RICE 2012/13 Field Season Blogs

While we had brief breaks in the stormy weather a stiff breeze and blowing snow dominate conditions over the past week. Richard and Bob are still waiting at McMurdo hoping for a weather window to come to RICE. Here at RICE we are wrapping up final preparations for our winter storage and getting ready to leave.  Darcy, Hedley, Peter, and Luke have drilled a paddock full of elephants- or 18 cargo stands staged on platforms, each supported by four large fuel drums. These elephants will keep cargo from drifting in too much in the winter. Twit has completed his radar work obtaining great data that also showed the drill hole in its relative position to the RAYMOND pump and topographical divide. The weather has now settled to complete the GPS measurements. Jeff spends a few hours every day preparing our ski way levelling the large sastrugi that keep falling and is preparing the generators for their winter sleep. Alex revised our aircraft load sheet and responds to the ever changing flight schedule and departures and arrivals. Margie is busier than ever with our outside work winding down, people now have time to come in for delicious custard squares, freshly baked breads, pies, and rolls which just seem to keep coming from the oven. Even if you didn't feel hungry coming into the RAC tent you find yourself craving a hearty treat that Margie is just taking out of the oven.

Monday, 14 January

Over the past five days wind, snowfalls and drifting snow created large drifts everywhere, since the snow is soft every walk around the camp means that you find yourself every so often knee to hip high buried in the snow. The once smooth surface of Roosevelt Island is now once again covered by snow and Jeff has worked continuously on our runway to maintain its good condition. Darcy, Hedley, Alex, and Peter added the expansion to our bore hole casing as the drifting snow has been filling in our large drill trench. Twit continued his radar survey despite the challenging weather conditions and has being getting great results. All our cargo is now stored on our winter line and could still be put on planes once the weather allows for more flights. Luke and Nancy inventoried the food stock and while we are in very good shape we concluded it’s not enough to make it through the winter. By the weekend we are planning to pull down the RAC tent which has been our home for the past few months and move into the smaller and non heated endura tent. We hope to leave for Scott Base and McMurdo station in the week starting 21 January 2013 but as always the weather will have the last word on this. In the meantime we still enjoy the comfort of the RAC tent, Hedley made his famous bacon and blue cheese omelettes with hash browns for Sunday brunch and Peter cooked steak, eggs and kumara with a balsamic capsicum salsa for dinner. Richard and Bob are still at McMurdo station waiting for a break in the weather to make it to RICE. Less disgruntled by the weather two skuas visited the camp and placed themselves at a safe distance observing the strange happenings at the RICE camp before disappearing into the foggy skies from our interesting entertainment. We will spend the day digging out tents and keeping out of the wind which is best done by eating delicious bad weather food. Margie is making a lamb roast for dinner with broccoli and a gorgonzola sauce, life isn’t so bad.

Thursday, 10 January

• People on site: 9
• Weather conditions: -8°C, moderate snow fall, foggy.
• Drilling completed 20 December 2012

Happy New Year to you all! We had a rather eventful time since our last blog. First of all on 20 December 2012 we completed drilling at a depth of 763 metres- Hooray! The second to last run recovered the usual 2 m long single piece cores which showed a few sand sized grains in the lower section of the core it took over 900 kg to break the core but the hydraulic system dealt with it well. The next run got us only 25 cm but showed that it had clearly plucked off the rock below. We had reached the bottom and that very close to Twit and Richards’s depth of 760 m the final core was facebreak and had a distinct cloudy band with a higher concentration of sediment. We sent the drill down again for assurance that we had in fact reached bedrock and recovered a small amount of sediment that stuck to the drill head and was mixed into the final cuttings. The whole team have come to the drill trench for this last run and we proceeded to celebrate the successful conclusion of our drilling season gathered around the drill.

Over the next week Christmas and New Years gave us nice opportunities to continue to celebrate, while we started on the final stretch of the season. Darcy, Alex, Hedley, and Peter cleaned the drill hole of the cuttings, disassembled the drill system and returned the casing to the surface of the drill platforms. Jeff, Margie, Aja, Shimeng, and Ali relocated the heavily drifted generator tent and excavated the power compressor lines.  Daniel and Nancy processed the brittle ice from the core buffer, most of the ice cut very well while some cores especially below 650 metres cracked. Aja, Skylar, Ali, and Luke excavated and sampled a 2.5 m deep snow pit with annual resolution for isotope chemistry, dust and black carbon. Darcy, Hedley, Peter, Ali, and Luke drilled two shallow firn cores (10 and 20 m deep) for Bob and Ali’s bore hole measurements.

On 4 January we received the next flight. On this flight the first five of our team members left. Shimeng, Daniel, Aja, and Skylar left to Scott Base with the MKB Basler crew. They were excited to go, they landed at Williams field runway, Lex and Brad from Scott Base waited with a reefer to tow the ice core boxes back to Scott Base. The rest of us felt a bit lonely after their departure which we addressed with having a BBQ along with some gin and tonic. On Monday 7 January we received the next flight from McMurdo which brought Twit to RICE and took out all of the ice core boxes. This was a big relief and we were able to switch off the refrigeration unit which kept our core well below -25°C while on site. We then started to decommission our drill tent it took just 24 hours a good portion of sweat and creaking muscles, Alex and Jeff on the snow blowers and a whole lot of digging to fully excavate the 30 m long drill tent which served us well for the past 1.5 years. Richard and Bob made it to McMurdo from Christchurch and we hope to see them soon here at RICE. Twit has started his radar survey and we looked at the first images showing our drill hole. Margie keeps us all in good shape with her delicious RICE cuisine; we are having spring rolls for smoko- got to go

- Cheerio from the RICE team.

Tuesday, 18 December

• People on site: 13
• Weather conditions: -10°C, sunny
• Drilled depth: 708 m

Yesterday after an 18 day wait the weather finally cleared and allowed our flight to come to RICE, thus 52 ice core boxes and Holly made it to Scott Base while Luke and Ali arrived with big smiles to Roosevelt Island. We all are hugely thankful for everybody that made this happen, Lex, Peter, Dominique and the comms team at Scott Base, with Nancy and the weather service at McMurdo station and the Kenn Borek Basler crew of course. In the meantime we made excellent progress with the drilling reaching 700 m during the night shift. While the ice is now very brittle it still reaches the surface in 2 m long single piece cores, however, sometimes cracks develop when the core is pushed out from the barrel into the vacuum system or while resting on the core trough. These cracks do not normally fracture the core into multiple pieces which might be in part due to the netting. We also now observe an increase in temperature in the drill hole which is not unexpected considering we are close to the bedrock. Since Saturday we started cutting the first cores from our core buffer with overall good results we decided to hold off a little longer allowing for more consistent good cuts.

On Saturday Holly and Jeff organised the Roosevelt Island beach party in the blue bach, the bach came complete with fishing rods, a sun (in the marked absence of the real one), jandals, and a stranded sailing boat. Some were brave enough to join the party in their beach towels but a heated game of trivial pursuit kept everyone warm before we retired to the RAC tent for Saturday dinner. The surf and turf dinner was prepared by Peter and Aja. Peter cooked steak to order, Aja substituted the surf with a vegetarian turf with a selection of fried tofu starters and tasty marinated grilled tofu (a New York recipe by Ajas brother). Margie surprised Jeff with a delicious Hatz generator birthday cake complete with exhaust fumes and control board which was quickly devoured leaving a small left over piece that was non repairable even by Jeff. Sunday brunch was prepared by Maître Hedley and assistant Nancy serving Spanish omelettes to order with hash browns.

- Cheerio from the whole RICE team.

Thursday, 13 December

• People on site: 12
• Weather conditions: -11°C, thick fog, with blue sky above 
• Drilled depth: 600 m

We are still waiting for the friendly Basler team to make it to Roosevelt Island, however continually thick fog is making this rather challenging. Nonetheless, we made excellent progress with the drilling. We still obtain 2 m single piece cores with each run, however, we experienced some cracking over the last day or two of the core when it is pushed out of the barrel.  On Tuesday night, the night shift drilled beyond sea level depth of 550 m. Well Roosevelt Island is called an island it is in fact a rise since its bed does not reach above sea level. While our drill site lies 550 m above sea, the ice thickness is 760 m, and hence we will drill 260 m below sea level. To celebrate this milestone, Peter offered to cook a surf and turf dinner on Saturday and him and Margie have been in intense planning mode. Today also is Jeff’s birthday which we will celebrate with Roosevelt Island version of sushi for lunch and surf and turf dinner on Saturday. We hope that we will receive a flight today, as the backup generator and some freshies would be a well received birthday present for Jeff.

Temperatures have recently dropped a bit to -10°C to -11°C creating more pleasant conditions, which keep snow from melting on everything. The continuous fog keeps renewing beautiful rime, coating everything stationary in feathery white such as ropes, and, shovels etc. Snow petrels keep investigating us much to the delight of everybody.

- Cheerio from The RICE team !

Monday, 10 December

• People on site: 12
• Weather conditions: -6°C, thick fog, and wet snow
• Drilled depth: 507 m

Since our last blog, flights were cancelled due to weather conditions. Thus Holly is still waiting to get home to New Zealand and Luke and Ali are still enjoying the hospitality of Scott Base. Here we made excellent progress with the drilling and we are still obtaining 2 m long single piece cores with almost every run. Our breaks have become heavier too, now averaging 450-550 kilograms, but the hydraulic s system works extremely well and doesn't damage the core. We now have 57 ice core boxes in our storage cave, which is getting rather full. Since Saturday, we have started putting all cores into the core buffer as the cores started to develop some fractures when cut with the band saw. The cores will be left in the buffer for 10 days to relax before we try cutting them again. The refrigeration unit built and modified by Christchurch Refrigeration is working well, delivering air of -27.5°C into the buffer and core storage area and keeping the temperature well below -20°C. After a particularly difficult core break using the Danish super-banger system, we also had to apply the Danish fishing technique… which was successful after the first attempt. This was celebrated with an appropriate toast to our Danish friends and an obligatory Gammel Dansk. On Wednesday, Hedley Alex and Darcy conducted some maintenance on the drill cable termination, switching to a stronger connection for heavier breaks, which has worked very well. Jeff was busy building a new home with a backup generator which we will receive with our next flight. He used scaffolding and a blue tarpaulin, creating a superb blue room and making RICE quite a posh address.

On Saturday night, in the marked absence of the new generator, Holly and Jeff celebrated the opening of Jeff’s blue shack by turning it into the local bar, serving snacks and a fruit punch laced with New Zealand produced stout along with music. Everyone was invited and were required to wear something blue. This ranged from a bluebird balloon to blue nitro glove earrings to blue underwear. The bar bouncer, Nancy, made sure that the blue tickets were presented before entry was allowed. Holly and Nancy cooked dinner for Saturday night with a highlight being Holly’s famous chocolate fondue for desert. Aja and Holly volunteered for making a fabulous brunch on Saturday baking fresh bread, topped with eggs a la Roosevelt Island (soft boiled eggs, on a pesto, tomato cream, and bacon base).

Aja and Holly continue to battle the heavy snow falls of the past days and weeks, and take snow samples with a daily walk to our clean sampling area about 800 m away from camp often in visibility less than 100 m. Jeff has trained Daniel as our night shift generator expert, checking his performance during the night shift hours between processing cores. Peter has become our winch expert, changing the alignment at light speed during the upward travel of the drill. Skylar has taken a few time lapse videos during the night shift which turned out very well and which we hope to put on the webpage when we have access to the internet again in February.

- Cheerio from the whole RICE team.

Tuesday, 4 December

• People on site: 12
• Weather conditions:  -5°C, fog with heavy snow fall and 10 knot winds
• Drilled depth: 400 m

Monday last week, Luke and Ali made it to Scott Base and headed off to their Antarctic field training. On Thursday, a flight was scheduled to bring them to RICE and take Holly back to Scott Base, having finished her shift with RICE, for a well deserved holiday back in NZ. But the weather always has the last say and on Wednesday evening a front moved in, causing new snow drifts, foggy conditions with poor visibility, and a lot of fluffy new snow. Thus the flight was cancelled. In the meantime, we’ve made good progress with the drilling. The cores are becoming more brittle but so far almost all runs return about 2 m single piece cores, which are still easy to cut with the band saw. While the drilling/core processing teams finish the operations in the drill trench, Jeff has been modifying the services tent, keeping the two main generators on their best behaviour. In addition, he made the RICE ski-way one of the most accomplished flat surfaces on the island, which will impress the pilots next time they come through. Margie’s noted a much increased food consumption with the start of our shift work (now we have time for four meals!) and fighting the onslaught with hot chocolate, apricot scones, toasted buns, and hearty soup for smoko breaks, along with mountains of yummy food for lunches and dinners, which seem to disappear at a moment’s notice. The cribbage competition has slowed a little with the four main players now stretched over two shifts, but Saturday a new tournament is planned.

Over the past few days, thick fog, extremely warm temperatures and snow fall dominated our weather. Cancelling all scheduled flights and creating very large snow drifts. On Friday evening one of our two main generators suffered from technical problems. While Jeff and Alex investigated the cause, carrying out some repairs and modifications of the set-up including our heat exchanger system, drilling paused to ensure that our back-up generator would not suffer the same issues. With help from Peter, Rex and Molly at Scott Base, a replacement generator was indentified which will come with the next flight. In the meantime, Ed and Byron from Youngman and Richardson in NZ had to endure our satellite calls over the weekend, sourcing a spare part for us overseas . While the drilling was on hold, the drilling and core processing teams, set-up the refrigeration unit during their shifts. The unusually warm conditions has caused the temperature in the drill trench to reach single digits, while the core buffer and storage case still cycle below -20°C. The refrigeration unit will run daily during our non-drilling hours from 3am-7am, which we hope will keep the core buffer and storage area well below -20°C.

On Sunday, Jeff and Alex gave the all clear and we started our normal shifts again. Although the cores are still getting more brittle the drillers still manage to produce beautiful 2 m long cores with each run. However, the cores have become more difficult to process and hence we started putting all cores into core netting which prevents the cores from breaking while being processed on the core troughs. The drillers are happy with the core processors again now the cores are no longer being harmed. On Monday, we crossed the mid-way point of 380 m (hooray!) and in the afternoon the night shift used the “super-banger” for the first time. This Danish invention enables a particularly strong core break, which was necessary since it took 682 kg to break this particular core run. The core did not suffer from this at all, and we again had a 2m long piece of ice on our processing table.

Holly and Aja take turns at collecting snow samples for themselves, while Peter, Daniel and Skylar make good use of the snowy weather. Yesterday was also Peter’s birthday and in good RICE tradition, we celebrated well ahead of time during our Saturday dinner which Margie turned into a superbly delicious event with birthday decorations (even serviettes), tasty pork chops with apple sauce, vege’s, and mashed potatoes, followed by a passionfruit cheesecake. On Sunday morning Nancy made a “European” brunch, with hot buns from Margie’s yummy sour dough and various types of cheese, paté, and to the disgust of some – tinned sardines. Today we are waiting again for a flight and hope that the fog will lift to bring Luke and Ali into the field and take Holly home along with the 45 ice core boxes that are currently in our storage cave. If anybody has good connections to the weather gods, please put in a nice word for us!

- Cheerio from the happy campers at RICE

Monday, 26 November

• People on site: 12
• Weather conditions:  -9°C, sunny, 4 knot winds
• Drilled depth: 232 m

Today we began drilling again after a short break on Sunday. Drilling is going very well and everyone has adjusted to the new routine and time schedules. After the split into two shifts over the last two days, we enjoyed coming together again for dinner on Saturday and brunch on Sunday. Daniel made delicious pizzas that kept streaming out of the oven. Aja with help from Holly (the Australian representatives, but neither actually Australian) made crepes for Sunday brunch. They donned the Australian flag to humour their supervisor.

To recognise the drilling success so far, Nancy presented Alex with some rose tinted glasses.
Ice Core boxes are filling up fast with ice core and snow samples. Daniel, Skylar, and Aja, continue to sample snow events. Today Holly started sampling a snow pit for iron, dust, black carbon, and stable isotopes. Jeff was a digging machine.

We had beautiful sunny and calm weather on Sunday and some of us spent our recreation time cross country skiing.

The national flags have been put up alongside the drill trench- New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Peoples republic of China, United Kingdom, and, United States of America.

- Holly

Thursday, 22 November

• People on site: 12
• Weather conditions: -12°C, overcast, 10 knot winds
• Drilled depth: 158.70 m

Today we started our shift work. For this shift gets up at 4 am to prime the generators. Alex, Hedley, Peter, Nancy, Aja and Holly represent the day shift working from 7 am – 2 pm and 5 pm -8 pm. Darcy, Jermaine, Daniel, and Skylar are the night shift working from 2pm-5pm and 8pm-3am. Margie keeps the smiles up with hot drinks and pikelets for smoko in the trench and huge delicious lunches. Since we started our shift work today, we decided to celebrate our American colleagues Thanks Giving (a day early). Last night Aja sung the US National Anthem, Skylar wore a turkey hat which Peter brought but kindly offered to Skylar. Margie in good kiwi style made some wonderful lamb chops with cranberries, mashed potatoes, cheese cauliflower, and green beans. This was followed by pumpkin pie, lemon tart and plum cheesecake. Finally, Peter got to slaughter the only turkey on the table which was a cunningly disguised paperbag stuffed with M&Ms. We all felt like we should be lying on the sofa watching a football game!

The drilling is going very well and we are starting to learn the dance. As the day shift went in for lunch break we had drilled 12 metres. Most of the runs give us single piece 2 metre length core. The weather is a little bit average with a lot of blowing snow, white-outs, stiff breezes and heaps of new fluffy snow that is beautiful until the wind starts blowing again moving new drifts in the way of unsuspecting pedestrians. Over the past couple of weeks a new highly competitive game of cribbage with Alex and Holly taking on Peter and Daniel who are currently in the lead but suffered severe defeat yesterday.
- Happy Thanks Giving everybody

Monday, 19 November

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island 
• Weather conditions: -12°C, 25 knots of wind, blowing snow
• Drilled depth: 129.60m

Drilling has commenced and we recovered the first piece of core! Over the past few days Darcy, Alex ,Hedley, Shimeng, and Peter set up the drill. The hydraulic system was giving them some grief with our valve having suffered some damage during the winter however, this morning Darcy and Hedley were able to fix it. They then investigated the drill hole to verify that the drill mast is still aligned vertically over the drill hole and that the casing and casing shoe are fine. After a cleaning run to pick up any cuttings that may have spilled out since last year (there were only few) the first piece of core was drilled with our new wet barrel. Hooray the new core fits perfectly to last year’s piece (not a surprise but still a relief) since last Thursday Jeff, Peter and Daniel pumped 1000 litres of drilling fluid, a mixture of ESTISOL and COASOL oil into our storage tank to allow the fluids to cool before being pumped into the drill hole. Alex and Peter levelled the core processing bench and set up the vacuum system which was dripping the drill fluid from the core. In the meantime Nancy set up the core processing equipment including ECM the scale and the temperature probes. Holly and Skylar were busy making a thermal curtain which will help to keep the core buffer and storage cave as cool as possible but hopefully well below -20°C. To help this along Hedley set up our new refrigeration unit which sits on the surface above the core storage and will produce and pump cool air into the cave. Jeff was able to fix the leak in the generator exhaust system and tendered with our special grooming equipment to our ski way creating our best runway surface yet. Daniel set up his snow precipitation sampling array for isotope and geochemical analyses of snow . Holly took a large volume of surface snow samples for dust analyses, Aja set up a snow trap for black carbon analyses and, Skylar set up a sampling line to take daily surface snow samples, this was excellent timing as we woke today to blowing snow which provided the first sample.

Sunday morning we started with yummy brunch prepared by Daniel and Peter which included pancakes meat medallions and real scrambled eggs. A huge Sunday dinner was prepared by Skylar and Jeff based on an old Haines family recipe, while it apparently didn't taste anything like the original dish it tasted excellent none the less! Margie continues  to keep the troops happy by coming up with amazing dishes including freshly baked pumpkin bread, roasted almonds and sundried tomato rice, coffee cakes and,  cream cheese and salmon parfait. Today as the team came back to the RAC tent a pot of hot chocolate and spunky sausage rolls let everybody forget the raging snow storm outside and provided a celebrative background for the first ice core of the season.

- Nancy

Thursday, 15 November

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island
• Temperature: -12°C
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

We woke to beautiful clear, sunny skies, with only a gentle breeze of about 8 knots and balmy temperatures. On Tuesday morning, Aja and Peter saw the first Snow Petrels of the season. They swooped around both of them, checking them out curiously before heading to the end of the runway perhaps out of professional interest. Yesterday, Kenn Borek delivered flight #7 and we are hopeful to see our last put-in flight today. Yesterday we also celebrated Skylar’s birthday, our ‘spring chicken’. Margie made a particularly nice dinner followed by a huge, delicious birthday cake, which involved plums, coffee custard, and hazelnut meringue.

In the drill trench, Darcy and Hedley are busy re-terminating the drill cable and putting the drill together. We now have all the lines for air, drill fluid, electricity etc laid and the winch and mast are operational. Holly and Skylar cleared the core processing benches and started levelling them. Peter and Shimeng set-up the Arctic Oven tent which will serve as our changing room for our drilling fluid contaminated clothing, while Daniel cleared all the snow drift around our cargo and tents with the snow blowers. Hedley, Nancy, Aja, Shimeng and Peter started setting-up the core buffer shelves, put stairs into our storage cave and tunnel, moved the cargo into their storage lines and filled up the core fridge with empty core boxes. Jeff, Alex and Daniel worked on the generator exhaust system and added new snow drift doors to the services tent. Margie is keeping everyone happy and warm with very yummy food which brings the troops back into the RAC tent for morning tea, lunch and dinner. I have on good authority that we will have ‘spunky’ sausage rolls for smoke-o this morning.

With the arrival of the last flight, Nancy’s 3 am wake-ups for weather observations will be over (at least until the next round of flights begin in early Dec)!

Monday, 12 November

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

Since the last log (sorry for the long delays in posting updates) we all made it to Roosevelt Island! The Kenn Borek team took the first group (Darcy, Hedley, Margie, and Nancy) with JKB, on one of their beautiful DC-3 or Basler aircrafts, to the RICE camp at Roosevelt Island. On Monday 23 October we landed on site after a 2.5 hour long flight at our old site. We set-up camp in -18°C which is about 5°C warmer than typical for this time of the year. Soon after, we went for a little rekkie around the camp. Much to our relief everything wintered well! The drill tent, the generator tent and, our winter lines are in excellent condition. The two tents were almost covered with snow drift but they show no damage to the fabric or structure. The drill trench shows only very minor distortion from compaction and has no traces of snow drift inside. The ceiling of our snow tunnel and storage cave sagged by about 50 cm and is covered with beautiful 5-10 cm long snow crystals. The raised cargo winter line (we refer to them as elephants) worked extremely well and we were able to pull off the cargo almost without digging snow. With the next break in the weather Alex, Jeff, Daniel, and Shimeng made it to RICE on Wednesday 31st October, while they got busy setting up their tent Margie rearranged our small temporary kitchen tent to make space for now eight hungry people.

The next day though, we finished setting up our RAC camp which serves as our kitchen, work, and shower tent and has two AN8 fuelled heaters, ‘Oscar’ and ‘Oscar Junior’. The heated, large space makes life for all of us easier. In the meantime while we continue to set up camp and infrastructure, Peter, Aja, Skylar, and Holly helped at Scott Base to get the remaining aircraft loads ready and staged at the McMurdo sea ice runway. On Monday 5 November they also made their way to Roosevelt Island and arrived along with cargo in two Kenn Borek DC3s just minutes apart, turning our camp into a busy little airport. We have now received all but two of our initial put-in flights and have all team members and essential cargo on site, ready for drilling.

Since then we cleared both entrances into the drill and service tent and recovered most of our winterised fuel and drilling fluid. Both big generators are operational, we chain-sawed a 2.5 m deep freezer cave for our food, chain-sawed the core buffer, enlarged our ice core storage cave and laid the electrical cables and drilling fluid between the RAC, generator, and drill tent.

For the past week, we have experienced mainly foggy weather with low visibility, blowing snow, and temperatures of -18°C. Yesterday, Sunday, was our day off and we all had a shower, read books, played games (even a banjo was played), and enjoyed a fabulous brunch made by Alex, an Indian curry followed by lemon tart for dinner made by Holly, with Aja’s moral support.

Today we woke to rather poor weather conditions with 20-30 knots of wind, blowing snow and reduced visibility to 20 m. In the drill tent however, the world is calm and quiet at the moment, we enjoy yummy salami and cheese scones and hope that the wind and blowing snow will ease up soon.

- Cheerio from the whole RICE team

Thursday, 8 November

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

All of the RICE team have now made it to Roosevelt Island. The team are now waiting for their last two cargo flights to arrive. Once the camp has been set up they will make their first call for the blog.

Friday, 2 November 

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island (8), Scott Base (4)
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

November 1st, a cargo flight arrived at Roosevelt Island and returned unused borehole casing pipes to Scott Base.This morning's Basler flight to Roosevelt Island was cancelled due to high winds across the runway at the field site. The four of us who are scheduled for this flight will now spend yet another day at Scott Base! There is cross-country skiing, dishes, napping, and reading on the schedule now for today. The RICE crew out in the field are doing excellent, and have already moved in to the RAC tent that will be our home for the next few months. All indications are that things are going very well out there, and our delay here at Scott Base will have little effect on the overall progress towards our goal of drilling to bedrock this season.

- Peter.

Wednesday, 31 October

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island (8), Scott Base (4)
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

This morning just before 9:00am our second passenger/cargo flight departed the ice runway for Roosevelt Island. The flight carried Alex Pyne, Daniel Emanuelsson, Jeff Rawson and Wang Shimeng, as well as plenty of frozen food and camping gear. They arrived at midday, and the Basler is currently en route back to base carrying a load of rubbish out of the camp. This makes 8 of us at Roosevelt, 4 at Scott Base. Those of us remaining at Scott Base (Holly Winton, Aja Ellis, Skyler Haines, and Peter Neff) are packed and ready to go at a moments notice. Our current schedule is for a cargo-only flight as soon as possible (hopefully tomorrow!), followed by our last passenger connection to the drilling site. After that, flights 5, 6, 7 and 8 contain cargo only and are scheduled for delivery in the next week or so. We're feeling good and are ready to set to the drilling!

- Peter

Tuesday, 30 October

• People on site: 12
• Location: Roosevelt Island (4), Scott Base (8)
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

On Monday, the first flight into Roosevelt Island for the 2012-13 was sucessful. Four K049 team members (Nancy, Margie, Darcy and Hedley) landed at Roosevelt Island about midday. Camp put in with Kenn Borek DC-3T aircraft JKB. Pilots reported landing conditions were good. Initial reports on the ground indicate the equipment has wintered well with a light covering of snow on the services tent and drill trench tent. Access was gained into the drill trench/tent and showed it remained weather tight during the winter and equipment looks good. Equipment wintered outside on fuel drums also looks in good condition and is not deeply buried. The 2nd flight to Roosevelt Island from Scott Base with a further 4 personnel was cancelled today primarily due to poor weather and extensive cloud in the Roosellvelt Island/Eastern Ross Ice Shelf region. The team in the field will be continuing to dig out equipment and start the setup of the RAC Tent and main camp.

- Alex

Thursday, 25 October

• People on site: 12
• Location: Scott Base
• Metres Drilled: 0 m

Wednesday, we were again scheduled as back up flight but all flights were cancelled due to blowing snow and poor visibility including flights to and from New Zealand. The weather provided ideal conditions to undertake navigation training in unpleasant weather conditions. Thus Jeff set-up a little treasure hunt where teams of two had to use their GPS units to find particular sites. After what seemed a long time, we can report that everybody was eventually accounted for – perhaps some looked for sites in the wrong hemisphere? Though the team identified the issue before reaching the equator and headed back to the actual sites around Scott Base in time for afternoon tea. We were again scheduled as a back up flight but the weather was good at the primary location Siple Dome so MKB took off for camp instead. We used the extra day to have fuel / drill fluid spillage training with Jeff, Alex, Darcy, and Hedley. Hedley and Jeff also delivered the remaining items for our flight 1 and 2 to the sea ice runway. Everybody else is packing their gear, doing some last minute laundry, helping in the Scott Base kitchen (amazing cooking tips come along with that also) and working on those last emails, papers, machining jobs, and getting a last minute nap on the sofa before we hopefully take off tomorrow.

- Nancy

Tuesday, 23 October

• People on site: 12
• Location: Scott Base
• Metres drilled: 0 m

We spent Friday and Saturday completing our packing of cargo loads, with Peter and Alex having to amend our cargo flight lists many times, but in the end, all is where it should be and within our weight limits – hooray! However, if we are staying a lot longer at Scott Base many of us may have to revise our personal weights since the Scott Base chefs keep tempting us with their yummy treats!!  Saturday night, Scott Base celebrated its beach party which honours the last sunset for the year (occurring at Scott Base on 22 October). On Sunday, after having spent the week packing and testing equipment, Daniel, Aja, Peter, Shimeng, Margie, and Skylar went on the Scott Base Familiarisation Trip (or Fam Trip) to Cape Evans and Cape Royds. On the way they encounter groups of friendly Emperor Penguins and are also privileged to enter Shackleton's and Scott's Huts. They come back happy and buzzing with these unique experiences while the rest of us old socks spend the day going for walks in around the sea ice pressure ridges, visiting friends at McMurdo Station, and reading a book or two in the Scott Base lounge enjoying a good cup of coffee. By Monday, we are ready to deploy to the field. The MKB DC-3 aircrew arrived on Saturday at McMurdo and have a well deserved day off on Monday. On Tuesday, we are scheduled as the back-up flight for MKB, however, due to weather conditions our flight is cancelled. At the same time the JKB DC-3 aircrew arrives at South Pole on its way to Davis Station.

- Nancy

Thursday, 18 October