Saturday, November 13, 2010

first helo flight of the season

***OK, don't pay attention to dates. I hate that blogger doesn't keep things in order (they don't keep the first entry at the top so you can read through in a logical order) so I fudge the dates to make them show up correct.***
Last Friday we went on a night flight to a place called Mt. Coates in the Dry Valleys. They call this area the Dry Valleys because it remains relatively ice free throughout the year -a rare occurrence in Antarctica. We were doing some minor upgrades to the existing site, and also performing what is called a tie. When we installed the POLENET system, we installed a new antenna in a new location, however, there was a system installed prior to our POLENET site. While this older site is no longer running, we can link the data from our new site to this old site by collecting data from the old antenna. This is called a tie, because you are "tie-ing" the old data to the new data, giving you a better record of how the rock is moving. The above photo shows me working on the old antenna, originally set up by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Not a bad day at the office! Because we wanted to collect at least 2 hours of data to get a good tie, we ended up having some time to look around. Mt. Coates is one of my favorite sites in Antarctica, because the surrounding landscape is like a giant playground. There are huge cliffs, beautiful valleys, peaks, glaciers, gnarled wind sculpted rock formations perfect for jumping around and playing on. It takes your breath away. Below is a photo of me doing a yoga pose on top of one of the rock formations. Myself and two friends of mine have a contest going to take yoga photos in front of impressive landscapes around the world. I'd say this backdrop qualifies for some seriously high marks.

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Love this one!! :)

7:16 AM

 
Blogger Unknown said...

This picture is great ! Where is it ? At Mcmurdo ?

6:18 PM

 

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