I spent the March - October period of 2023 overwintering at Rothera research station in West Antarctica. It was such a wild period in my life that I’ve been struggling to boil it down to a blog post, or even a series of posts. My tradition on this site is to write about one or two-week events that I’ve participated in, so writing about such a long period has been technically difficult.
Sea ice in Hangar Cove.
For a variety of reasons the campaign was hard: the sea ice conditions were very poor which meant we couldn’t do our science to the standard that we wanted to for most of the winter. When the sea ice and weather conditions were eventually good enough, we were often not allowed to work because of (in my view) overly restrictive safety rules. For instance, sea ice access is only permitted at Rothera when temperatures are below -5°C and the wind speed is below 10 knots. This is mostly not the case.
When you’re living on a research station, you are very defined by your job. I found that being a sea ice scientist who couldn’t do sea ice science was a real challenge to my identity, and that was difficult. Those challenges make the period uncomfortable to relive for the purposes of a blog. There was also a series of other challenges to our planned research program that are best not blogged about for reasons of professionalism, politics and advancing my career! Science eh…
So alas, the biggest campaign of my scientific career will not get a dedicated blog post. At least not soon. We did do some good science which will produce a few research papers in 2024/25, and I’ll likely be doing “science-style” (c.f. “personal-style”) blogs about those as they come out.