The BIG freeze has begun! The last two mornings have dropped to -20 degrees celcius and the days have been fairly brisk. With the sea ice getting thicker the penguins and elephant seals have been departing Davis station in search for food and wherever they head off to for the winter months.
I'll start off with 3 videos I took with my Go pro around the icy edges of the beach. It's quite a different and unique perspective to see what the sea looks like from under the ice.
Part 1 - 01:16
Part 2 - 2:26
Part 3 - 1:45
The Aurora Australis has started to become visible now that the nights are getting longer and darker. In a couple of months we will have approximately 36 days without seeing the sun. At the moment sunrises and sunsets are lasting forever! Th
The Aurora Australis (Southern lights) and the Aurora Borealis (Northern lights) are caused by the suns solar winds interacting with the earth's magnetic field, exciting different atoms like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen to produce different colours of the aurora dancing in the night skies above.
Me standing in front of the Welcome to Davis sign at the Heli-hut.
The amazing arcs and rayed arcs.
At this stage the aurora was so bright and moving extremely quickly it was hard to get photos of.... I actually took a few moments to enjoy and watch mother nature at its best! (In between me saying "Oh my god!"...)
Lesley and I went out for a 5 hour return hike to the Old Wallow. It was fantastic to get away from station and explore the area. It was a beautiful sunny day, not too cold.... (around -11 degrees celsius). It was made even harder due to the recent snow making it hard to judge where there are rocks and which rocks were small enough to move when you stepped on them. Also with the sunny days there were many areas where the snow has turned into ice, which is very slippery. Not to mention our very heavy survival packs we have to carry with everything we need in case something happens while we are a distance from station.
If you look closely you can see Davis station in the middle of the two peaks. Unfortunately you cant walk in a straight line, you have to go around the coast.
This MASSIVE iceberg that stretches pretty much across the whole image is approximately 8km long and sits around 13.5kms off the coast from the station. It has not moves since I arrived on Jan 29th and I don't think it will move now until the sea ice melts at the end of the winter.
I love seeing animals in their natural habitat, the ones around station are just not the same.... ha ha..... These Adelie penguins still malting (loosing their baby feathers). Not long before they'll depart for their winter home.
Before the big freeze, Dave and I went out for a trip down dingle road to do some maintenance on a remote solar panel connected to some water measuring equipment. Along the way stopping at the dingle road AWS (Automatic Weather Station) and a remote camera that takes photos every few hours part of some ongoing scientific research on the area. Once again great to explore yet another area away from station. We took a Hugglund with all our equipment. These Hugglund's are very robust allowing us to drive over frozen parts of ice across dingle road, go up step inclines and declines.
Our hugglund on dingle road overlooking Plough Island and Lake Island.out to the icebergs in the distance.
Me standing on the vast landscape along dingle road...... in the middle of nowhere!
Once again make sure you check out "This week at Davis" for all the latest updates. Click on the link HERE.
Stay tuned for further updates.... so many things to talk about and not enough time or space on my blog! ~ Aaron.