Packing Up

Against a backdrop of smoke-filled air and concern for family and friends in the Sydney bush, we spent last week packing our shipping container with scientific gear for Antarctica. The last month has been a scramble, with Chris and I ordering and receiving ever more equipment, talking to the media, negotiating with various officials – or trying to – and drawing up lists of supplies still to be bought. It’s incredible how quickly time has gone. We leave in just five weeks!  In that time we have to get the equipment to the Invercargill port of Bluff, clear customs and be ready to load our vessel, the MV Shokalskiy, when we take ownership at one minute past midnight on the 27 November. Somehow we appear to be on schedule.

The arrival of our shipping container
Not a lot has changed over the last century. Preparation for expeditions has and always will be a manic affair. When getting ready for the original Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Mawson’s diary for November 1911 is essentially blank; left clear by the amount of work that he and his team had to cram into a short period of time. The only diary entry for that month remarked that ‘the Aurora [the expedition ship] arrived Hobart and much fitting and arrangements had to be effected.’ No time to write anything else. I know where he was coming from. Mawson later reflected on this part of the expedition and wrote in his book The Home of the Blizzard that ‘the exertion of it was just what was wanted to make us fit, and prepared for the sudden and arduous work of discharging cargo at the various bases.’ No doubt true but all I can think of at the moment is sleep!


By Chris Turney (at +Intrepid Science)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia’s climate history

Image
500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history Patrick Baker , University of Melbourne ; Chris Turney , UNSW Australia , and Jonathan Palmer , UNSW Australia Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years. As part of our Australia and New Zealand Drought Atlas we’ve published the most detailed record of drought and wet periods (or “pluvials”) since 1500. The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900. But 2011 was the wettest year in our 513-year record. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. We may get one year of extremely wet conditions (for example in 2011) or we might get six years of extremely dry conditions (such as 2003-2009). North Queensland may be flooded out while Victoria suffers with drought. Or in extreme circumstances, the entir...
Read more

The Tropics and the Furious Fifties

Image
There’s an old sailor’s expression: “Below 40 degrees south there is no law, below 50 degrees south there is no God.” Since the sixteenth century, sailors have spoken in awe of the violent westerly winds and seas they experienced fighting their way across the Southern Ocean. With few landmasses to slow them down, the winds found across 40 degrees latitude often reach speeds of twenty-five knots—about 40 percent stronger than their northern hemisphere counterparts—earning them the title the “roaring forties.” As shipping pushed farther south, explorers realized that these winds form part of a vast storm belt that includes the “furious fifties” and “screaming sixties,” names more reminiscent of terrible rock bands than a major part of our planet’s circulation system. The early hunters and traders didn’t understand it at the time, but these winds are created by a procession of low-pressure systems carried east by the jet stream, a river of cold air hurtling and twisting round the Antarct...
Read more

Death of a colony

Image
Cape Denison holds a special place in the history of Antarctic exploration. A small outcrop of rocks on the remote East Antarctic coastline, Cape Denison is forever associated with one of the most spectacular and often forgotten tales of survival. A century ago it was the main base of operations for one of the great explorers of the south: the Australian scientist Sir Douglas Mawson . Privately funded, three bases and one research ship supported a science team that explored a region the size of the United States between 1911 and 1914. Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, however, suffered terribly during their time at Cape Denison: a sudden turn of events led to tragedy on the ice, the death of two men, allegations of cannibalism and with the return of winter sea ice, an extended stay in Antarctica. But when they first came upon Cape Denison, Mawson was ecstatic. Greeted by squawking penguins: ‘ We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The su...
Read more