The end of another week draws close, bringing with it the realization that there are not too many left before we head South to spend the winter at Scott Base, Antarctica. Scratch off a few of those weeks due to the Christmas holidays and we’ve got about 5 weeks left to pack and test everything we're going to need to study winter sea ice growth in McMurdo sound for 9 months. Over the last few weeks, we’ve sent off a flurry of purchase orders and the Physics Department's machine shop has been kept busy with orders for custom designs. Our collaborators at VUW, NIWA and IRL are busy preparing their components of the program and everyone’s inboxes have been brimming with e-mails back and forth.

So how can I have time to write something for the blog? Well, as things get busy like this, it is sometimes good to take a step back and writing the first blog entry (which I’d been putting-off for a while) seemed like a good opportunity to do just that. Until I just counted the weeks, I hadn’t actually realized how little time we have before we fly south on February 1. And things like that are good to know. It’s also good to realize, amidst the hurried e-mails and paperwork and digging through dusty corners of the ice lab, that this really is an exciting time and there’s a lot more to look forward to when we get down there. The photo below shows Alex and I packing equipment to send down to Scott Base. I don't know why we're smiling because we're going to have unpack it all again at the other end.

by Andy Mahoney