Davis this week has gone from cold to colder, Wednesday's temperature hitting a low of minus 22ºC. That is enough to make your eyebrows and whiskers freeze as this young elephant seal confirms.
 Young male elephant seal before the sea froze |
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This week has been business as usual around the station despite the cold. The crusher, out of action until the arrival of a new clutch on Voyage 4, has run almost non-stop during daylight hours, churning through several hundred cubic metres of rock in the process. Ahhh the serenity…
 Crusher in action |
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The rock being crushed is carted by truck from a quarry nearby where controlled blasting during the summer months has loosened substantial quantities of material excellent for surfacing.
 A load from the quarry |
|  Another load from the quarry |
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The heavy vehicles have loaded, tipped, bulldozed and rolled out the bumps and lumps around the place making the potentially hazardous business of travelling from one building to another a lot safer and more predictable even with snow. There must be something about big diggers though as it is hard to get these guys to stop.
 The finished product |
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At night for our entertainment we are sometimes lucky enough to have a light show courtesy of the aurora australis, and the LIDAR, that remarkable green laser beam that gathers information as it pierces the different layers of the atmosphere to the very outer reaches, over 80 kms up.
 The Aurora Australia and LIDAR beam |
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Occasionally the photographers get even luckier and capture meteors entering Earth's atmosphere at the same time.
 Shooting star with aurora australis |
|  Shooting star, aurora and LIDAR |
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This week the new Living Quarters were incorporated into the Davis circuitry. While the power was down to most buildings allowing this to be done, we once again moved the frozen food around. Voyage 4 brought us a refrigerated container to store the extra food required for this winter to feed higher numbers on station to fit out the LQ.
 Group effort |
|  Andy and partner |
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And as the sun sets over the icebergs – I'm off for tea. See you next time…
Alison Dean
Davis Station Leader
