We're nearly there! Our shipment has gone; three boxes with a total weight of about 160kg are currently sitting in a warehouse at Copenhagen airport awaiting their flight to Kangerlussuaq. We're wrapping up all of the final odds and ends that need to be taken care of before we leave the country, trying to think of every eventuality and making sure that we can deal with it when we're so far from civilisation. Buying billions of hand- and foot-warming gel packets, socks, first aid kit, red bin bags that we can fill with snow so planes can see where we are, pencils and waterproof notebooks, every possible plug adapter combo, USB sticks, tape measures, tiny flags on wire for marking out snow grids... The list seems endless!
Today Rachel and I sat down with Andy Shepherd (CPOM boss), Rosie and Ewan for a good four hours and went through our plans. Yes, we have a plan. It was a really productive session: we talked about schedules (our schedule as well as the schedules for the camps, flights, CryoSat orbits, the other ground teams), practicalities (how we are going to deal with working in such an extreme environment, hauling 100kg of radar around), eventualities/priorities (what if there's really awful weather for half the time and we can't make all the measurements we'd hoped for). Plus the scientific objectives of the experiments - what we hope to achieve with the data that we gather.
We are spending the best part of tomorrow with Jim McNeill of Ice Warrior - he's coming to UCL with the remainder of our specialised polar clothing and we're going to have a day of essential survival training. We'll cover some of the small, unimportant matters like how to deal with humongous hungry mammals and what to do if someone falls into the freezing ocean (!) Obviously doing this kind of training in a meeting room in Central London is not ideal but given the time constraints it is the best we could do. That's not to say that we're going unprepared - Ewan has a lot of experience doing fieldwork and has been to Greenland several times, and we will have additional training in Greenland from our dedicated polar explorers Marc Cornelissen and Petter Nyquist before we go out on the sea ice.
After that it's just the small issue of packing....
No comments:
Post a Comment