelled a little too far it would seem: back to an internet-less World. We’ve entered the absolute epicentre of a satellite no-coverage zone, stuck between the Americas and Asia-Pacific, and we’re set to be here for some time.

Travelled East, and woke up in yesterday. We’re in the Eastern Ross Sea, one of the westernmost parts of the World: we just crossed the 180 longitude line, and therefore the International Date Line.

The sea ice is not part of our science. Though perhaps no one’s told it so – it seems to want to creep up on us from any direction, at any moment.

We’ve been at sea for two days now. At sea and at science: we turned the multibeam on as soon as we had got through the sea ice around McMurdo and had open water beneath us – a couple of hours after the crew hauled in the ropes at the station. We're collecting data!

We made it! Boomerang bags were not needed, though it was apparently a close call. We landed on McMurdo Ice Shelf (a tongue of floating ice, a couple of hundred metres' thick over nearly a kilometre of water to the ocean floor) in snowfall and pretty sketchy visibility.

We should have flown to McMurdo today. Instead: another baking hot summer’s day in Christchurch. Our shuttle to the US Antarctic Program base out at the airport was due to pick us up at 6.15 this morning... then it was 8.15... 11... “I’m sorry, you won’t be flying today”.