Setting up our Antarctic Field Camp

Your first two days in Antarctica, if a newbie, are spent doing Antarctic Field Training. Basically you get taught how to operate out in the field. There is a huge emphasis on health and safety, but their approach is not not so much rules based as teaching people how to make good decisions. Once you are out in the field, you need to decide a lot of on the spot.

ANT0040

After an initial hour inside, you go out for a walk on the sea ice. There are hundreds of sea lions lazing about.

ANT0042

You really do not want to fall into the !

ANT0043

On average we have two metres of ice over the Ross Sea, but less in some areas.

ANT0050

Then we spend a few more hours inside learning how to use the cookers, selecting tents and gear and then outside into a Haglund.

ANT0051

We around 5 kms away from Scott Base to set up camp.

ANT0052

The first tent up (and was already there) is the toilet tent. Antarctica NZ is passionate about leaving minimal impact on the environment so all human waste is collected, including urine. You all have a pee bottle to use also.  There is no going behind the rocks.

ANT0053

Time to start setting up the tents.

ANT0054

First you smooth out the area you want to pitch the tent. Then you pitch the tent, and finally weigh it down by covering the sides with snow.

ANT0056

This is the tent I was in. You have to basically crawl into the tent through a small tunnel, so there were lots of jokes about it being a birthing chamber 🙂

ANT0057

One of the other tents our groups had. The three type people did field training with a group of four from AUT are down to map sensitive areas of Antarctica using drones. I'll cover their work in a later post.

ANT0055

And finally we have the tents all set up.

The entire time it was snowing. Lightly at first, but then more heavily. 99% of the time the snow is dry (Antarctica generally is extremely dry) but that night it was wet snow, so by the end of the night (well it is never night but you know what I mean) we were a bit wet.

After the tents were done, we then had to make our field kitchen which I'll blog about later also.