The Big Move

Everything seems to be going along alright at this point. We just finished moving the ice runway from its old location in front of mcmurdo to about 19 miles away on the ice shelf. THis is something that is done every year because the runway and "ice town" that I always write about is on top of "sea ice" which is frozen ocean. at this point in the year that sea ice is about 1 to 6 feet deep and is melting away so it cannot support the wait of the C-17s anymore. In about 2 weeks the old location will be water. It was a very complex operation to move. All of the buildings at the ice town are built on skies, incliding our station 2. It was about 20 hours of towing those buildings across the ice to the new location. We now are operating an airfield that is on "shelf ice" which is about 200 feet of ice and then 3 thousand feet of water under that. It never melts and can support as much weight as we need too. My shift fell on a day where we were actually moving the town so we were without a station for about 16 hours. I got stuck driving PH-2 from the old runway to the new one wich took about 3 hours but was an awesome trip. PH-2 is one of the very very large yellow fire trucks on the big tank wheels. It is very slow so I was quickly left in the dust. Once you get about 3 miles out you cannot see anything but ice so its very beautiful. Long story short it ended up breaking down on me about 10 miles out but thats a story ill finish when I get home. So now that the airfield move is done things are slowly returning to normal again. Other than that everything is same old same old.
I dont have any new pictures from the move but here are some from this past week:
The bird is called a Skua. they are just like seagulls but the adults have about a 5 to 6 foot wingspan and are very mean. They odd birds and constantly knock trays out of peoples hands if there is food.

This is one of the A- stars after doing a drop, flying over Mt. erebus. You can see the gasses coming up since it is an active volcano. The other helicopter that is on the ground is one of the 212's which is the other helo we use here.