Arctic Astrobiology Field Report From Dale Andersen 19 June 2006

Dale Andersen: Keith – We arrived in Resolute Friday evening but we are still in here awaiting better weather. Its been cloudy with periods of light snow and rain along with low cloud and fog so getting north has been a bit problematic. But that is life in the fast lanes… We may try to get up to Eureka later today but I am not betting the farm.

Hard to believe that we started blogging from the McMurdo Dry Valleys in the Antarctic nearly ten years ago. I know that “blog” along with the images have been available online at your astrobiology website since.

Well, now I am finally getting around to blogging from the Canadian High Arctic. We arrived in Resolute Friday evening but we are still in here awaiting better weather. Its been cloudy with periods of light snow and rain along with low cloud and fog so getting north has been a bit problematic. But that is life in the fast lanes… We may try to get up to Eureka later today but I am not betting the farm.

We have a camera installed on our met station at Expedition Fiord that allows me to retrieve images along with the data from the station via an Iridium satellite connection. This helps take some of the guesswork out of getting our flights into the camp when there is no one there to report the local conditions, visibility etc. Now we can pull up the most recent image, see visibility markers in the distance to gauge visibility and cloud height etc. Pretty neat. Enclosed is a shot I retrieved on the 17th which shows the camp with low cloud which would make getting a twin or helicopter to the camp difficult. We have pretty much the same weather today.

More later if I get time to send a note. Perhaps I will try to update you by Iridium phone from our field camp once we arrive.

Cheers

Dale

Astrobiology