Leaving McMurdo

Well, I’m back in the US.  I arrived just before midnight on Thursday, Dec 29, a day that started the previous midnight 42 hours before.  I was up for a good many of those hours.  Overall the trip was a great success.  Our instrument, CREAM, is still up in the air as of this writing (New Year’s Day).  You can follow its position at http://www.wff.nasa.gov/BPO/creamweb/edrs/viewimage.php?image=GPS_fig11.jpg
(It was the other science group, ATIC, that had the bad balloon.)

I wanted to share with you my last few adventures, including flying out of McMurdo in a C17 cargo jet and exploring New Zealand.  First, in this installment, the trip out of McMurdo:

I was supposed to leave on Dec 21, but, as I mentioned previously, the flight was cancelled that day and moved to the 22nd.  The plane for the return trip is very different than the one I took down.  Recall that the flight down was on a C130 propeller-driven cargo plane (shown earlier) and took seven hours in cramped conditions.  However, the C130 planes landed conveniently just outside McMurdo on the Ice Runway.  Sadly, the ice that it landed on melts in the summer, and it is too late in the season now to use it, so a runway on the permanent ice shelf, about 10 miles out from McMurdo, called Pegasus, was used for the return trip.  That runway can have C17 Globemaster jets land on it.  These jets can fly down from Christchurch and return in one day.  The trip is only about 4 hours, and the planes are newer, so more mechanically reliable.  (Several times C130 flights were cancelled due to mechanical difficulties.)  

On the day we were to depart the weather was poor.  It was snowing hard, but at least the wind was not very strong.  The journey out to the runway was in Ivan the Terrabus.  Finally, I got to ride it!  However, poor old Ivan got stuck in blowing snow, despite its huge tires.  We had to be rescued by two caterpillar tractors, which then accompanied us the rest of the way out to the runway.  After a long wait we boarded the plane.  What relative luxury!  The interior was much roomier.  There were even some REAL SEATS!  Even one real bathroom this time, as opposed to the wall mounted receptacles in the C130.  While many people slept, I took pictures of sea ice and continental ice below.   In this last photo you can see the wing of the plane above, and some crevasses in the lower right.  There is also fog or windblown snow over a large region of the lower right as well.  Mountains stick up above the ice.  My last sight of Antarctica.

Four hours after takeoff, at about 10 PM, I was in Christchurch.  Civilization!  And darkness!!  When the airplane door was opened it was dark out.  All of us were quite surprised, since we were used to the constant light of Antarctic summer.  It was rather surreal for a while.  After all, McMurdo is at about 78 degrees south latitude – only 12 degrees from the Pole, and well within the Antarctic Circle.

I was ready for the next part of my adventure, which was to explore as much of New Zealand as I could in 5 days.