Today we took advantage of a “dinkle day” – excellent weather – to go off base 20km and service a “Lifetime of Halley” site. These are automated GPS receivers that we have dotted around ice shelf with a purpose being to monitor the movement of the ice that the base is built on. More on that to come in a future update. Our field party was made of four snowmobiles and camping gear for a month on two sledges – even though our destination was less than an hour away, we always take shelter in case of a weather chamge. Off we went:

Today’s work was mainly shovelling snow with a little bit of surgical shovelling when our spades got near something fragile like a solar panel. Fun fact: solar panels work even when buried in the snow. We were “raising” the site – lifting it out of the previous year’s accumulation of snowfall. Last year it got buried quite a bit  – about 2m of snow was built up:

And so we needed to dig down a little bit to get it out:

And get it back to normal:

And go home:

The site, LoH Lima Lima, will hopefully be happy by itself until the next visit sometime in 2016!