Thursday, November 22st, sledge attached to the skidoo, Zarges boxes loaded with all the required material to work on field, and coordinates on our GPS, Preben, Henry (the chief scientist) and me are ready to go 4 Km away from Princess Elisabeth Station.
3, 2, 1.. Let’s do it! 20 minutes later we arrive onsite and from the distance we can see our poles standing. YES. Nice feeling, we found everything as expected. We parked the skydoos few meters behind the site in order to avoid contamination. To continue protecting our samples as much as possible, it’s time for me to dress up a little bit. And yes, you can laugh, with the wind blowing and inflating my uniform I look like an astronaut! Two different kinds of samples I have to take care of. First, I’m gonna collect snow samples into a pre-cleaned 10L bottle that will remain frozen upon return to our lab in Brussels. Second, I’m going to replace the filters from the passive dust collectors known as Sigma2 placed by Nadine during the previous season (1-year sampling period). While Preben is taking care of his organic collectors I am dealing with mine, and Henry is helping us with whatever we need and is the named photographer ;).
After almost 2 hours we are done! We are very happy of our work, so we came back to the station to store the samples in the freezer and re-organize everything until the next field trip that will depend, of course, as everything in Antarctica, on the weather!
Tefi
