Happy New Years!
It's Dec. 31 and I'm in Punta Arenas, Chile. The internet onboard the ship is painfully slow (basically nonexistent) so I snuck out for a coffee and some free wifi at a local cafe. The trip so far has been great. We flew for something like 24 hours, getting on an off planes as we skipped down to the end of the South American continent. Once in Chile we were whisked through customs by a local official who had the power to waive his hand and open up a new line for the Antarctic science party immediately. Our numbers have swelled to about 30 people, scientists and students from all around the world, lots of interesting people excited to embark on the research expedition.

Yesterday, we were all given big black duffel bags full of gore-tex jackets, thermals, socks, hats gloves and some other random cold weather gear, it's called ECW or Extreme Cold Weather gear. It took several hours to make sure everyone had the right sizes. After the gear issues were resolved we headed to the ship, had some safety briefings and started to locate all the scientific gear we shipped down months ago. As of today, we located everything except one small cardboard box, there are a lot of places to continue checking. I'm going to hit the local grocery store for some last minute provisions and then get on the boat for our departure. I will try to get some more posts our while we are at sea. Cheers!
Hank

Antarctic Bound: Background

Well Merry Christmas everyone! I'm about to depart on my research expedition to Palmer Station, Antarctica. A lot of people have been asking me about the trip, where I'm going, what I'll be doing and so forth. I thought that I'd put a little blog together to document the trip so here it is. I'm calling this blog, "Green Radar." I realize that it is not the most catchy name on the internet but  pretty much explains my main responsibility as a part of this trip. I'll get around to describing the project and my work in more detail later. Here is an overview map of where I'm going.

For the first leg of the trip, I'll fly down to South America, first stop is Santiago, the capitol of Chile. From Santiago, I'll jump on a smaller plane and head to Punta Arenas, a port city of 130,000 on the Straits of Magellan. After an overnight in Punta Arenas, I'll get onboard a research class icebreaker called the R/V Laurence M. Gould and transit past Cape Horn across the Drake Passage, one of the windiest and roughest expanses of open ocean on the planet.  This is the stretch of ocean that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean and bottlenecks the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

 Once across the Drake, we will steam towards a Anvers Island and the research station operated by the United States Antarctic Program. Here's a link to a google map of Palmer Station. The research station is manned by about 30 employees of Lockheed Martin.