Hurry up and Thwaite!

The LC130 at Waste Divide. 

Luxury travel in the LC130

I recently returned to McMurdo after about six weeks out on the Eastern Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue. It has been very much a season of long delays interspersed with very busy periods, or if like a terrible pun, hurry up and Thwaite.

I was working as a field guide for the British Antarctic survey (BAS) with a mainly American team as part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). The ITGC is a collaboration mainly between the British and the Americans to study the Thwaites Glacier area of West Antarctica. There were a number of field teams at different locations around the glacier studying the rapid changed that have occurred in the are in recent years. In this post I will focus on the season in general, and discuss the science that was carried out in a future blog post.   

The delays this season have focused around getting in and out of  McMudro. In my previous post, written in late November, I mentioned the delays we had experienced in getting to McMurdo, and then in leaving McMurdo. Well the latter continued after I had written the post. After a couple of false starts I didn’t actually leave McMurdo until the 13^th of December when I was flown on a LC130 to Waste Divide.  Waste Divide is a major logistics hub for USAP operations in West Antarctica and is situated at about 79°S. It plays a similar role for USAP that Sky Blu does for BAS (a place I spent a lot of time back in 2015/16 and wrote about here http://blairfyffe.blogspot.com/2015/12/sky-blu.html), but being USAP is much more substantial.

Arriving at the site that would become Cavity Camp via Basler. 

Fortunately the four skidoos and a lot of the science kit our team required had overwintered at Waste Divide and had already been flown down to our field site while we had remained stuck in McMurdo. This meant that once we arrived at Waste Divide things moved pretty quickly. I was only on the ground at Waste for a few hours before myself and two other members of the team climbed aboard a Basler and headed off. We were flown down to a spot on the Eastern Thwaites Ice Tongue that we called Cavity Camp, and would be our home for the next few weeks.

Cavity Camp from the air about ten days after it had been established.  

There were three of us on first put in flight to Cavity Camp, and three more people arrived the next day. However, due to further weather delays it was another week or so before all eleven members of the team had arrived. The team consisted of eight scientist/technicians, two field guides and one journalist. The aim was to carry out various geophysical surveys of the area, and to drill a couple of holes through the iceshelf. 

Wetness on the side of the tent. It was not
cold where we were with some
very wet snow/rain.

Initially myself and Cece, the other field guide, spent our time out proving the routes required for the geophysics. In the planning process a lot of effort had been put into studying satellite images and choosing safe working areas. Initially we were quite cautious of buried crevasses. However, in the end the area proved to be quite benign, with no surface crevassing being observed.  After a few weeks of proving routes and carrying out geophysical surveys, on the 30^th of December the drilling started.

The full team in front on a trusty twin otter. 

It could get quite busy with eleven people in our cook/dinning tent. 

The purpose of the drilling was to put a hole through the ice shelf into the ocean below so as to make various measurements and install monitoring equipment. We ended up working on it for 36 hours straight.  For this period we were joined by another scientist and a BBC camera man working on the Frozen Planet II. 

Accommodation was in a mix of mountain tents (in picture) and more traditional pyramid tents. This gave everyone their own space, but did require a bit of effort to maintain including building some substantial wind walls. 

Given the success of the drilling and geophysics it was decided that in early January that half the team would head over to another ice shelf (the Dotson) to do some geophysics work there, and the other half would remain on the Eastern Thwaites ice tongue to drill a 2^nd hole a few kilometers away from the first. I would stay with the drillers.

The Doston team headed off on the 8^th of January, and after a few days of moving camp and equipment four kilometres we were ready to start drilling the second hole. Although we only had six rather than thirteen people, the ice was a little thinner in this location (about 250 metres), there was not geophysics happening concurrently and we knew better what we were doing. This meant the drilling went a lot more efficiently with the whole process being successfully completed in 24 instead of 36 hours. After that a few days of packing up equipment and tents, and we was flown back to Waste Divide by twin otter on the 18^th of January, and then on to McMurdo a few days later. I had been out on the Eastern Thwaites Ice Tongue for 35 nights.

The first drill hole was done in a 36 hour push. This led to some tired people. Ben the cameraman from Frozen Planet II having a wee snooze (it was about 5am at this point) while waiting from an instrument to come up. A core sample form the sea bed can be seen in the tube to the left. 

Overall the weather we experienced out at Thwaites was better than expected with only few days of science being lost to weather. It was generally pretty warm for Antarctic standards with the temperature generally between about minus three and plus two degrees Celsius. The was a couple of days of wet snow verging on rain in mid December. Although unpleasant at the time, the advantage of this was when the weather cleared and the temperature dropped, the snow surface hardened up to give a good firm surface which was easy to travel on. We did have one storm during our time out here. In terms of pure wind strength it was not that high, only around 30 knots. However, it did occur after a snow fall so there was a significant amount of drifting, and thus a fair bit of digging was required to maintain camp.  We also unfortunately manged to rip a large hole in the side of the main cook tent during this storm which we did manage to fix but required some hardcore storm sewing.

Sewing up the tent after it was ripped in the storm.

I type this sitting in McMurdo.  I was suppose to be leaving McMurdo a few days ago, but unfortunately the American Air Force C17 which was suppose to take us off continent seemed develop a problem with an engine when it landed, and thus could not transport us.  In total three of the four flight I have had in/out of mcMurdo has been significantly delayed by weather/planes breaking down. Looks like another day of hurry up and Thwaite!

A C17 with a broken engine leading to more delays. Notice the ladder below the rightmost engine. Seems to be a common theme!