Moving the TAWO Tower

 over the past two weeks I've been helping the tower riggers take down and rebuild the TAWO tower in a new location.

The finished tower! I have a time lapse of the whole process but it's a bit big to upload just yet. 

Retrieving Ice Cores by Plane

 Yesterday I got to go on a twin otter flight 190 miles away from station to help dig up some ice cores and empty gas jugs from a ice core traverse that has been snowmobiling around the west of Greenland for the past 7 weeks.

 Station from the sky!

 Landing on ungroomed snow in the middle of no where.

Dug a hole to retrieve the things left behind. It was a really fun afternoon trip! The flight back was a bit cold, because you can't turn the heat on in the airplane if you are carrying ice cores, you don't want them to melt!

Happy Mid-Summer!

Mid-summer isn't a huge deal as mid winter is down south or even mid winter up here. But it's still a good reason to take a crew picture and mail it to all the stations in Antarctica celebrating mid winter today. 

Sun Dog

It's been a very busy first couple weeks. There has been a couple storms but mostly really nice weather. Wind under 10 knots, temperatures between -15 and 15 F.

We are in the process of moving the TAWO tower that was built too close to the TAWO building. To do this two tower riggers were flown up to take the tower down and rebuild it in a new location. This is the riggers and medic man hauling the base of the tower out into the clean air sector. We had to drag it by hand to not disturb the clean air science going on at TAWO.

While taking turns hauling the base of the tower and the anchors of the guy wires a fantastic sun dog appeared.

Best one I've every seen.

Lots of different effects were displayed including, the parahelic circle, Perry's Arc, infralateral tangent arcs of the 48 degree halo, lower and upper tangent arcs and the 22 degree halo.  It was hard to get everything all in one picture.