PERMANTAR_#04: Cold days in the magic land

Sara Ramos, Ilha Antártica de Livingston, 15 Fevereiro 2018

Our team having a break while climbing up to Reina Sofía Peak.

​We are in the second week in this remote place and the weather is not blessing us with the best conditions. Cold winds, stormy snowfall and heavy rains are hitting the Island these days. We are living some of the hardest days working outside and many days we feel obligated to stay in the base processing data and doing some PC works. Despite of that, we are making the most of the better days to finish the most important works around.

At the beginning of the week, we came back to Reina Sofía Peak, this time accompanied by two of our base colleagues: Nuno and Lucy. Here we managed to fix some of the damaged equipment installed and we showed our colleagues a new territory for them in this Island.

Gabriel and me measuring with GPS the solifruction monitoring sticks that help us to understand the deformation and movement of the terrain in this periglacial environment.

​At the end of the week, we are anxious to have a light windy day so we can test our last technology drone to fly over the area taking pictures that would be later used to create Digital Elevation Models. We find handling this drone more tendentious that we expected, as it needs to be perfectly programed in order to take in account many facts that could interfere in the performance of the flight. After several attempts, we managed to fly it for a couple of minutes, despite it was not a total successful flight due to different technical problems.

When the weather doesn’t make possible working outside, it is a good time for learning a bit more about our colleagues’ projects here, so this week we planned that every team prepares a presentation to explain its project to the rest.

Gabriel concentrated in program the flight of the drone.

Drone right after the launching performance.

This week, we lost one of the members of the team, as the time of Miguel here was schedule to finish at 9th of February, when he shipped himself on-board of “The Hesperides” heading back home. Despite of the odds we have managed to finish almost all the work around the Bulgarian Base and we are planning to move to the Spanish Base for the next week. From there, it will be easier to keep working in monitoring points located in farther away areas from here.

Meanwhile, spending our last days in here, we make the most of the free time helping our colleagues with their tasks, exploring the place riding the Ski-Doos or learning a bit more about the magnificent fauna that one can find out here.