Do you ever have those dreams where you\u2019re juuussssst about to do something incredible, but then suddenly wake up? That\u2019s sort of what every day of the last month has been like while waiting to hear if our research team is, in fact, deploying to Antarctica. In truth, we still don\u2019t really know if the ice will be stable enough to safely live and work on, but for now we are at least half-way to our dream field-season studying emperor penguins at Cape Crozier in Antarctica.<\/p>\n
The waiting period has kept us on the edge of our seats with numerous moving parts that could cancel our plans. A big priority, and one that we could at least do something about from home, was to avoid contracting Covid-19. Our team has been in a self-imposed quarantine for the last month (thank goodness for furry companions and HBO!) to make sure that the lingering global pandemic would not stand in our way again. In 2020, New Zealand closed its doors to outsiders in hopes of waiting out the covid storm, and our research along with many other Antarctic projects was put on hold. A year later our plans were postponed yet again due to the long backlog of isolated researchers eager to leave their desks and get back to work in Antarctica. This year, we had priority but still feared delay due to positive covid tests.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most torturous part of the self-imposed quarantine, was waiting for our GO\/NO GO date two weeks before departure to New Zealand (the Antarctic deployment hub) and not knowing whether all our efforts where futile. While you might think the penguin team would be getting better at waiting to return to our huddle at Cape Crozier, this could not be farther from the truth. Several days past the GO\/NO GO date, we had heard nothing about our fates, but had acquired some promising images of the sea ice around Cape Crozier. Sadly, some of our colleagues working in McMurdo Sound had already been canceled due to unstable ice conditions, but with the satellite images, we began to feel hopeful that the ice at Cape Crozier was in good shape. Our team leader, Gitte McDonald, explained that all the \u201cmuddy\u201d looking ice was a great indication that our penguin friends had initiated their breeding season in April, and had likely been happily pooping away and staining the ice ever since. Poopy ice, means stable ice. Eventually, we received communication that a helicopter wasn\u2019t available to confirm our hypothesis, but that we should at least plan to proceed to New Zealand.<\/p>\n