September 2013

Fortunately the very strong winds that we had yesterday eased during the night to a more moderate 30 knots and that was enough to allow us to start the GPR survey of the route ahead. This is a badly crevassed area but thankfully many of the bridges that we built on our southbound journey we found were still intact. By lunchtime we had surveyed up and over the hill and  identified a few mor…

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The weather for the last few days has been the best we have had for many, many months and that has helped us make good progress. The ground penetrating radar has been busy as we check the route ahead and several sections have required a twisting route as we pick our way through crevassed areas. Moving the loads through is a slow process and much of it is done on the winch cable – move the Cat…

by Brian Newham…

Regular visitors will remember that a few months ago we launched the Challenge Yourself initiative, inviting you – our followers – to conjure up your own wacky ideas for putting yourselves to the test to raise money for Seeing is Believing. Over the coming weeks and months we will be showcasing some of the fabulous efforts that the most adventurous among you have been making – starting…

Every morning and every night Ice Team leader Brian Newham braves the outside – no matter what the weather is throwing at him – to take meteorological observations as part of our very many scientific projects during the expedition. These then get sent back to the Met Office in the UK for analysis and archiving. Today, we can share the bulk of Brian’s findings with these four graphs charting t…

Current position: S72 45′ 37.1″     E023 35′ 54.6″ Altitude: 2704m Distance travelled today: 2.0 km We had good conditions today and we were able to GPR the route for 2km through an area of obvious upheaval, with minor route preparation work along the way. We then moved all six loads through to a relatively safe area. Much of the movement was done with loads on the winch cable to reduc…

Today was a productive day. Overnight the wind eased slightly, although it was still over 40 knots, but more importantly there was less drifting snow in the air so visibility improved to a hundred meters or more. Added to that was an almost cloudless sky so surface contrast was good. It was time to move camp. After several hours of final snow clearance and a few tweaks on the skis to break t…

Six fuel scoots were moved 5.4km yesterday, and a further six were moved to the same location today.  Deteriorating conditions made it prudent to then call a halt and the cabooses were not moved. We now have just two loads left to move. We also carried out our weather observations for the Met Office as normal, as well as snow sampling, minor Cat maintenance and day one of a five day White Mars…