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The Aurora Australis continued its transit to Hobart, making good time due to the favourable wind and swell conditions assisting our progress.
This evening a second presentation was provided by a member of the summer technical support team for the Mount Brown South site, Mr Paulie Hanlon. Paulie is a rigger and carpenter from Queensland, who joined the existing support team at the site (including Antarctic deep field veterans Peter 'Bloo' Campbell and Sharon Labudda) to establish and maintain a small camp at Mount Brown South to enable an international scientific team to extract ice cores, some being several hundred years old.
Despite its name, the site is characterised by flat and featureless terrain from horizon to horizon and is well over 100 nautical miles inland, accessible only by helicopter or ski-equipped fixed wing aircraft from the Davis station ski way. Its position inland from the coast and at a higher altitude, meant daily life was far more extreme for the team who had limited shelter from driving wind and snow, and temperatures inside the tents plummeting as low as minus 28 degrees Celsius daily. As well as setting up the sleeping, kitchen and diesel fitter's tents the support team also used compact plant & machinery to dig out a large working trench to house the drill for the ice core work, before constructing a larger tent to sit above the coring trench. Once this work was complete, the team used specially modified quad bikes with tracks instead of wheels, to drag a weighted blade along a 1 mile section of the ice adjacent to the camp site in order to smooth out the uneven surface presented by sastrugi (large mounds ranging from one or two feet to several feet in height and formed as snow is shifted and moulded across the ice sheet by strong winds), to provide a makeshift runway for the fixed wing aircraft.
Frequent blizzards brought snow drifts up to a few feet thick and drove the snow inside the field camps' working tents covering machinery and stores. This meant the support team were regularly digging out tents and equipment, just to keep working and living spaces habitable and to keep vital support systems operable. Some team members tolerated the harsh environment for up to seventy days, including over Christmas only returning to the comparably benign weather environs of coastal Davis station in the last week before the ship's arrival.
Despite these hardships however, the support team have helped facilitate the successful retrieval of over 200 metres of ice core by the scientists which will be used by the Australian Antarctic Division and other partner scientific organisations to analyse atmospheric conditions and changes over the last several centuries. The cores are safely encased in special containers in turn stowed aboard the Aurora in a refrigerated container which keeps the temperature at a constant -18 degrees Celsius until the vessel arrives in Hobart. These, and many other samples extracted from field sites and from aboard the vessel during the voyage, will be delivered to the Antarctic Division's purpose-built Cargo Biosecurity Centre at the Macquarie wharves on Hobart's waterfront, for inspection and clearance by quarantine authorities before being released to laboratories in Tasmania and elsewhere.
In the coming days, the vessel will observe time zone changes to bring us steadily back into line with Hobart (Australian Eastern Summer Time), and plans will be developed between the vessel, voyage management, the Division's Hobart-based shipping section and the vessel's operator P&O Maritime - around our return.
Cheers
Mark & Fred
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.