Winter is going very quickly here at Rothera, the whole base have lots of jobs that we have to complete before the summer. We have been lucky with the ice in the bay and the weather so far, we have completed lots of diving and sampling every week since winter started almost 6 weeks ago!
As part of one of our wintering duties we each do night watch for a least one or two weeks over the winter period. The reason for having a person on night watch is primarily to alert the base if there is a fire, as a fire during winter could be catastrophic to the running of the base. Secondly, the major job seems to be cleaning whilst everyone is asleep!
More importantly than the cleaning is that we have to be in the tower at midnight, 3 am and 6 am if there are field parties out on winter trips. In theory if they had an issue they would ring the tower on the SAT phone.
I got very bored so made everyone some muffins, I usually burn or completely ruin the mixture so I was pretty surprised when these turned out ok; 9HG would impressed!
As I was actually awake at 730 am for once...only because I was working as night watch until 8 am I launched a weather balloon with John our base met man. Weather balloon data has been collected at Rothera station for more than 30 years, providing a valuable long term data set for climate scientists.They launch balloons 4 times a week at about 8am. At the same time, all over the world, about 800 other balloons are being released. Attached is a radiosonde which has a GPS to track the wind speed and direction and other instruments to measure temperature, pressure and humidity. The importance of the data is to find information such as the fact that temperatures below 8km in the troposphere are warming and temperatures in the stratosphere are cooling.
People on base tell me that my face is rather expressive...!
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| Thanks John Law for the photo. |
The wildlife has decreased in numbers over the past few weeks, the plankton numbers are now below 1 mg/m3 and the sea ice is forming and breaking up regularly so most animals are starting to migrate further north. These are likely the last elephant seals that we will see until they invade our base again most likely in October/November. Interestingly today we saw Adelie penguins, we haven't seen any for at least a month, snow petrels and guls are regularly flying around, however the Antarctic Snow Petrel has recently started to make an appearance - they are fantastic at soaring.
Darkness. The civil day light hours are quickly reducing. We wake up with the stars out. It now gets light at 1030 am and starts to get dark around 3.30 pm; in the next week or so we have the flag down ceremony. The sun does not rise high above these mountains to the north of us. On the other hand, the sun rising and setting is creating some incredible colours!
The base is currently like as ice rink as one day last week the air temperature was 5 degrees and it rained....
The algae on top of the fast ice got a bit excited...
As there are not many hours of daylight left we leave as soon as civil twilight begins, this is in the morning on the way to a climb on north stork.
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Great view of the bay whilst belaying.
Loving it.
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| Photo by Ali Rose |
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| Al and I at the top of Stork |
So far so good for winter at Rothera!