Burrito Contretemps

With wild exhilaration and abandon I made my lunch burrito, stuffed it too full, and was unable to wrap the insides with the tortilla. This is a mistake I have made many times before. Like Sisyphus, I see myself doomed to repeat.

Excursus on the making of a burrito does not belong in a blog about Antarctica...Or does it!?

I took a tour of the Pressure Ridges last night. This is over Observation Hill at Scott Base (New Zealand), where the Ross Ice Shelf collides with the sea ice of McMurdo Sound. The sea ice is anywhere from twenty to forty feet thick (and rapidly thinning). The ice shelf is about 300 feet thick. The collision drives ice up into a spine that serpents over an otherwise flat plain. (My last entry gives a mistaken explanation – sea ice pushing against the shore.) My camera battery unfortunately ran out halfway through, but I still got a few pictures. The light was quite nice, as it was evening going on night (8:15-9:15); we saw four Weddell Seals from a distance; it was much colder than town out on the ice, exposed to the wind. Ob Hill protects McMurdo. At Pressure Ridges, wind blows directly from the south across a huge ice shelf and into the poor suckers touring about. At the end of the tour we all stood in silence – fifteen of us – and it weighed as the eerie silence of a cave weighs. The bitter cold made that silence almost malevolent.

That remains the highlight of the week. I have otherwise been unloading old junk from a cargo container then reloading the container with other old junk that has been inventoried and sometimes organized in bins. Aspects of it are actually enjoyable. I get to move around, lift things up and put them down. It's physical labor, and refreshing in the way all physical labor is. We are above town in the relative quiet, an unobstructed view of the mountains. We work seven days this week, Monday through Sunday, and then get two days off for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There is a banquet, I think some kind of concert. Living at McMurdo is like returning to college. Some of you may find this enviable. Well, now you know.

The NSF is always seeking support staff for grantees.

My dinner was not as noteworthy as lunch, nor was breakfast, though I had oatmeal for the first time. On top of my oatmeal was brown sugar. On top of my brown sugar were raisins.

And if this blog were a tortilla, well, my experiences...