Getting started

Most of the effort on the base so far has been focused on unpacking.. Every once in a while we form up long human conveyor belts, sending box after box from our orange containers into the base storage areas. Fortunately we've managed to spend quite some time getting started with the scientific work today though.. one of our tasks so far was to do an inventory of the dome for the Swedish Astrid-2 satellite down link station that was used about a decade ago. Apparently they do one every year even though it's no longer in use, and as we surprisingly enough managed to find an additional modem this time that wasn't there last year, I guess it might actually be called for.. We certainly did have a nice time doing it, it's almost a religious feeling to get to see and touch all that equipment that helps to bring us back data and it makes everything seem so much more real in a way.

Offloading activities

The weather around here changes frequently from nice to awful, or from awful to nice. We were about to go on a shorter walk after dinner to check out the "Smelly" (the snow smelter). In the 5 minutes it took for us get properly dressed, the weather turned from fairly clear to whiteout conditions! A good lesson to make you realize how important it is to always bring the proper clothes and preferably also a radio when going out. When the weather clears though it's amazingly beautiful, a completely white landscape interrupted by the occasional mountain peak. It really gives me a feeling of being above the clouds (or inside the clouds in the event of a proper storm). I'm sure we'll put up tons of pictures of the surroundings later on, but I thought I'd be nice to start with an image from above, taken as we flew in on the helicopter two days ago. The base can be seen as three connected building blocks, located on the nunatak (rocky outcrop) on the right hand side.

SANAE IV at Vesleskarvet

Regards,
/Torbjörn