I made it to WAIS!!!!

I would really love to send some pics in this email, but we have such a limited internet connection here that it may not be possible!  So on the 7th try, 6 weather cancellations later, I finally got to take a ride on an LC-130, a military cargo plane equipped with skis for field landings!  It is absolutely amazing here.  It is both beautiful and utterly desolate!  Its much like being on the open ocean in that in every direction there is nothing but a sea of snow and ice.  There is literally NO topography here save wind drifts agains the building or man made snow piles used as wind breaks.  It has been very clear for my 16 hours here so far, the outside temp hovers just above zero F and with the wind chill, it dips well below zero quite often.  I have been all throughout the drilling and core processing arch, the main point of having WAIS Divide camp this year.  For more info try http://waisdivide.unh.edu/ to find out about the main project here at WAIS this year.  I'm sitting next to one of the scientists working on the cores whose giving a lecture via satellite phone back to his home university; he's saying that in their test drilling this year they've just passed the year zero A.D. and what they're seeing is that the climate is definitely changing and humans are difinitely impacting some percent of that change.  It's truly amazing to be here both because of the fact that we're very deep in the filed, but also to be right in the middle of some of the hottest emerging science right as it happens!  It looks like the weather is good enough to fly today, but will worsen over the next few days, so it has been suggested that I take the flight this afternoon back to McMurdo otherwise I may get stuck here longer than intended.  That's truly unfortunate as I'm finding life here at an established deep field camp is quite to my liking!  We have heaters in large tents for sleeeping and dinning, and they're big enough to stand up in and wakl around just fine.  We take snowmobiles everywhere we go, I'm even driving one myself (and haven't flipped one yet, thanks - Amie!!!)   Well, its 6:30 by the clock we follow here, which is McMurdo time; however, if you were to follow the lines of longitude (the up and down ones on the map) I'm actually in Mountain standard time zone right now!  Work goes on 24 hours a day here, in three shifts, one begins again here in just a half an hours so I'd better throw down some brekky so I have enough fuel for the morning working inside the arch, which is kept at 0 F on the warm side and -20F on the cold side!  Talk to you all soon!