Last weekend, we experienced our first “blow” – the Antarctic equivalent of a storm. It is when powerful and consistent winds appear, pick up surface snow and blasts us with it for days at a time. This weekend, we had an even stronger one.

Wind here is common, but this was something else. For the past 24 hours, it’s been over 40 knots with gusts of 46 knots – that’s 83kmph. Imagine, if you will, what it would feel like standing on your car driving down a main road. Now imagine the temperature is -10°C before the windchill… and this is still summer! The winter will have worse in store for us…

Life continues as normal inside. We can’t see anything but milky white out of our windows and the building is rocking a bit every now and then. We experience the wind as we dart across the bridge between the modules – even crossing this 30m stretch will leave one side of you coated in snow and ice and all of you chilled.

The conspiracy theorist in me is sure these blows been carefully timed to prevent us going outside on our last two days off! I did anyway, of course…

…briefly.