Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 11/30/2007 - 13:34
Forums
Antarctic Ice Sheet Studies

Hey Mr Gillette. Do you miss us? We miss you. So hows the weather there? What do you eat? When do you eat? Where do you sleep? Do you have your own tent?

Sami and Kelli, Hour 1

Wed, 12/05/2007 - 00:43

Brandon Gillette

Food:  Right now while we're in McMurdo there is a full service cafeteria.  Several different main dishes, usually some kind of salad dish, veggies, bread, deserts, including soft serve!  The food is really quite good!  Once we get to WAIS Divide, things shouldn't change too much, though there will be a smaller number of people in the camp itself.Weather:  The weather is a bit weird.  It snows a little bit almost everyday.  It doesn't really stick around though.  It is all a very dry snow, so what falls is very easily blown out onto the sea ice and ice shelf that surrounds the station.  The temps are always in the mid 10s to mid or upper 20s, at least this time of year.  They can always go up or down if a storm rolls in.  There is some weather forcasting that can be done with a large number of stations around the continent that help to monitor the current weather.  These forcasts, as with those back home, aren't very accurate out to more than a day or so, and as you know in Kansas, even that can change in a few minutes!
Sleep:  As for sleeping, right now we're in dorm rooms.  They're probably not much bigger than your bedroom, except we have 6 people and two 40-pound bags of luggage per person.  It's kind of tight quarters but we don't really do much more there than sleep anyway.  That also will change once we get into the field at WAIS.  Out there we will be sleeping in 2-person Scott tents.  You can see pictures of those in the photo gallery.
Cheers,~Gillette