weather in Antarctica

Last night after class I walked down to hut point (it's about a 15 min walk) after sitting all day and didn't see any penguins but did see some pretty spectacular weather. It was especially cool because yesterday morning we had this great lecture on Antarctic climate

and discussed how the storms all come from the southeast because the south pole is a low pressure system and cold dry air sinks and then, because it's really dense, it moves down the plateau because of a combination of katabatic (density driven) winds and the Hadley cell (remember that from intro oceanography?). The pictures don't really capture it, but the left one is looking southeast from hut point (toward the incoming weather) and the right one is looking northwest, where it's still clear. Today it was colder and windy. The dry cold air from the south pole is also why Antarctica is so dry... it's actually a desert. They told us to drink 4 L of water a day and I've been finding that I really do need to drink that much and also put LOTS of lotion on.

Today we made more ice in the -20 C cold room... here's Dennis in his big red jacket. We actually spent most of the day setting up to do better experiments... it's hard to take pictures of ice in a metal can so we built an aquarium with lexan sides and a metal bottom. It was fun because it involved visiting the plumbing and insulation people and the carpenter shop. The carpenter shop is REALLY nice, which I guess you would expect since they have to be able to build and fix stuff. There are a lot of characters in Antarctica (anyone seen the Werner Hertzog movie?) but they're all very friendly. This Saturday is "ice man" which is the antarctic equivalent of burning man. I have no idea what this entails, but I hope it goes sort of late because we have class all day and there's a special lecture Sat. night by this guy Charlie Bentley, who is a geologist who did a lot of work here back in the 50's and 60's and is now retired and back down here running one of the maintenance crews - how cool is that?

Here's a picture of the huge nudibranch Jim collected yesterday (note 6" ruler above it). He went diving again today but I haven't seen what he got yet. Tomorrow Mark and Jim (the biomechanics profs) are going to check out a new site in a helicopter and collect some algae for us to freeze. I think we get to go sometime later... we did do helicopter training so we're all ready to go!