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Hello again, For my next email I thought I'd provide a contrast to my last email... One of the things that marks the seasons at Mawson is the breakup of the sea ice. Late in summer, the sea ice melts from underneath. The colour of the ice turns from a bright white to a dark grey which indicates that it is very 'rotten'. The average thickness changes from about 1 metre down to less than 100mm. When the ice is very thin any high winds can cause wave action and easily break up the ice. Once the ice is broken into small pieces it ends up being 'blown out' leaving the water behind.
In the middle of January, the sea ice became dark grey and thin. It came to a point where it was not safe to walk on so walking on the sea ice was stopped. Then, only a few days later we had a blizzard for 3 days which had thick blowing snow. The snow obscured our view out over the harbour and the sea ice so we were unable to see if the ice was still in, but as the blizzard was dying down I looked out and noticed the dark blue of the water. Finally, the blizzard blew itself out and the sun came out greeting us with a vista of dark blue sea contrasting against the white of the ice and the dark brown rocks on the islands. To me it was a very strange experience to suddenly see water where I had once walked and ridden on a Quad. It struck me that there could be almost nowhere else in the world that I could travel between two places by so many different and complementary means. Where I was once walking, riding a quad, a Ute, or a buggy there was now open water and the only way to travel was by an IRB (Inflatable Rubber Boat) or a small boat. So as soon as the ice clears the harbour, the IRB's are pulled out of moth balls and the boating season begins! Just before the sea broke out the two penguin biologists, Lyn and Lisa, and the penguin electronics engineer, Peter, walked over the sea ice with enough provisions to last them for a few weeks until the ice broke out and the boats could be used. Since that had been a few weeks ago, we readied the IRB's and headed off to Bechervaise to bring back Lyn, Lisa & Peter to 'town' (as Peter put it). While the 3 were out on Bechervaise Island the sea ice was too thin to walk on and there was too much loose ice to allow the boats to be used. Because there was no way to reach Peter re-wrote the words to this famous TV show! (the FTO is the Field Training Officer, Matt). (To
the tune of Gilligans Is.) The
ice was thin,
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