GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition 2008
Report Day 04 -- Thursday 30 October 2008 -- Making Exposure Chambers
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GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition 2008 |
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We can see the end of the tunnel of briefings and training courses! Now we have to hurry to get ready for our first experiment deployment: On Saturday the McMurdo dive master Rob Robbins and Henry Kaiser will deploy some of our experiments on the underwater slopes of Mt Erebus near Cape Evans. Time to do science.
The first thing we need to do is to prepare our exposure experiments that we briefly discussed in the welcome-piece of this website. Most of our experiments are confined in an "exposure chamber" made of black pipe and fitted lids that holds all the small pieces. There are four different types of experiments: Two polished sections with volcanic glasses of different compositions (rhyolite, basalt) and some gem-quality olivine (=peridote). Then, there are a bunch of little bags with different glass powders, marked with beads of different color and shape, and we have a covered Teflon beaker with rock fragments and a little test tube with some glass wool. Everything needs to be to sterilized, either by autoclaving or by an ethanol wipe-down (the exposure chambers themselves warp in the autoclave).
While we are trying to get everything done for the experiments tomorrow, we had to spend all afternoon on "happy camper", sea-ice refresher course and survival training in case we get stranded out on the ice. We have done all this before, all in great gory detail, but getting the highlights one more time definitely helps. We would like to avoid swimming with the penguins, and definitely want to remember how to get the camping stoves working when we are freezing and stranded on a mountaintop glacier. Nevertheless, it took us almost four hours and now we have to hurry getting our experiments done. More tomorrow!
| GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition |