McMurdo - my home!
Hello again! It’s been a long first week here at Mactown - it seems like I’ve been here a month! There is a lot of meeting new people and so on, so it gets tiring! For the most part, though, the people are very nice and generally friendly (sometimes a little bit quirky!), which makes it easier to get along.
Here’s a photo of part of McMurdo:
These are a number of the main living and working areas in McMurdo. The four similar buildings in the back are dorms (not my dorm - it’s off the picture on the far right), and the dining hall building where I work is on the right, just in front of the rightmost dorm. Believe it or not, that sort of dirty open area behind those dorms is the Ice Pier, where they do all the vessel offloading. It’s frozen solid now but eventually it will be open water, and that dirty spot, which is ice bound with steel and concrete (not sure how that works!) will be the only ice in the bay.
Some of the other buildings include the Chalet, which is the NSF’s headquarters, and the Crary Lab, which is the main science building.
This is a picture of the historic Hut Point, taken from above the town. There is a building at the lowest point of the jut of land, and that is the hut that Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition built in 1901-1904. They built the hut out of Jarrah wood from Australia, in an Australian fashion, with wide verandahs and a high ceiling - which is excellent for the hot Australian climate but doesn’t work so well for the Antarctic. The hut is a short, 20-minute hike from town.
Those two little dark things in the background are vehicles driving on the sea ice.
Finally, here’s a picture of our friendly neighborhood volcano, Mt Erebus. That little bit of cloud you see at the top is steam, because Erebus is a pretty active volcano! You can’t see Erebus from town very well, but my department drove up to the side of one of the hills and it was amazing how close it was!
