And another week flies past here at Mawson.
This week the last group completed their Hägglunds driver training and plateau familiarisation. Given the conditions that we may encounter whilst out and about, a major part of our driver training is to become familiar with driving ‘blind’ to the GPS. To simulate this, Mark blocked the driver’s windows and it is quite discombobulating to have no external reference. Good to experience though, as it may well be what we get in a blizzard or the dark — not a lot of ambient light up on the plateau! We all passed our training, so are now able to plan recreational field trips via either quad or Hägglunds; in fact, the first group are setting out this weekend.
We test drilled East Bay this week and the sea ice is thickening up nicely there, so as soon as the weather allows Linc and his sea ice team will be able to start the weekly measurements at the second site for the Sea Ice project. There are four sites around station that we monitor for this long-running project — Horseshoe Harbour, East Bay, West Bay and Kista Strait. We need to wait for the ice in the Strait to settle before we can open up the last two sites.
Saturday night we had a formal dinner and Donna again went all out including a range of seven different desserts. Sadly, no pics as everyone was far too busy eating to think of photos. Sorry!
