Polar Radar for Ice Sheet Measurements

Tuesday 24 October 2000
We had planned fly off operations for this morning but the weather at ship and station was not suitable to fly. We were having hourly skeds with Davis to receive weather observations and to report progress. The Captain pointed out that the temperature is 10 degrees colder than the equivalent voyage last year - our track at present is ice where it was water last year, we will need to rug up well for unloading operations.

The special report "Tell us about Davis" will give you some background to the station.

We reached the edge of the fast ice about mid afternoon - the ice was up to about 1.8 metres thick with a snow layer of about 250mm on top - this meant that it was going to be heavy going with the vessel backing and ramming. The main thing abut breaking through fast ice is the ice has nowhere to move to. In the pack the ice tends to get pushed away from the ship and more easily rides up on to other ice. Because the fast ice is so much thicker and in an unbroken sheet a different approach is needed to ice breaking – I’ll describe that another time.

At about 1830, after we had gone a little way into the fast ice, two Hagglunds all terrain vehicles (a low ground pressure tracked vehicle very suitable for these conditions) came out with Davis Station Leader Bob and a couple of his main people who will be involved with our resupply job here. Bob spoke to all expeditioners as a group - welcoming them to Davis and giving them information about the Station and some of the early rules they needed to know about.

After that Gordon and a couple of others gathered together some urgently needed equipment, all the Davis mail (about 18 bags), and a few boxes of fresh fruit. These were all lowered over the side and placed inside the vehicles. There were a number of people who had very important work to do on the station so they went off the ship as well, and the vehicles drove off to the shore.