Going, Going, Gone South

2007-02-11T11:57:00.000+06:00

Well...I know I'm late updating the blog but a lot has been happening since my last post. For one, there was the mad last minute rush to get everything ready for departure from Davis. There were lots of emotions ranging from disbelief and sadness to joy and happiness along the way. It took me quite a few weeks to realised that I am no longer in Antarctica, and that it might be a very long time before I get to go back. I hope not.... I miss it all and I still can't bring myself to look at the photos.

We arrived in Hobart on 1 December to a warm and sunny day. It was surreal to walk back to the Antarctic Division office in Kingston - nothing had changed except for there was a pile of mail for me waiting in a box. I was staying at the University accommodation and that night I went to have a quiet dinner on my own in the nearby shopping village. As I was sitting there, still dumbfounded and slurping away my miso soup, I realised that there was no way back now but to re-adapt back to the "real life". After a week in Hobart I travelled to Perth via Darwin, and after a few days in Perth's sunny 38C I left for Europe for four weeks to see my family and friends. I hadn't been back in Europe for three years and I felt most odd at Frankfurt airport in the morning rush hour, waiting for a flight for Finland. I returned to Australia in late January, visited Hobart for a week and then sat in the car for seven days driving across the continent back to Perth.

While camping in the silky blackness at Nullarbor desert, we took photos of comet McNaught - watching the brilliantly bright tail fanning perfectly far outward from the comet itself, it felt like time came to a halt. I had vivid flashbacks of deep impact footage and I felt humble once more. Our fragility is so easy to forget and our place in the Universe is even easier to ignore in the husstle and busstle of everyday life. As is our responsibility to inhabit and preserve the planet in a responsible way - the current generation(s) don't seem to have much of a problem letting the future generations worry about a planet which has been used and abused in the name of greed, personal benefit and blind pursuit of power. We haven't been very good tenants and there is no excuse to bury our heads in the sand now - the IPCC report should make sure that even the most stubborn opponent of climate change has been left without arguments.

Now I'm back in Perth and after some thorough thinking, I have come to the conclusion that I want to continue my PhD on a part-time mode. I am now working for CSIRO as a Research Scientist on a two-year contract, working on a marine project.

2006-11-09T12:00:00.000+06:00

I'm putting off thinking about the inevitable, the imminent departure from Davis, which is now approaching at an ever increasing pace. Aurora Australis is currently off Mawson waiting for a weather break to commence fly-off operations. Everyone has been busy packing their boxes for cargo, making beds for the summerers, shovelling snow and repairing damaged vehicles (see below).

As if to remind us that summer is not yet here, we had our strongest blizzard so far on 26 October with wind gusts up to 101 knots and ~70 knots sustained. Davis gained a huge amount of snow and some truly handsome blizztails. Again a reminder of the insignificance and fragility of humans in the scheme of Antarctica.

Our feathery friends are as busy as ever with a full population of penguins now present in most rookeries. We spent some time with these darlings out on Gardner Island last Sunday and I managed to get some excellent footage excerpts of the daily life in the colony. The nest preparations and breeding being in full swing, the colony is regularly disrupted by bouts of blazing neighbour fury. These squabbles often start with two or three birds on neighbouring nests finding that the carefully measured pecking distance is no longer adequate to keep the peace, and soon the brawl spreads around with all the nearby birds becoming engaged in the action. Feathers fly as the furious birds bump their bellies against each other and direct exquisitely aimed pecks at each other. Mad dashes, loud flipper flapping and furious squawking accompany these arguments that can last for some time. Whilst all this goes on, a group of penguins next door goes about their daily business of stealing nest rocks, preening, breeding and waddling around for a beakful or two of snow. Skuas keep an ever watchful eye on the colony, and now and then make a half hearted effort to tug on some long dried carcasses.

Again the looming shadow of the approaching departure makes me avoid thinking about all the things I will have to face again back in the real world. On one hand I am ready to go home to see my family and friends but on the other hand I already miss Antarctica and feel that dark and tearful depression slowly but surely descending upon me. When I went to McMurdo someone said to me that you should treat every trip to Antarctica as your last. I was depressed for months when I returned last time and I dare not to think what the after effects will be this time. I will miss the serene peace, the incredible breathtaking beauty and the daily feeling of awe that I have felt here. Denial of what is about to happen is definitely setting in.

2006-10-19T16:42:00.000+06:00

The penguins are back!! I refrained from updating the blog until I had some new penguin photos to share...These little darlings returned just a few days ago and there is now a steady stream of them arriving here to start their annual nesting activities. We haven't yet lost the snow that fell a week ago (Davis in general has very little snow as usually most of it blows away soon after falling) and as the penguins toboggan across the sea ice they leave tracks with perfect little foot marks and immaculate flipper impressions on the side (see photo above). Their squawks can be heard again after a long break of no sounds other than the wind. It is absolutely fantastic to have these lovely birds back! Last week we saw some Weddell seals with their newborn pups as well - there is definitely spring spirit in the air. The sun now sets at around 9:30pm which gives us a good time to head out after dinner to check out the progress of the return of life to Antarctica.

Aurora Australis, our orange ocean going splendour, left Hobart last week and, after dropping in at Macquarie Island, is now approaching Casey. After that she will head for Mawson for crew changeover and finally arrive at Davis (if all goes well) around 13 November. Everyone has started to slowly pack their belongings which need to be in the cargo system one week prior to the ship's arrival. There's also the work RTA (Return To Australia) to take care of plus making the station summer-ready. This involves preparing all empty rooms for new occupants and turning heating on in the summer accommodation block. Only four of us winterers will be leaving on V1 (voyage 1) and I think that it will be rather hard for the remaining winterers to watch the ship leave without them, knowing that she is taking her passengers back to their loved ones. I definitely miss my family and friends and as such I feel ready to go, but at the same time I know already now that as soon as I set foot on the ship I will miss Antarctica. That's the thing about this place, once it has you it will never let go. I'd like to quote a couple of excerpts from Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Antarctica" because I feel that he captures the essence of Antarctica so well:

"...everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you've ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you all alone in it...and the uncanny beauty rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because this world is so spacious and pure and beautiful.."

The PhD is going veeery slowly as there are a lot of other things that need to get done at the moment. However some positive progress has certainly happened - I finished the first draft of my first chapter a couple of weeks ago which felt great! In addition I have been playing with the perl data language (PDL) to see where I can use it instead of having to deal with IDL (which I still think is a rather cranky and unfriendly language not to mention its lack of elegance - it does its job but it ain't pretty).

The ozone hole has started to abate after showing its might by trailing the upper limits of the annual average curve. Factor 30+ is essential and with all the snow around to increase the exposure it doesn't take long before the skin burns badly. The PSCs seem to have disappeared but not before making a comeback on 8 October. This was facilitated by a wobble in the polar vortex which brought Davis close to the cold vortex core.

As said things will now get rather busy and this Saturday we will be celebrating the "official" end of winter. With just a few weeks to go it is also a time for reflection on what we have experienced in the past 8 months. We last saw anyone except for each other on 2 March and it is time to start the psychological preparation for reintegration into the real world!

2006-09-04T09:00:00.000+06:00

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

2006-08-10T20:00:00.000+06:00

What an amazing series of heavenly displays we have been treated to lately. After a long cloudy stretch we have been enjoying clear skies again - just in time for the full Moon. The above photos were taken this morning - the "portrait" was taken with a 300mm Canon lens at f/5.6, 1/320 and ISO100 - not bad for a little lens and a slightly shaky tripod! The image below that was taken a bit later at dawn and the Moon looked like the classic big cheese, only this time it was accompanied with the dignified icebergs and the beautiful hue of the shadow of the Earth. The last photo was taken yesterday evening when an amazing complement of both type 1 (NAT) and 2 (water ice) clouds appeard across the sky. It was a frozen hour with numb fingers but well worth it - these are such beautiful clouds and not just the garden variety iridescent clouds - let us show some respect here! Our cloud camera has captured numerous beautiful sunrises with Orion and Sirius with PSCs as well as Jupiter, Spica, Altair and so on. The seeing here is nothing short of spectacular - stargazers around the world spend thousands of dollars on equipment and still can't get the seeing - all you need down here is an average complement of standard camera gear (and lots of warm clothes!)

It is needless to say that as the sunlight has returned our spirits have lifted with it. I know I keep repeating myself but after a prolonged period of darkness and just a trickle of light it is amazing how seeing the sun energises the soul. I keep thinking of Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" and the maddening influence of darkness on the entire population of the planet. Perhaps not quite as dramatic but nevertheless there is a lot of truth in the concept.

The ozone hole has started to form and I am studying the dynamics of the vortex which is now nearly completely depleted in several key chemical species (well, from the point of view of a PSC). Our lidar dataset is growing and I am trying to decide which NCEP archive I will use to construct the trajectories - I ran some tests with several archives and there were some significant differences between the results which is a worry. For the sake of homogeneity I may have to default to an archive that might not be the most accurate but if one is dealing with six years worth of data and attempting to do an intercomparison there aren't that many options. In the case of UARS vs. Aura MLS the choice is easy - take it or leave it.

I don't really miss the outside world amenities too much but one of the things I long after is the bookshop...endless hours reading books of all kinds while sipping a hot coffee....sigh. I couldn't resist ordering a book from Amazon after seeing an ad for it in an old issue of the Planetary Report - it is called "Centauri Dreams - Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration" by Paul Gilster. I can't wait - I will save this one for the long trip to Europe when I return from Antarctica. Have a look at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038700436X/104-1940233-7296761?v=glance&n=283155

I love it how Amazon allows you to read bits of the books and wet your appetite until you can't resist and end up ordering the book (of course that is why they do it, not of the kindness of their hear). That said I reckon Amazon is one of the best things that ever came out of the ecommerce phenomenon. How could they ever be worried that eBooks would replace paper books - I cannot think how curling up in a comfy chair with an e-reader could possibly compare with a good quality printed works - yes it would be better for the trees but there is something in the psychological aspect of turning the pages of a book that you cannot substitute.

2006-07-09T12:30:00.001+06:00

Waiting for the sunrise...not long to go now! We will see the disk of the sun again in two days time but the maximum solar elevation will not be positive until 16.7. It is difficult to describe the effect of the return of the sun after more than a month of days consisting of a few hours of twilight and the rest of the day darkness - just as with the changing seasons it signifies a new beginning and, in a short while, the return of life as the penguins return to start their nesting preparations all over again. To us it also means that the time of our stay here is getting shorter. It feels like turning a corner and heading towards something finite.

Midwinters celebrations were undertaken with the appropriate grandeur and humility that can be expected. Numerous midwinters greetings were exchanged between Antarctic stations (McMurdo, South Pole, Rothera, Halley, Dumont D'Urville, SANAE, Scott Base, Syowa, Signy and so on) and some faxes were also received from old ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) expeditioners. The midwinters celebration started with a polar plunge (-1.8 C water) in the morning followed by a brunch and a bath in the old snow melter (37 C water), pre-dinner canapes and drinks, the most delicious dinner (see the above photo of the dinner table) and finallly the midwinter's play and other entertainment such as poetry, songs and guitar music. I feel very privileged to have experienced this Antarctic tradition that has gone uninterrupted since the first winterers started it in Scott's and Shackleton's days.

Since I last made an entry we have acquired a lot of new lidar data with the weather staying nice and clear for several days at a time permitting collection of near-contiguous datasets. PSCs were first detected above Davis on 13.6 and have been present in every observation since then. I also obtained some visual images of them and in the above photo they can be seen as white wavy streaks in the sky. These are type 1 PSCs which consist of either solid nitric acid tri/dihydrate or supercooled solutions of water, nitric acid and sulfuric acid. The "ripples" just discernible in the photo are probably gravity wave effects. The stratosphere within the polar vortex above Antarctica has been progressively depleted of nitric acid since late May and, lately, water vapour as a result of continous condensation of these clouds as the air whirls about the pole. The daily Aura MLS plots clearly demonstrate this annual phenomenon and by late June the depletion of nitric acid within the vortex low temperature region (where temperatures are below ~196K) was nearly complete. Heterogeneous processing of chlorine compounds by these clouds is also visible as the increasing mixing ratio of ClO outside the polar night terminator and the depletion of HCl inside the vortex. PSCs contribute to ozone depletion in two ways. Firstly they allow heterogeneous (multi-phase) chemical reactions to proceed on the particle surfaces that would not proceed via gas-phase-only mechanisms (the "usual" ozone depletion cycle). These reactions liberate chlorine from its main reservoir species HCl and ClONO2. Secondly the existence of polar stratospheric clouds allows irreversible removal of nitrogen and water from the stratosphere which in turn allows ozone depleting reactions to continue longer (due to the effect of this removal on chlorine partitioning). This latter process, sedimentation, proceeds by downfall of solid phase cloud particles from stratosphere to troposphere.

The uplifting events of the past weeks naturally include the launch of the Discovery and its safe arrival at the ISS. I can never watch a launch without an intense feeling of pride and hope - if only we could reach further and conquer the biggest challenge of all - to not obliviate ourselves before we reach the technology and maturity to explore (and inhabit) the rest of the solar system. And the Milky Way. And the local group. And the supercluster. Or maybe another civilisation finds us first - if they do I hope that they are less fearful and aggressive of the new and unknown than we are.

2006-06-04T23:00:00.000+06:00

Time flies and it has been almost a month since my last update. It is all too easy to forget that there is a "real" world out there somewhere - things that concern us here are mainly the weather and the need to keep the station, our lifeline, operational.

The polar night has finally descended upon us and the sun will not rise again before early July. I was expecting it to be much darker until I remembered that the polar night is really only referring to Sun's altitude being zero or less (there is always good light until the altitude gets to about -7 degrees). The colour display every "morning" and "evening" is stunning ranging from deep indigo to ridiculously bright light blue and from peachy orange-yellow to rosey pink and crimson red, all colours being there at the same time depending on which direction of the sky one is looking at. I wish I was a poet so I could better describe it all!

We have just completed the first Hagg (Hagglunds all-terrain vehicle - see photo above) trip of the season. The sea ice needs to be of a certain minimum thickness before these vehicles can venture out but they enable travel even when the weather conditions exclude all other forms of mobility. You still need to mentally prepare yourself for the experience though - you are moving in a square box weighing several tons above an unimaginable volume of unimaginably cold water and the only thing that separates you from it is less than a metre of sea ice.

Whilst temperatures in the lower stratosphere are now suitably low for cloud condensation no PSCs have been detected at Davis yet. I am following the evolution of various chemical species within the vortex using the EOS MLS plots which are great for an overview of what's going on up there (http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/plots/mls/mls_plot_locator.php). The PSC modelling work is also progressing nicely and the current aim is to be able to quickly run all new incoming data through a standard set of models. The more I look at the data the more there is, as always. Where does one stop?!

I have also configured the CloudCam to spy the skies. It is a Canon 300D with a standard 18-55mm lens mounted on a motorised tripod thingy and a set of scripts controlling its operation. The camera takes one photo every 10 minutes and the system then stitches the images into a timelapse movie. Any aurorae in that part of the sky will also get captured as we use exposures of around 30 seconds at night time.

Apart from the usual routine and the preparation for the PSC showtime we are all getting excited about the biggest festivity of the Antarctic year - the Midwinter's celebration. It will be held on 21 June and traditionally involves a black tie dress code with a delicious dinner followed by the perpetual performance of Cinderella. This tradition dates back to Scott's and Shackleton's days and psychologically holds a great significance to the wintering expeditioners as it marks a turnaround point - from then on the days will again start getting longer and the resupply date will start approaching at an ever faster pace. However it is probably watching the beirded Cinderella with the rest of the gracefully hairy crew doing their uttermost to keep this tradition alive that will be the highlight of the night!

Again I feel so very privileged to be in Antarctica. It is simply awesome to be part of all the Antarctic traditions here and to be able to share them with the fellow winterers - we have a fantastic group of people here this winter and I know already that I will miss them when it is time to return to the real world.

2006-05-09T16:20:00.000+06:00

Temperatures have plunged to around -23C for the past week or so and we have had a few beautiful and clear nights. These photos were taken this morning with the lidar running (the famous green beam) and a brilliant auroral display completing the scene (one photo being partly polluted by sodium light - note Venus prominently on the lower left hand side of the photo). I also managed to take a nice shot of Scorpio with one of my favourite stars, Antares, shining bright and red.

The sea ice has thickened enough for us to venture out and last week we mapped ice thickness along the boundary between new and older ice. It was a slightly nippy (-21C) but sunny day and the icebergs were breathtakingly beautiful with an endless variety of blue shades from light shining through snow and ice layers of different thickness. Wow. I feel I am constantly repeating myself but Antarctica is a truly amazing place, if you persevere you will be rewarded. It is no different from life in general though - this, like any other precious thing, has to be earned.

I have been learning about the dynamics of the Antarctic polar vortex which in its greatness, of course, puts the Arctic vortex to an utter shame. Nitric acid and water vapour mixing ratios are required to initialise the microphysical model runs and I expect that in our data we will see the effects of the gradual denitrification within the vortex as the winter progresses. Davis is located at the vortex edge so things can get quite dynamic. I am looking forward to finding out what the basic statistics produces in terms of cloud base altitude and cloud type as a function of time (day number) for each year (starting from 2001). Then there is the most exciting part - how well/badly can the model reproduce our observations? So many things to take into account...presence of planetary and gravity wave activity along the trajectories, local sonde data for temperature sanity checking against the model, selection of the meteorological dataset to be used for trajectories (HYSPLIT and GSFC for now), chemistry (UARS and Aura MLS)... Every time I think I have the basic set of thoughts sorted out something new pops up and I feel hopelessly ignorant. And nervous!

I have started reading "normal" books (= fiction other than science fiction) again, something I haven't done for years with the excuse of never having enough time (pathetic really - there's always time). I went looking for Hemingway in the library and was dismayed to discover only one - instead I ended up with F.Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the night" which I consider to be a very decent start. I also grabbed Kundera's "The unbearable lightness of being" in French - a sure way to get a headache!

2006-04-24T11:00:00.000+06:00

Days are getting ever shorter with daylight now lasting for ~7.5 hours but the polar night is still more than a month away. In the last three weeks we have had one official blizzard and a couple of might-have-beens with maximum wind speeds around 75 knots. We also got some snow last night and this morning Antarctica is looking very very lovely with a fresh ~15cm cover of pure white fluffy stuff. I have to go and do some snow angels this afternoon, there's no way around it. Life is good!

Life at the station is going its merry way. I did my first slot of 2-day slushy service in the kitchen and almost got inspired to do some cooking too (but that remains a definite 'almost' for now). Amongst other things we've been doing some further SAR training in the greenstore. Various rope and pulley systems were set up and we spent the morning prussiking, tying knots and rescuing each other from crevasses. Everyone is waiting for the sea ice to thicken up a bit further but we'll have to wait for the ice cover to extend a bit longer as the blizzard blew quite a lot of it away last week. Everyone is using their allocated head torches regularly now and it has become almost a reflex to check that when you leave a building you have gloves, hat, snow goggles, torch and possibly a radio in your pocket. Makes me think of the "wallet, keys and mobile" reflex - it is now more than six months since I locked my door, used money or spoke on the mobile.

The lidar has not been running too many days this month since we have only had a few clear nights (the photo above shows the actual lidar observatory with sun just rising, taken this morning). It also seems that any especially promising coronal hole or solar flare occurrence is guaranteed to take place when we have overcast weather down here - awesome aurora or clear skies, pick one! Our fluxgate magnetometer kindly tells us what we missed out on.

Davis being one of the global validation sites we have been waiting for the CALIPSO/CloudSat launch to go ahead after a series of frustrating delays. The launch was finally supposed to take place last Friday but it was canned at t-48s due to technical problems not related to the actual spacecraft. CALIPSO and CloudSat will join the NASA EOS A-train constellation which will consist of Aqua, CloudSat, CALIPSO, Parasol and Aura flying in formation to provide unprecedented near-simultaneous coverage of the state of the atmosphere. Check out the CALIPSO website at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/calipso/main/index.html

In between wading through a thick pile of PSC literature and testing the data analysis system I have also made some progress with the VLF experiment. Apart from making a total fool of myself in the lab with less-than-elegant soldering I am almost there and the antenna is now sitting nicely in a solid mount. I have enough material to make another coil to mount it 90 degrees to the current one for directional resolution but I'd be happy with even the first antenna producing something (that soldering was really quite nasty!).

2006-04-01T11:00:00.000+06:00

Winter is approaching. Days are getting noticeably shorter and temperatures now remain around -10C and below. We even have some snow now after a couple of days of heavy snowfall last weekend. Davis in general doesn't get prodigious amounts of snow due to its location at the root of the Vestfold Hills, which greatly resemble a miniature version of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Whenever the sky is clear at night the aurorae appear in a myriad of shapes and forms. There is a sense of slowing down which, of course, is just a sensory perception of a phenomenon that has nothing to do with anything actually slowing down. With the possible exception of one's mind perhaps.

It is now a month since the ship departed but it feels like that was just last week. People at the station have now settled down, each into their own working routine. During the week work usually starts at 8am and finishes around 5pm with dinner at 6pm. On Saturdays everyone is busy with their allocated Saturday duty which normally begins around 11am and finishes at lunctime at 1pm. After that it is officially the weekend with a special dinner prepared for Saturday evening from 7pm onwards. We all dress up a bit, bring out a nice bottle of wine, put on some nice music and light up the candles - this is the only time and place we can have candles anywhere on the station (fire hazard is all too real in the extremely dry atmosphere). Most expeditioners have taken upon themselves to keep up their fitness and due to some people working on shifts and others during fixed hours, there is pretty much always someone sweating away at the gym. I keep an eye on the wind and the consistency of snow for outdoors running - loping around in anything beyond 15 knots without special snow running shows will lead to random sliding and slipping and to a greatly reduced mileage.

One thing that is impossible to describe is the profound beauty of Antarctica. No words, images or sounds can ever do this place any justice and I can only hope to convey some of the awe I feel when I step outside and look around. I have never seen such clarity of colour or purity of shape, it is as if the true profound beauty of Antarctica is only just starting to emerge and to reveal itself to those who dare to stay behind for winter. Every sunset, with icebergs bathing in a brilliant spectrum of perfect pastel colours, the snow sparkling like an infinite field of tiny diamonds with a pink and orange hue cast upon it all, and the eye-watering bluer than the bluest sky, is nothing short of a sensory overload.

My project is progressing well and I am slightly surprised by how easy it has been to get back into programming. I have always liked coding - there are many ways to do one thing, it is up to you how to do it and it all brings kind of instantaneous gratification (or miseration!). When working in the IT industry I always found it very rewarding to design and implement things from the scratch to see them (eventually) working - all the more so when the system is used for a scientific purpose. The "system" I have been building for my thesis is a truly modular beast and currently consists of a pile of UNIX shell scripts, numerous IDL routines, two Fortran programmes and one web-based program. Putting it all together certainly brings an invaluable insight into what one is actually dealing with and there is always room for improvement!

The VLF project has been stalled a little but the circuit shouldn't take too long to build and I have a computer ready to be configured for data collection and processing. The hardest part is to get the mount done - last time I touched carpentery was in year 4 but it's never too late to learn it again!

2006-03-10T13:00:00.000+06:00

Our summer has officially ended with the departure of V3 and the summerers last Thursday (2 March). The transfer of passengers from the station to Aurora was done by helicopters and it took just a couple of hours to move 50 people across. One by one the ranks at the helipad got thinner and it was an odd sensation to walk back to the accommodation building with just 19 of us there. Aurora departed a few hours later and we stood on the beach letting off some handsome smoke from expired flares. We radioed in to remind the Captain to come and pick us up next season and he replied by wishing us a good winter providing a kind of official closure. Whilst it was sad to see Aurora go I did feel a certain profound and intense joy - this is what I came here for, to work on my research over winter and to experience the stunning beauty and majesticity of Antarctica. With the summer crowds now gone I feel the same peace and calm I so well remember from my first visit to the McMurdo Dry Valleys back in 2002. Life is good!

We have been cleaning and scrubbing the station for the past week and as a native Finn I took great pleasure in recommissioning the sauna here after thoroughly scouring all the benches and changing the rocks in the stove ("kiuas" in Finnish). As a reminder of our vulnerability and the fragility of our existence in Antarctica we had a real fire alarm incident last weekend. A strong smell of an unknown chemical was detected in the greenstore (which contains most of our supplies) and the fire chief sounded a full fire alarm. After consultation with the Tasmanian fire service and the head office in Kingston three teams with BA (breathing apparatus) took turns to contain and clean the spill inside whilst the rest of the fire team assisted outside. I was in the second BA team and it was good to have a chance to refresh the skills which hadn't been used since our fire training in Hobart last year. A few hours later the spill had been completely cleaned up, the greenstore ventilated and the fire chief called standown and our wintering team had thus had its first Antarctic incident response. Hopefully it will be the last one too!

In between all the business associated with the ending summer and the sporadic attempts to continue my data analysis I have helped our resident engineer with his annual radar mast inspections. For safety reasons he needs to have someome with him when he inspects the masts and I also got to climb a small one - a task I thoroughly enjoyed!

I have also built my very first VLF loop which consists of 39 turns of insulated copper wire in a shape of a hula hoop (which it very much looks like!). Around the whole shebang a layer of a single piece of chef's aluminum foil does the job of the electrostatic shield and now I'm waiting for access to the chippies (= carpenter) shop to build a small (but steady!) mount for the antenna. Stay tuned for further news (no pun intended)!

2006-02-25T09:10:00.000+06:00

We finished our last resupply on the 15th of this month and Vasiliy Golovnin (voyage 4 - in the photo) departed the day after taking with her five expeditioners from Davis. During the five days of resupply I opened the post office again (being the official Australia Post postmaster for 2006) and processed a couple of mailbags worth of outgoing mail (we had 19 mailbags coming in!). Resupply time is always frantically busy with all hands on the deck and with the trades people working long shifts to get all cargo moved in the minimum time possible. There is no such a thing as fixed duties down here - everyone pitches in wherever they can and for example the rostered kitchen hand duties were mainly taken over by the scientists who cannot help with things like moving containers with huge forklifts or operating massive cranes. Being at an Antarctic station is certainly not like being at a holiday resort - this ain't Hotel Davis! It seems to me that a lot of people think that being down here is just one big camping holiday - that is a serious misconception.

Today we have a visit from the Chinese ship, Xue Long, which is taking their expeditioners back home. Xue Long is the sistership of Vasiliy Golovnin and somehow it is nice to have a ship sitting in the bay - maybe a subconscious reassurance that not all ties with the outside world are cut off just yet?

We now have only a few days to go before the rest of the summerers leave on Aurora Australis voayge 3, which will be arriving next week. All site maintenance work is slowly being wrapped up and the efforts concentrate on getting everything ready for the winter when there will be only skeleton staff to keep things up and running. We still have the pleasure of having the elephant seals down at the beach - someone counted over 60 of them the other day!

The weather has been pretty average for the past weeks and we even got some snow (which melted away the day after). I haven't been able to take too many any photometer measurements since 4 February and by the looks of it I may not get many more before the months ends. The lidar has been operating on the few clear nights with the team concentrating their efforts on building and configuring the second receiver channel, which is now ready for testing. Hopefully this winter we can run a configuration with one channel for PSCs (high temporal/spatial resolution for the lower stratosphere) and another for standard temperatures.

Amongst the resupply business and other duties such as a couple of slushies (= being the rostered kitchen hand) I have made some further progress with the code migration and now I just need to finish testing all the IDL routines. I have started working on the DMI microphysics model integration which involves HYSPLIT trajectory output files being fed into the DMI model and then plotting the results alongside with the actual PSC analysis from Davis (at this stage comprising a 3D backscatter contour plot, a vertical backscatter profile and sonde and AURA temperature profiles).

I also received some VLF (Very Low Frequency) receiver parts on V4 which I will use to build a little experiment to hopefully catch some solar flare signatures in the ionosphere. I have never done anything like it but this is as good time as any to start - this is the first step and maybe in a few months I can make an attempt to build a "proper" heterodyne receiver - I wish we had a dish down here! The plan is to try and get involved in some radio astronomy with the 26 meter Mt Pleasant dish in Hobart (http://www.phys.utas.edu.au/physics/physics_mt_pleasant.html) when I get back to Australia. Our resident electronics engineer here is a RF (radio frequency) electronics guru and I have pestered him into promising to teach me some basics during the winter. He calls it "The Black Art" which sounds exceedingly nonlinear and certainly more interesting than the idiot-proof first year RL circuit frequency response analysis (not to mention the oscilloscope here - the one we used at the Uni pretty much had two knobs and five buttons whereas this monster has more buttons, gauges and knobs I can think a function for). I had brought a small space shuttle model to build it as a hobby while down here but I'm finding that I'd much rather spend my time in the lab with the soldering iron!

2006-02-04T11:50:00.000+06:00

It's already February - where did the time go! The weather seems to be getting more variable after a sensationally sunny and stable December-January and the air has definitely started to cool down with subzero temperatures at night starting to persist during the day. It is most noticeable when wandering outside doing something that a couple of weeks ago could be done without a hat or gloves on - it is also more pleasant to go running with one layer of thermals being just perfect.

The station is getting frantically busy with the final resupply approaching. Site maintenance work is gearing towards the final stages for getting the station ready for winter and the air operations (both fixed wing CASAs and the choppers) have been busy retrieving the Amery ice shelf science field parties back to the station. There are a lot of very happy and content scientists at the station right now with all programmes having achieved (or exceeded) their targets for the season. This weekend will also be pretty busy with several field parties coming and going on various short missions in the Vestfold Hills.

An added excitement at the station at the moment is the collection of male elephant seals residing on the beach - they are huge animals and their snorting and carrying on can be heard far away (if you think you have heard someone snoring try listening to these guys!) The other night we watched one of them haul itself up to the others where it promptly proceeded to stir a squabble and induced a spectrum of amazing guttural sounds - I wish I had had a sound recorder!

Vasiliy Golovnin (Voyage 4) arrived at the Mawson station on Thursday evening after stopping at Casey first and will remain there for at least a week before continuing on to Davis. Aurora Australis (V3) is doing the BROKE marine science cruise at the moment and will be collecting the summerers from Davis around 3 March but that stop will be just for a couple of days. After Aurora departs us winterers will not see anyone from the outside world until late November - that goes for any mail, fresh fruit and cold viruses which we have no immunity against too!

As far as my project is concerned I made some good progress with the MSISE model migration - I admit that IDL certainly outsmarted me and I got punished for not having read the manual properly. After getting the Ruby method to work I had another look at the IDL documentation and voila - there is a very smart option available in the IDL call_external function which automagically generates the appropriate wrapper for an external shared library - it took some time to get it working but I finally got my victory last week with the model now working flawlessly from within IDL. YesSSSS!! That was a very good experience as in the process I became closely familiar with the MSISE source code as well as some of our own lidar IDL library routines. My next task is to get the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) PSC microphysics model integrated into our environment as an automated step in the chain of standard PSC analysis - I am looking forward to doing all that as it not only requires new IDL routines but also some good tinkering on the linux side to reformat the trajectory model output files into a suitable format for the DMI model etc.

I also discovered an easier way to get my thesis into a respectable layout. There is no question at all about using LaTex - that's a natural must - however I had never heard of Lyx before last week when another PhD student here mentioned it to me - Lyx is a wonderful WYSIWYM (what You See Is What You Mean) editor which uses LaTex (including BibTex) and after fiddling around for about an hour I have to conclude that it is a truly fantastic tool for producing LaTex quality output with ease. Check it out at http://www.lyx.org

Yesterday I got out on the boats for a quick escape in the afternoon - a few of us were dropped off at Gardener Island and spent a couple of hours with the darlings there (hence the photos). There appears to be a rather bimodal distribution of chick sizes at the moment with one of the two chicks from the same parent being much smaller than the other. I assume this is the survival game with the chicks being of same age but one being fed more than the other. The parents are ever so stressed with their offspring continuously chasing them around the colony and it is not uncommon to see a parent scramble down the hill with two or more squawking chicks at its heel and then nosediving into the relative calm of the sea in an escape. It was a very nice afternoon and a perfect ending for a good week all around!

2006-01-19T09:03:00.000+06:00

It has been a very busy January so far! After a quick overnight trip to one of the field huts to welcome the new year in the Vestfold Hills the weather has been absolutely stunning and blessed us with clear skies which has allowed us to break a record in the lidar observing hours - for the second time this summer! So far we have 190 hours of data this month and numerous events of probable Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) coinciding with Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE) from the radar. We have also installed a second telescope to the system in preparation for the Polar Stratospheric Cloud (PSC) season to improve the collection of high resolution temperature and cloud data. Next summer we are hoping to add an auxiliary polarisation system to the lidar configuration for further PSC work.

Apart from helping out with the PMC observations I have continued the photometer measurements three times a day and we should end up having a reasonable dataset for the first summer of our photometer observations at Davis if the weather holds. Right now I am also concentrating on the task of enabling our lidar IDL system (currently running on Windows platform) to work on linux which is my preferred OS (well, since Solaris for Intel does not run too well on my laptop). All lidar data is analysed with a library of IDL routines which interface to various models such as MSISE and CIRA. Most problems are solved by adding operating system dependent case statements to the offending code but it doesn't appear to be so straightforward to get the MSISE Fortran code to run properly under linux. Those programming skills being rather rusty combined with various small but nasty issues (such as directly calling a subroutine from a shared object library so wrappers are needed) has stalled the progress somewhat but in the process of googling away I came across an object oriented language called Ruby for which by coincidence an MSISE wrapper has already been written. Well, either I'll learn some Fortran, refresh my UNIX sys programming skills and go the brute force way or try the Ruby trickery - I know how to make the brute force method end result to talk back to IDL but not so sure about the Ruby method. This is good (or maybe not - ask again next month when the thing still crashes) - the only way to learn of course is to have a go at it and fall flat on one's face a few times. The fact that I am new to IDL doesn't help but whilst it seems a bit cranky as far as programmning languages are concerned I am very impressed by all the things it can do.

In between the lidar obs and bouts of IDL/Fortran frustrations I did get out for a day to assist in a geochemical soil sampling on one of the islands here. That was an absolutely fantastic day - there is an active adelie penguin colony on the island and consequently never a dull moment - I just adore those darlings (as probably is evident by now!). Half of the island population consisted of chicks of various ages and the parents seemed to be at times driven to sheer madness by the chicks chasing them around the colony begging for food. Skuas added a dynamic component to the experience and they are certainly not too shy to come and swoop at anyone walking in their territory. We also saw a leopard seal which is the first time for me - it is an impressive animal, bigger than I thought and scarier than I thought - I would certainly not want to be in the water when they are around. We witnessed one of those inevitable scenes of the leopard seal catching an adelie - whilst it is part of the natural cycle of life here I still don't think I want to see it again.

The photo of the day is from the trip - I'll add a few more shortly - this is the view from the top of the island (note the penguins hitching a ride on the ice floe in the lower left quadrant of the photo).

2005-12-23T11:34:00.000+06:00

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Seasons Greetings to you All!
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Kris Kringle and his enthusiastic bunch of elves and reindeers are about to pay a visit to our station. We are busy with last minute preparations for the Christmas lunch but otherwise the ongoing station duties and tasks continue as per usual. I have to say this is a different Christmas experience altogether - no commercial madness, no endless Christmas carols everywhere you go, no office stress, no traffic jams and no mad rush to buy those last presents. What a bliss!

Have a very merry Christmas, I hope it will be a good and relaxing one with lots of good food and some silent peace we all seem to miss these days.

2005-12-14T20:05:00.000+06:00

SAR (Search And Rescue) training!

Most winterers belong to various functional teams such as ERT (Emergency Response Team which does fire fighting) and SAR (which responds to field emergencies). Members of the SAR team need to be trained in various essential ice, snow and cliff rescue skills (snow and ice anchors, belay systems etc) and we were out all day today for our first session. This took place at the Trajer Ridge which is right next to the plateau itself about 25 km away from the station. It was an excellent day despite of the 30 knot winds and overcast weather - it was great get those rusty cramponing muscles going again not to mention the rope skills! We will have another session next week for a cliff rescue scenario plus some further rope work at the station in the Greenstore, which apart from housing most of our precious food supplies also has a small climbing wall. We prepared it a couple of weeks ago and have been conducting ongoing inductions in basic belaying and climbing.

Apart from training I have been trying to get into a routine with my project work and have started reprocessing lidar data from 2001 onwards. I have also been going through literature on polar stratospheric clouds - as usual there is a whole lot of work on the Arctic (more people there) and I was pleased to discover a couple of very nice papers written on data from Sodankyla which is where I spent quite a lot of time when I was a kid. When I was doing my first year physics at the Helsinki University I remember going up to the EISCAT observatory in Sodankyla to listen in on a workshop on ionospheric research.

The weather has not been very favourable to the sun photometer observations and I certainly got my sea ice prediction wrong as well - the ice is still hanging onto the shore for about 2km out. This is one of those transition periods when you can't drive or walk on it but you can't use a boat either.

2005-11-28T08:00:00.000+06:00

Penguin extravaganza!!!!

We went to Gardner Island again this weekend to greet our lovely neighbours. They are busy with nesting and preparations for the little ones to arrive and there is never a dull moment in the colony. The snow is melting, the sea ice slowly decaying and the open water drawing ever nearer with a steady stream of waddling penguins heading to the ice edge. These darlings are truly accomplished mountaineers - despite of their short feet and stubby appearance they are incredibly agile on rocks and can advance up the hillside of polished rocks at great speeds if necessary. Their tail is a very efficient rudder in the water but doubles very well as a walking stick with the beak functioning as an ice axe for self arresting and getting up those extra tricky spots.

The station has been a quiet place this weekend with several field parties heading out to the various huts. The weather has been incredible and Davis the Riviera of the South lived up to its reputation yesterday with temperatures reaching +5 C with almost no wind at all. I have been taking regular sun photometer measurements which require a clear sky. The photometer measures direct solar irradiance at five different wavelengths: 380nm (UV), 500nm and 675nm (VIS), and 936nm and 1020nm (IR) and calculates the aerosol optical thickness (AOT). It also determines the water vapour column (how much water vapour in total a narrow beam of sunlight encounters as it traverses through the atmosphere to the surface) by comparing measured irradiances on the 936nm and 1020nm channels (936nm = absorption peak, 1020nm = off-absorption). It is a very smart little instrument not much bigger than a satellite phone assembly and can be used either handheld or mounted to a tripod.

I have also been learning some laser maintenance from Andrew and Tony. Before coming here I had never had a chance to look at the inner workings of a class 4 laser (let alone pull one apart!) and after an initial shock the device is starting to look a bit less overwhelming. We swapped one of the amplifiers which allowed me to see the actual cladding, Nd:YAG rod, flashlamp and the various other associated bits and pieces. I also learned the basics of how to do a standard optical check of the whole beam path (from the seeder all the way to the final beam output) as well as a standard power check on the oscillator itself. There is so much to learn but it is excellent to be able to do some hands on work as it helps to gain a good understanding of the data - it would feel rather uncomfortable to work on a dataset produced by an instrument whose workings I didn't have a faintest idea about.

2005-11-19T07:30:00.002+06:00

We have finished two days of initial field training for the wintereres now. On Thursday we were out on the sea ice with quads learning how to control them in slippery conditions and how to gauge the sea ice thickness with auger drills, and yesterday we did navigation in the Vestfold Hills. They look very much like a slightly less extreme version of the McMurdo Dry Valleys with lots of extremely interesting geology around and of course those amazing dolerite dykes cross-cutting the landscape everywhere. In between all the science and the station duties we will be doing I am very much looking forward to getting more familiar with the terrain here. There is also a small lake right next to the station and a roundtrip there on the gravel road is about 6 km - this makes awesome offroad running. I managed to get out for one run the other day and it was absolutely fantastic!

Today I am on slushy which involves kitchen and generic housekeeping duties around the station main living area building (LMQ). Everyone gets rostered for a day or two every few weeks in the summer (every couple of weeks in winter) and everyone also participates in Saturday duties, which are done in the sleeping quarters and accommodation areas (SMQ and summer accommodation). And when there's snow we go out and do some shovelling - right now there isn't much around anymore as the summer is quickly approaching. From the Vestfold Hills yesterday I saw how close the open water is - and it really isn't far away - it is only a matter of a couple of weeks now and the sea ice will no longer be there.

2005-11-18T21:10:00.000+06:00

Aurora Australis is gone!!

She left late on Monday 14 November and it was so sad to see her go, all that is left now is a scar in the sea ice (and in a few weeks time even that will be gone too when the ice melts away). I had never been on a voyage quite like this one and had grown attached to our orange floating home. She is a very nice ship indeed - very comfortable, very functional and she has all one can ever ask for (including two small gyms) and the best gully in the Southern Ocean! The atmosphere was great all the way - the crew are fantastic with most of them old timers down here, loving Antarctica just as much as the rest of us do. The only danger on the ship was getting too fat from eating all that delicious food - we didn't get those famous Southern Ocean waves so only a few people got seasick and consequently the mess remained busy all the way through. We shall see Aurora again in March when she returns on V3 to pick up all the summerers.

2005-11-13T23:55:00.000+06:00

Penguins!!!

Here are some photos from the Gardner Island adelie penguin rookery, which is right next to Davis, as well as some emperors we saw on the way.

2005-11-08T16:20:00.000+06:00

I'm in Antarctica!!!!!

After three weeks on the ship, our Orange Splendour Aurora Australis, we finally arrived at Davis station on Sunday evening. We didn't get to the station straight away but were allowed on the sea ice to watch the penguins and stretch our legs. I am HAPPY....so amazing to be here again, not only have I been lucky to have seen Antarctica once but now I'm back and will spend a minimum of 14 months here (and 18 months if I get an extension!). We are busy with the resupply right now, offloading cargo and refuelling the station with around 80 people onsite at the moment. Mawson fly off people are staying at the ship waiting for the CASAs to fly to Mawson but the weather has not been co-operating so they will have to wait. We walked to the station across the sea ice in the morning of Monday 7 November which will be my very special day.

The trip down here was absolutely fantastic - a slow transition from "civilisation", warm weather and many colours to relentless wind, icebergs and sea ice and an endless nearly monochrome world. I feel the same amazement I felt last time but even more so perhaps as I experienced the anticipation and excitement of seeing the first ice lumps in the sea, the first emprerors, adelies, seals, petrels and skuas. I could go on forever about how I love the adelies, the cheeky little darlings, waddling along and waving their flippers and displaying a plethora of behaviours from ecstatic displays to apprehensive poses or what I could swear is the guilty look of someone who has just stolen someone elses nest rock.

The official changeover will be in a couple of days and I will then move into my permanent room in the main accommodation building, which means unpacking all the unaccompanied personal effects boxes. Right now I am doing postal agent duties and it is great to see how many people still send "proper" mail. Email has made a big difference though - I can just imagine what it would have been like back in the early days of exploration when it could take up to two years to hear from the loved ones.

Will write more later once I get settled a bit more - here some pikkies from the trip for starters (have taken about 2.5GB worth of photos before even getting to Davis!)

2005-10-06T17:54:00.000+06:00

Time flies but that's good because most of us are starting to feel a bit trained out and just want to get on the ship. Then again there's the downside of leaving everyone you love behind but heck I just want to get going now, enough packing, running around getting supplies, trying to assimilate info from yet another training session...It's all part of the experience but I have to admit I never knew how mad pre-departure organising can get.

We visited the Great Barrier Reef for a few days a couple of weeks ago and I have to say that was the most amazingly beautiful and mesmerising place. The tropical north Queensland coastline is rugged and stunningly beautiful and we also made it to Daintree where I saw real rainforest for the first time in my life. The only downside of the trip was that I took my skinsuit instead of the 3mm wetsuit and absolutely froze stiff after 30 minutes in the water - I should have known better. Mental note to self.

Fire training was a very good experience if not slightly hairy to start with. The thing that sticks to mind is that if things should go pear shaped and you end up crawling in a real fire down south it will be someone you know you might be looking for. That's not a very nice thought. I became one of the two deputy fire chiefs for winter and that is an even hairier thought.

Since my last post I have also done mast and tower climbing rescue, lifting and handling (OH&S) and postal officer training. I have never climbed a tower before, just gone up a mountain or dangled up on a climbing wall but this was something else. The descenders were luxuriously heavy duty although I suspect the mechanism might not like -30C (so I'm definitely taking the trusty old figure of eight along). It is really our engineer who will have to climb up but backup buddies get to practice too so all in all things look promising climbingwise.

More training on the menu tomorrow - some further OH&S stuff and on Saturday we will shoot up to the central highlands of Tasmania for further survival and basic field skills practice. Snow down to 700m has been forecasted so the quad bike training should get a bit closer to the real thing. It's been blowing our socks off here in Hobart in the last two days too - I was hoping for some warm weather with luxurious sunshine to soak up some vitamin D but there's still time!

So it is now 11 days to go and the schedule is looking like it will happen as planned. I dragged my remaining boxes of unaccompanied goods to the cargo facility earlier this week and felt a short bout of relief until I realised that I had inevitably forgotten a few things that I "absolutely must have" (as with so many other things). Again it will be a bit of a relief to get on the ship as you know that after that things are no longer in your hands cargowise. But just to stop myself from freaking out I have a one last bag ready to hold the last minute things - who cares if they get to Davis in March.

I think I have some serious obsessive-compulsive traits when it comes to redundancy - must have two of everything (three is better). It is not like we are going to be out of communication living in a shack with blubber stove and spam for a year. So I need to snap out of this and enjoy the ride. I'll return to that topic again after I stop being seasick I think - still, going by plane the first time was so very very easy and convenient so this time some misery must be had before earning the place. Everything is getting easier these days...what happened to the sturdy tough resilient explorer? And will you please make me a latte while I'll turn up the heat a bit and watch the penguins waddling outside. Yes, very easy indeed.

Speaking of penguins I have a new little companion - he's a little fairy penguin and he's called Wobbles. Pictures will follow!