Sea Ice Training

At 9am today (Saturday, October 11) we reported for Sea Ice Training. The purpose of this training is to teach us how to safely travel on the sea ice, including visually "reading" the surface, testing the thickness of the ice with drills to determine if cracks are safe to traverse, and how to use hand drills to create survival shelter anchorage points. Another overall goal of the training was to travel around the area and help us get oriented to our new environment.

After an hour of classroom training, we got dressed in our extreme cold weather gear and loaded into an ice vehicle called a Hagglunds for the trip out on the ice:



This trip was our first good view of the sea ice and surrounding mountains. The view was breathtaking! The shot below is of a cloud-shrouded Mt. Erebus - our local active volcano:



This next one is Mt. Discovery - a dormant volcano across the sound:



Here is a large ice cliff where the base of Mt. Erebus meets the sea ice:

Next is a group of seals lounging around a crack in the ice in front of Barne Glacier:

Our first stop was next to a frozen-over crack in the sea ice so we could learn how to use ice drills and measuring equipment to determine the depth of the sea ice and whether the crack is safe to traverse:

After this, we stopped by an iceberg locked in the sea ice and got close to it. We also had good practice using a bamboo pole to probe for hidden crevasses, of which there were several:

While we were out doing this, high winds blew in and substantially reduced visibility:


Overall, an amazing experience! That night we went to one of the station's bars to mix and mingle. It was quite strange to leave the bar around midnight and find it still light out!