ULB on Ice got larger; not that we got more members in the BELISSIMA team; no, the medical doctor of the expedition at the Princess Elisabeth Station is also a research associate at the ULB. Therefore, ULB on Ice is a team of six as from now. Nathalie Pattyn - no, as far as we know there is no affiliation with the other Pattyn of the expedition - will stay here for the next 3 and a half months, in charge of the expedition's medical care, and running an experiment investigating people's sleep during this summer that lasts a day (or is it that day that lasts a summer?). In a couple of days the rest of the BELISSIMA team will leave for field work at the coast, and Nathalie will continue to furnish the blog with an account of our adventures in never-neverland.
If you think that going to the Antarctic is an encounter with harsh and cold conditions, you are wrong. Today we found ourselves in the tropics. Temperatures flirting with zero degrees centigrade, sunshine, no wind and a lot of sunburn. Ideal day for the team to get acquainted with the daily life of the station, i.e. dragging sledges, hauling bulks of wood, removing nails and bolts, etc. You understand: we are still without our cargo, waiting for the arrival of the last Bassler flight from Novo. And it eventually arrived at the end of the day: 2100 kg, half of it our cargo composed of the drills and radar equipment; the other half catering and building material for the
station. As from tomorrow we can start to test and prepare for the actual field work. Today has a bittersweet aftertaste: lovely day, with the most picturesque views of the surroundings, good humoured people all around, nothing dramatic happening, no new problem to solve, not the slightest hinge of a crisis. Blue sky is boring: who wants to read about a good news show?
At least, tomorrow, we will be testing the equipment, probably facing nice fresh challenges about missing pieces, non-functioning parts, delayed transportation to the research site.
No comments:
Post a Comment