I'm Madeline Hunt -- I graduated in May 2020 from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in physics and geophysics. I currently live in Socorro, NM and work as a Polar Field Engineer for IRIS/PASSCAL. My job is to install or repair seismic stations deployed in polar regions; for the most part, in Greenland and Antarctica.
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| A double rainbow outside my home during monsoon season in New Mexico. |
22/23 Antarctic Season
I am going down to Antarctica for a second season this year. This time, to support the TIME (Thwaites
Interdisciplinary Margin Evolution) experiment. I'll be deployed from Nov 2022 - Feb 2023, and am planning on spending 2 months at an unheated deep field camp on the Thwaites Glacier! I'll post updates as often as I can, starting in Nov.
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| Me hanging out with a penguin on the Ross Ice Shelf. |
21/22 Antarctic Season
I went on a wild adventure to do fieldwork in Antarctica from Nov 2021 to Feb 2022, and posted regular updates to this blog. If you'd like to see all my posts from that journey, you can read them here!
Long story short, I left New Mexico on Nov 10, and spent the first few weeks of my journey in various quarantines in the US and New Zealand. I arrived in McMurdo (a US Antarctic base) on Nov 30.
The original plan was to head out to a WAIS Divide, a deep field camp, in mid-Dec, where I'd support the POLENET experiment by taking day trips out to repair some of our seismic stations. However, with many delays (COVID and weather related) in the 21/22 season, and the POLENET field season was cancelled.
So with this change of plans, instead of supporting POLENET, I helped manage PASSCAL operations in McMurdo and prepared for next year's field season. I also serviced some seismic stations on Mt. Erebus (an active volcano)!
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| Here's me hard at work at a PASSCAL station in Nuugaatsiaq, Greenland. I am troubleshooting the modem (which sends state-of-health data back to our facility in New Mexico). |
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