Going South

First thing's first - who's on this trip?

Robert - Research Associate in the Noble Gas Lab. Cosmogenic nuclide and Antarctic geology expert. More than a dozen Antarctic field seasons. He's the boss on this trip.

Jenny - Undergrad at Harvard working in the Noble Gas Lab towards a thesis using the sample and data collected on this trip. 

Allen (me)  - I did my undergrad at Harvard, including a thesis on Antarctic glacial history with Sujoy Mukhopadhyay in the Noble Gas Lab. So, this trip is letting me do the Antarctic field work I never got to do. I'm currently at graduate student working on remote sensing of glaciers at Cambridge University.

Mountaineer - Some of the work we're doing requires a little safety expertise. We'll have a fourth joining the crew so we can reach those hard-to-sample areas.

Although we aren't leaving for Antarctica for another week, I'm getting excited about this blog, so I wanted to post. Everybody asks me, how do you get to Antarctica? This post is an explanation of the trip down south. That, and playing around with maps on my computer. 

If you're an oceanographer or working at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula, you take commercial flights to the southern tip of South America and either take a boat or a plane from there.  (Map from http://mabryonline.org)

We are working out of the Dry Valleys via McMurdo Station (the largest base on the continent) , so we take commerical flights to Christchurch, New Zealand - I'm going via Chicago, Los Angeles, and Auckland for some reason while Jenny is flying through Los Angeles and Sydney; not sure where Robert is going. (Thanks Google Maps for the base image.)

In Christchurch where we get cold weather gear and final logistics before taking a chartered flight with a bunch of other scientists down to McMurdo Base. We'll spend about a week there doing final preparations for our field work in the Dry Valley. The map below is from the original proposal for this research. (I split it into two pieces so it would be a bit bigger.) See the links on the side for more information about the Noble Gas Lab, the Dry Valleys, and Antarctic glacial history. And hopefully, this post answers how we will get to Antarctica.