Sunday May 3rd, 2009

The science is finally working, sort of. It’s been tough starting from scratch here with different equipment than we use back home. At home everything works beautifully, but it took us a little work to get it to that point. We were hoping to avoid that problem here at Palmer because they have the exact same equipment that we have at OU, however, they didn’t ship all of the accessory parts to the equipment from Chile so we can’t use it. Major bummer…  so now I am trying to accelerate the “getting up and running stage” with this new equipment. Time is a tickinG…. TICK TOC TICK TOC! Everyone is feeling the push. In fact, I’m not going fishing the next time so that I can stay behind and work on my experiments.

I did take a little break this afternoon and headed out to the “backyard” to play a bit. By backyard, I of course mean the glacier. Lisa and I headed out to hike to the top of the glacier

You can see that I made it to the top…

Palmer Station is dead in the middle of the pic...

But it wasn’t easy and was super windy, cold, and side-ways sleeting, so I had to dress warm. And, as you can see, I even was even able to accommodate on a special request from back home by licking the glacier. Weird, I know, but that is what I was asked to do. I guess this would serve as a beard up-date…

I mean who wants to know what a glacier tastes like anyway? Have they never had an ice cube, slushie, snow cone, Italian Ice, etc….???

Here is a cool rock puddle that I found on the way down. I was impressed.

It was a good break from science, but back to work. Unfortunately progress on the science front has been slow, but we’ll press on.