Progress Report

The Ice Team has made excellent progress today in, for once, favourable conditions. Although the temperature has been hovering around a chilly -38C, the wind dropped to a more moderate level today and visibility improved immensely. With the elements in their favour, Spencer and Richmond have managed to wind a route to the far side of the upheaval with the Cats. No loads have been moved yet but at…

Visibility was good enough today to allow the Ice Team to start moving ahead with the Cats through an area of notable upheaval, stretching approx. 1300m west, which lies between their overnight base and, we hope, more favourable terrain. They have now marked and travelled along a twisting route for approx. 800 metres west from camp. This is excellent progress considering the terrain and proximity…

By 1800 BST yesterday all units of the Ice Train had been moved to a position 700m west of the previous night’s camp. This puts the Ice Team on the edge of another area of ice upheaval which extends for about 1km and beyond which the terrain appears to ease. A further brief reconnaissance into this area yesterday in fading light and 50m visibility was not as encouraging as the previous visit…

Following Rob Lambert’s blog earlier this evening, there can be few readers who do not now understand just what a nightmare the Ice Team finds themselves in on this seemingly endless patch of blue ice. I think what he writes about how it would be a breeze on foot says it all: the Cats might be the only chance of crossing the Antarctic in winter, but they have their downsides for sure. Rob wrot…

Written at 1900 BST yesterday: The area that we are in is a disturbed blue ice feature with extensive ice upheaval. This creates unpredictable crevassing in terms of location and orientation. GPR is producing a confused set of data due to the multitude of fractures lines within the ice. Reconnaissance on foot has taken us 1.8km south and this also has not identified a viable safe route. We hav…

Despite high winds this morning the visibility was sufficient to allow us to move south along our flagged route and then push onwards for a total of 2.2km. Poor traction on the ice required us to break down into eight loads however. All cabooses and fuel are now at this new position which is at the transitional section between blue ice and snow (ground conditions are currently a mixture of…

High winds, very limited visibility and the fact that the Ice Team is in a difficult area have prevented the Ice Train moving…

Image by Ian Prickett After two days of painstakingly surveying and preparing a route across an especially difficult crevasse field, the Ice Team was finally able to get on the move again today and overcome the treacherous terrain. The team has spent most of the last two days identifying and filling in large holes in the blue ice with the Cats to enable safe passage and this comes with it a fair…

by Brian Newham All eight remaining fuel scoots have been brought up to last night’s camp in pairs by double-head. We then started to move both cabooses further south but very quickly encountered difficult terrain with honeycombed ice. Progress has been very slow and with fading light we called an early stop for the day whilst we formed a strategy for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will recce the rout…

Load relaying has continued although once we reached the blue ice area we lost traction and had to break the loads down further to six loads and also double-head on some sections (i.e. two Cats pulling each load). It has slowed progress considerably. Units 1 & 2 have been moved 13km further south and we are hoping that all the remaining fuel scoots will reach the same position by the time w…