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.