Week 5 at the Pole
Maybe we should all do this with our packages from now on. Mail and cargo arrived last week, and someone set out the contents of one of the boxes quite decoratively for the photo. To efficiently unload the goods when they arrived, they formed an assembly line going up the stairs to the station.
Winterover Mack was able to make a quick R&R jaunt to McMurdo, his last trip out for a while. In addition to enjoying a long shower for a change, he got to view some wildlife—including a seal on land and a skua overhead—and captured some great shots of the Transantarctic Mountains from the plane (the first one from inside the cockpit). Upon his return, it was time for a test of the Swedish camera, which is actually a pair of cameras that were used to visually inspect the freeze-in process for sensors lowered into the holes in the ice during construction. The cameras are frozen in the ice, deep below the surface. They remain mostly turned off, but they still function and are tested every so often to check on changes in the ice over time. The last, kind of spooky, image below was taken by the Swedish camera.
