Departure!

Today is the day! The ship leaves in just a few hours and this is the last bit of interneting we'll be able to do for a couple of weeks. Etienne, the South African PhD student who's going to do part of his thesis at KTH, gave us a link to a website where you can see how far the ship has progressed on it's voyage down south. The address is
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=ZSAF

Yesterday we learned more about what it is we're actually going to do down at SANAE. There is a narrow band VLF antenna, that is used to receive very specific signals from senders located all over the world. These signals are for example used to communicate with submarines, as they can travel far through water. The signals will experience perturbations, due to electron precipitation from the magnetosphere. The precipitation is either a short burst; in that case it is caused by Whistler waves, originating from lightening in the northern hemisphere and travelling along magnetic field lines down to Antarctica, or the precipitation lasts for a longer period of time, in which case it is caused by chorus waves taking energy from electrons in the magnetosphere due to wave-particle interactions and causing the electrons to fall into the loss-cone. A genious way to use the military services to learn more about science!

However, this receiver does not work at the moment, and it is our task (together with Daleen and Marlie) to figure out why. One problem could be the preamp, but it could also be problems with grounding. Grounding is very hard at Antarctica, as we can't even be sure that the enormous rock the base is situated on, is actually in contact with Earth and not just lying on top of ice! There are also other things to work on, like putting duct with cables from the instruments down to the base, a distance of about 500 metres! Well, at least I have practise of such digging work from Svalbard! =) I must say though that if someone had asked me 10 years ago I would not have thought that in 2009/2010 I'd be spending my days digging cables and duct on both poles!

Yesterday morning we went with Andrew to the beach early in the morning, to go for a swim. It was quite windy and we weren't really awake yet, so no swim for the Swedes, instead we watched Andrew jog along the beach and then jump into the water! The South African viking! Of course the real reason why we didn't go into the water was really that the beach looked very much the same as the one where we had seen a white shark lurking on Sunday...

Andrew jogging along a beautiful sand beach early in the morning

Well, that's it from us for a while, we wish everyone a

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

We're back online in 2-5 weeks..

-Hanna