Ships are here

It has been over a month since I have added anything to my blog. Life has been very busy in the lab, but otherwise pretty uneventful. We have had some beautiful weather and a few storms. It has been slightly warmer and sunnier than average so there is more stream flow out in the dry valleys. My research team added a few special sampling events to take advantage of the unusually high flow, so this means more samples for me to analyze.
I still have a few weeks left of my field season. Several milestones have past. We celebrated Christmas and New years and both were fun. New field team members arrived after the new year and others are leaving already. This is the beginning of the real exodus at the end of summer. There is always a flux of people coming and going for various research projects and other events. Now there are more people leaving than coming south. It's also the start of ship season. The Swedish ice breaker Odin arrived and created a channel through the sea ice to McMurdo Station for the fuel tanker and the cargo vessel. The fuel ship arrived two days ago to refresh the station with another full year supply of fuel for McMurdo Station, South Pole station and all the field camps. The photo shows the fuel tanker and the Odin docked by the ice pier.