Gettin' Schooled on Sea Ice

The other day I got sent to Sea Ice School, which is considered a morale trip, but also required for doing any kind of "boondoggle" on the sea ice. This was actually probably one of the last trips like this out on the sea ice, as it has become very active (meaning it's cracking and thinning -- good old summer thaw). After an hour in the classroom, we 8 students and one instructor piled into a Haglin (vehicle especially designed for traveling on ice) and drove north, towards Cape Evans and the Erebus Ice Tongue. We stopped at a couple of spots , looked and seals, skuas, and the cracks and pressure ridges in the ice. As we headed north, our instructor saw signs of flooding, so we stopped to measure the depth of the snow and ice by shoveling snow until we hit ice, then drilling holes into the ice until we hit sea water. We determined that the ice is about 6.5 feet thick, a definite change from its usual thickness of 9 feet. The weather that day was warmish, but incredibly windy -- we drove back in Condition 2.