The POLENET field season has been officially cancelled as of last night.
The reasons we were given include the lack of firefighters (which I've already talked about), as well as bad weather, and the delayed opening of WAIS. The grad students and mountaineer on our field team are going to be sent home on Monday, but it sounds like the technical engineers (me and Avi with PASSCAL, another engineer with UNAVCO) will be staying a few more weeks. Our options to fly back home are Monday, or in late-Jan (after a 5-week gap with no incoming flights).
We have some PASSCAL work to finish up here -- even if we won't be supporting the POLENET experiment -- including our work at Castle Rock, inventorying equipment, and sending cargo back north. It's a bit unreasonable to accomplish this all in the next few days, so it seems like we will be staying in McMurdo until late-Jan.
I am incredibly disappointed that we will not be going to WAIS this season. Many of our POLENET stations are already buried under 10+ ft of snow; it was already going to be difficult to find/dig up those stations this season, much less after another year of snow accumulation. Since we don't telemeter data back to the US, these stations have critical data that may be lost if we can't find them next season. Not to mention the tens-of-thousands of dollars of equipment that could be lost as well.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but morale on the team is at an all-time low. We might take another trip or two to dig at Castle Rock before the grad students and mountaineer have to go home (which might help the mood a little), but I think we are all dismayed that we can't progress any of the science this season.
There's obviously a huge amount of logistical work that goes into making any field season possible, between getting field teams down to the ice, accounting for the notoriously bad weather of West Antarctica, and getting fuel/resources out to field camps. The logistical staff have been meeting daily to try and figure out any scenario that might work to get our field team out. So while it's tempting to point a finger and blame a specific reason for our cancelled field season (and other team's cancelled/delayed seasons), there's simply no one thing that could have been done differently. There is always some level of uncertainty in Antarctic travel.
So some of this was because of an all-around reduced season due to COVID, some from poor weather, and some from just plain bad luck. Either way, I am glad I've had this opportunity to travel to Antarctica, and I am still looking forwards to making progress on PASSCAL operations for the next 6 weeks here. I'll have a (cheerier) post about the work we've been doing at Castle Rock soon -- work that will support experiments we have planned for next season.
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