It's spring! The weather has been variable with both gorgeous days of sunshine and sunsets with the icebergs bathing in those famous pastel colours as well as gloomy solid grey days when all the colours look the same nomatter where you look. This weekend we had -30.2 C and combined with 15 knot winds this made outside ventrues a bit on the nippy side. The ozone hole has taken off with gusto and so far its area is about 25 million km2 (1.9) with minimum ozone values dropping to 167 dobson units (1.9). Follow the development of the ozone hole at NASA's ozone hole watch web page at http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Some of the permanent Antarctic residents have reappeared and we saw three emperor penguins a couple of weeks ago when doing some sea ice drilling for sea ice thickness mapping. They are truly amazing creatures with an impossibly perfect plumage. Their calls resemble a slightly guttural trumpet and vary from short squawks to long extended complex vocalisations. Their waddle is slow and precise with no energy being wasted in unnecessary movements. I had not realised how big they are - onboard the Aurora Australis last October and November we saw many of them when skirting the ice edge but it was hard to gauge their actual size from the heights of the upper deck. It is easy to understand why they were called emperors - if a bird can be called graceful and dignified then these guys fit the bill perfectly. Their character is very different from the small adelie penguins which run and rush around like small duracell toys endlessly squabbling and carrying on amongst themselves. I have to say though that despite of being deeply impressed by the emperors I still love the adelies the most. Being a scientist and especially in the light of the recent movie "March of the penguins" it may be unforgivable to humanise these animals but I can't help myself - the adelies are just too lovably temperamental and animated not to identify with (the usage of these adjectives speaks for itself). These darlings won't be back for another few weeks yet.

We went to the plateau last Friday and it was the very first time I hav made it to the actual plateau (back in 2002 we only spent time in the Dry Valleys). Finally!!! What a view it was with all of the Vestfold Hills and countless icebergs scattered across the sea ice stretching in front of us - see photo above. I took a couple of panoramas (stitched together from 20 photos) which unfortunately are too big to include here. We also visited a couple of field huts to drop in some supplies and I discovered a small geological treasure coffin near one of the wind scoured ice edges. This was a small saddle like feature covered with boulders of various lithologies representing the metamorphic petrology of the Vestfold Hills. With just that one outcrop one could say quite a lot about the local tectonic evolution.

The PhD is coming along as it should but I have to admit that there have been some stalled moments which are hindering the desired pace (sound like a standard PhD student?). To combat this the work for now will focus on the data analysis system side and began by installation of a new version of MySQL plus some perl modules and Apache reconfiguration. The aim is to use Perl/Tk to make a nice little GUI that allows the user to select and analyse various data using just one interface. Underneath the GUI it is of course perl (what else) that glues it all together and calls various other modules such as MySQL, IDL (for processing and plotting) and the DMI model (microphysical model written in Fortran). The shell scripts I wrote earlier to do some of the were fine for quick and nasty shuffling but the amount of data is growing and the number of things I want to get out of the data is increasing and changing so why not make it all a little bit easier. It might not be elegant but it will work!

And finally, congratulations to the European Space Agency and the SMART-1 team for an excellent mission - what a way to go out for the little spacecraft! Check out the images of the impact at
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=39962 and an overview of the final moments of SMART-1 at
http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/0903_SMART1_Mission_Goes_Out_With_a_Bang.html