McMurdo Sound Ice Breakout

Russian icebreaker at the pier  

Tourist shuttle

This is the time of the year that vessels begin arriving in McMurdo Sound.  Our sea ice has thinned and the ice edge has moved close enough the the station to make it easy for a contract icebreaker to open the shipping channel.  Soon our fuel tanker will arrive along with a research ship, followed by our cargo vessel.  Cruise ships occasionally visit McMurdo as well and use helicopters to shuttle their guests ashore.  

TED Talk about the xAlps Paragliding Race

This talk is a great overview of the Red Bull X-Alps paragliding race.  Salzburg to Monaco with one main rule:  the athletes must carry their paraglider or the paraglider must carry them.

Killer Whale Tagging

Examine the cargo carefully and you'll see two crossbows.  Yep, crossbows.   These implements are used by one of our science groups to take tissue samples and to tag Orca Whales in McMurdo Sound.

I could write more, but you should really just watch the video shot by one of our pilots, Ken Kuwahara.

A-Star Pollywog

Our A-Star helicopters just returned from the Pine Island Glacier deep-field camp.  The aircraft were partially disassembled in order to fit onto the LC-130 Hercules cargo plane for the flight to the camp.  The poor things...

Mac Truck of the Sky

Here are a few photos from camp moves.  Our Bell 212 helicopters are essentially big flying dump trucks.  Ugly, noisy, rough-around-the-edges, tough, and capable.  Workhorses. 

Check out the sling in the foreground

Creative Rigging - techs will get it...

Surely we can get another box in there somewhere...

University Valley

Garwood Valley