[Dale Andersen]: The 787 Dreamliner rolled to a stop far out on the apron, as the big jets often do here, and I climbed down into a gray afternoon and onto a waiting bus.
Across the airfield, parked in front of the Ultima Antarctic Logistics hangar, stood the aircraft that will carry us the rest of the way: six hours south over the Southern Ocean to the Antarctic continent.
Somewhere inside that hangar sits the cargo I sent ahead. I’ve made the flight from the US to Cape Town many times now, but I still look for the plane every time I land.
Cape Town welcomed me the way it always has, with grace and kindness. Passport control, customs, retrieving luggage, the drive to a hotel by the Waterfront: all of it easy, all of it familiar. By evening the clouds had settled low over the city and a few drops of rain were falling, which seemed about right.
Team members are gathering now from several countries, and if the weather holds and the logistics fall into place, we fly south on the 25th. Between this hotel room and Lake Untersee lie thirty-seven degrees of latitude, most of it open ocean and the rest of it ice.
At that distant end to the south waits a lake sealed beneath perennial ice, an ecosystem unlike any other I know, and a long list of questions we have not yet answered. A fine beginning to my 30th expedition to the Antarctic continent.
You can see all of the status report and related articles from this field season and past field seasons here: Dale Andersen’s Field Reports
Astrobiology, Exploration,
