deployment photos

At long last, some pictures from the ice! This should be a good start. I'll post some more soon. It takes a long time to upload pictures from here...

This is a group of photo of the portion of our field team that traveled together to the ice. From left to right - Mitchell, Brian, Eric, and Stephanie. Brian is an engineer from the PASSCAL instrument center at New Mexico Tech and Eric and Stephanie are researchers from the Ohio State University. Eric and Stephanie will be installing GPS instruments to study millimeter scale plate motions/plate deformation. Brian and I will be installing seismometers to record the earthquake activity and study the material properties of the Antarctic lithosphere.

These are some shots from inside the plane. This year we flew down on a C-17. It is a lot nicer than the C-130 Hercules. It is also a lot faster because it has jet engines instead of turbo props (we will fly in the C-130 to the deep field so I'll post some pictures of that later). The flight took about 5 hours. It takes about 7.5-8 in the C-130. And the a C-17 has a lavatory! (as opposed to a bucket, which is what you get on the C-130) All of the long range flights are run by the Air National Guard.

Here is the C-17 on the ice runway. They actually land the plane on the frozen sea ice of the Ross Sea. It was a pretty disorienting feeling getting off the plane and stepping onto the ice.

Here is our transportation from the ice runway to McMurdo Station.

More photos coming soon!