Tuesday 26 August 2003
Halley video
Today I watched some home video from a previous Halley winterer. In most ways it was very familiar from all the photos I've seen, but there were a few things that the video really brought across well.
The first thing was the film from the boat we take to get from the Falklands to Halley. It's an icebreaker, and it takes around four weeks, stopping off at a number of other bases along the way. Watching the video of the hull of the ship crashing its way through two metre thick ice was breathtaking. At one point they hit some thicker ice and had to back up a bit before accelerating up to full speed and ramming their way through!
The other thing that amazed me on the film was some footage of high winds around base. I knew that it got quite windy around the base (Antarctica is famous for its Katabatic winds), but I wasn't quite prepared for the ferocity of it - it was incredible. Ice and snow was blown up from the ground and was moving horizontally across the surface at high speed. It turns out that the footage wasn't even of a particularly bad storm (only 30 knots). When the wind really gets going the whole base sways back and forth.
Posted by simon at 10:00 PM