Day 12 in Antarctica

December 8, 2013
Happy Birthday, Dad!
There is more snow on the peaks and the Onyx River is really flowing.

I spent the morning programming in Python to look for trends in our preliminary thermister data.  I don't do enough programming to remember all the data reading and processing tips.  And without the internet to look them up in an instant, it took me much longer to actually get to the data.  I worked on sorting out how to do a Fast Fourier Transform to look for cycles.  This was really fitting for today, my dad's birthday, as a key part of his Ph.D. thesis was implementing a FFT technique to understanding nuclear data for cobalt.

Helping Tyler prepare for a dive.  I'm holding the rope, Ian is checking his air, and Devin is preparing to attach his inflator.  Anne is the photographer.
Tyler dove and collected samples for me to photograph and for Anne to subsample for genomics.  Anne and I spent all afternoon on the samples, and Anne worked late into the evening.  I'll get an early start tomorrow to use the binocular microscope and let her have it later in the day.

Pinnacles from 19 m depth.  The scale on the left is in millimeters.

Backlit pinnacles look even more dramatic!
In the afternoon, Ian walked 14 km of the south shoreline with a GPS unit.  With 1 m of lake level rise across a shallow slope, there is a lot of new lake surface area.  The old surveying benchmark is only 30 cm above lake level now!

Climate change is real!

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