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28.11.09
Skiing over meringue
The weather's fine and the skiing's good but what lies ahead? Find out from Helen (UK) in today's PodCast.
Helen (UK)'s PodCast:
Link to Podcast
Helen's PodCast in writing:
"Hi this is Helen from the UK speaking on behalf of the Kaspersky Commonwealth Antarctica Expedition.
We have had another really good day on the ice today. The weather has been fantastic and it's really holding up well. You wouldn't have thought this was Antarctica really, by the gorgeous sunshine that we're having but we don't want to make you think that we're having an easy time.
It's not all smooth and plain sailing across nice smooth snow. If you imagine Antarctica is about the size of one and a third times the area of Europe and about 99 percent of it is covered in snow. But it's all very sort of up and down, it's a little bit like skiing over the top of a frozen meringue.
All of the the waves of snow are whipped up by the strong winds that come, especially in the winter time here, and form what are called sastrugi. these winds grow and point towards the direction of due south but at the moment the bearing that we're following from our Messner Start towards our first navigation point isn't actually taking us in a due south direction. So, all throughout the day we end up cutting across these sastrugi waves and sometimes the pulks (sledges) just glide across the top of the ice and sometimes they get stuck in the ruts and we really have to pull and use the strength in our backs to get the pulks moving again.
As I say, it would seem like a dream world here and it's certainly easier going at the moment than we expect the sastrugi to be later on in the journey. We have seen some satellite imagery of sections of our route to come later on between 86 and 87 degrees South provided by Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, the logistics company that is providing us with help for this expedition. The images of the sastrugi were so large that they showed up on these satellite images. We're expecting these waves to appear almost the height of ourselves so I think we need to sharpen our knives and really strengthen our muscles to be able to pull the pulks through.
But this is certainly good practice and it's not hindered our progress today. We've done another 12.8 nautical miles on our distance and we're all chuffed to bits with that.
So it's good night now from our tents. It's nice and cosy in here, the sun's shining and we'll speak to you again tomorrow."
Photo by Robert Hollingworth