Waiting for weather

Pretty soon, hopefully, we'll be out of email contact for several weeks. At the moment we are waiting in McMurdo for a flight to Wais Divide and then on to the PIG (Pine Island Glacier). Yesterday we tried. After a 3 hour flight, we circled for two more hours trying to land. But the weather just wouldn't clear. At 3 AM we were back after 8.5 hours in the air. Gruesome.

The scale of this undertaking is quite daunting. The distance from McMurdo to PIG is about 2,400 km. That's similar to the distance from Seattle to the Twin Cities, or Madrid to Oslo. The flight will actually carry us across the date line, but we will probably not adjust our time to stay synchronized with McMurdo. We have 24 hours of sunlight now, so it doesn't matter too much.