Deleted post

Rothera band end of winter playing Eric Clapton’s, White Room.

This is song 17 from the band evening at the end of Rothera’s winter this year.  the band played 22 songs over the night.  It was a great night the song is performed by Riet, Mel, Matt, Andy, Danny and Tony. Enjoy

Danny just told me that the song was written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown, is a single by Cream.

Cool pic from Rothera

Thought I’d show you this little pic from my wintering mate Terri at Rothera.  Pretty cool.

Happy Christmas from Halley

Here is a massive sofa with all of us on it at Halley.  Agnieszka made the sofa with the help of Bob and his digger.  Agnieszka also took the photo.  Merry Christmas all.

Happy Christmas

Emperor Penguin sea ice and home disappearing

Here we have a photo I posted a couple of weeks ago of the Emperor penguin colony at Windy bay on the Brunt ice shelf.   There is also a picture from last night when I took a couple of chefs, Ant and Alan, down to see the penguins. A crevasse which has recently appeared can be seen in the bottom of the shot.  It has grown 50cm every 24hrs for the past three days.  It would be just jumpable on the way down but not on the way up. We had a ladder to cross it with us but the thought of floating off on the sea ice with a bunch of penguins to our doom was to much so we stayed up top to watch.

You can see how much ice has disappeared over the last couple of weeks.

It is always an unknown entity once the sea ice footing is this small and only one year old. It could go in the next hour or maybe in a month? If it goes in the next couple of weeks all the Emperor chicks will die as they still have their fluffy coats which are not water proof and they would freeze quickly or drown.    All the chicks died last year for this reason. So hopefully the ice will hold out for them this year??

Emporer colony a few weeks ago

Emperor penguin colony last night

Halley VI virtual tour

Found this on youtube which was put on by a Russian fellow.  Not sure how he got hold of it but thought I’d show you it as this is the new building that is being built here although it has four legs on each module rather than 6.  This is an old film.

Towing the 60 ton Drewry building, a huge caravan basically

At the start of the season at Halley there are two big jobs before relief these are the relocation of the the Drewry and Garage buildings. They both way about 60 tons and are built on ski’s. Here is a little movie of the guys prepping and towing the Drewry out of it’s winter hole with eight big vehicles.

Filming the Emperor Penguins

Few photos for the blog all taken by Susanna the doctor here at Halley.  Hopefully she doesn’t mind me using them!!  The pics show a little day trip to see the Emperor penguins at Windy Bay last Sunday.  Was the best I’ve seen them although quite a few chicks had been washed away to sea due to some of the sea ice having been blown out.  Chicks this small can’t swim unfortunately.

The rules about wildlife is that we cannot go any closer than 5 meters to them.  The great thing is that you don’t need to as they are very curious guys and they come to you.  You just need to stay still for a wee while and they begin to surround you.  Not good if you have a phobia of penguins coming to get you after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘BIRDS’ as a kid.  Fortunately I don’t and no one else did either.

There will be a blog coming soon of some wonderful moving shots of these guys.  I even have some flying shots of them.  Well flying out of the water onto the sea ice or smacking into the side of it before falling back in the drink.

 

Antarctic horror film

This is the poster of our Antarctic horror film called ‘ANNE’. It will hopefully be in some film festivals next year so I will keep you posted on that. We had an awesome time making it. Myself and Matt Edwards the doctor at Rothera directed it. I filmed and edited it and Matt wrote the story and screenplay. 14 people on base starred in it. We wanted to get every winterer in it but time was an issue so we had to cut lots of people out to keep our film to feature length, 90minutes.  Trailer will be on the blog at some point when I get a few hours to make it.

The poster was made by Matt Von Tersch and the picture of Rothera at night in it was by Andy Webster.

Wedding message for Des, Franco, Andy and Rachel

Heyup Des, Franco, Andy and Rachel. Just a wee message for your wedding days.
have fun
kirk