Nov. 5 2002 Greetings!

I thought you would like you to know about my children's book about diving in Antarctica, just released. It's called "Under the Ice". Here's a picture of it. It is a biography, 55 pages long, and is full of pictures of what it's like under the water. I also talk about my feelings while diving, what research I'm doing, and what it's like to visit all the beautiful places that we have been describing on this web site. You can buy the book from the Canadian Museum of Nature's web site, http://www.nature.ca. Half of the money goes into my research account (none of it goes to me personally) which I will use to hire a student to work up the collections from this trip. The other half will go to the Museum, which will use it to fund its exhibits and to do other outreach like that, which is described on its web site. So it's all going to a good cause, I think.

On the afternoon of Thursday November 7th we will be flying across McMurdo Sound to work out of New Harbor for eight days. New Harbor is located on the coast, at the entrance to the Taylor Valley, one of the Dry Valleys. Taylor Valley is named after Griffith Taylor, a Canadian geologist who was part of Scott's Party. The closest glacier to New Harbor, as you walk up Taylor Valley is the Commonwealth Glacier, followed by the Canada Glacier. Griffith Taylor was a bipolar adventurer. He has an island named for him - Griffith Island - which I have visited, just offshore of Resolute Bay in the Canadian High Arctic. The second Dry Valley paralleling the Taylor Valley is the Wright Valley. Sir Charles Wright was a geologist in Scott's party and I believe that he eventually established the Geology Department at the University of Toronto (or maybe it was Taylor - I knew at one time but I've forgotten). So, Canada has had a connection with the Antarctic for many years (despite the official Canadian federal lassitude when it comes to signing the Environmental Protocol and generally supporting polar research, a concern for me because I'm Canadian). Other things Canadian that I have encountered around here: ski-doos, our red parkas, bunny boots, the Terra Bus (a huge bus with balloon tires to transport pax to and from the airplanes - it's made in Calgary), and Ken Borek twin otters, which have been providing flight support here for years.

For the last two days we have been doing lab work, which for me means photographing the microscopic fauna, taking wet weights, sieving cores, and transferring samples from formalin to ethanol. We are accumulating a great set of photographs of the marine life of McMurdo Sound, which you can see on http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/nsf/fguide/index.html.

With that relative lack of physical activity, I was getting pretty antsy by the end of the day, so I decided to go for my first run in McMurdo since 1998. Running here is way more of a challenge than at home because it is on gravel, along a steep and very long uphill slope followed by a steeper downhill to Scott Base, it's way colder and drier and windier than what I'm used to, and the scenery is spectacular, so I keep turning around to gawk. My legs held out on the uphill to the crest between McMurdo Station and New Zealand's Scott Base, so I decided to run halfway downhill to Scott Base before making the prudent decision of turning around. McMurdo hosts two runs, the Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving, and Scott's Hut run. I've done the latter twice and they have been quite the challenge. But I actually got listed in Women's Sports and Fitness for having done a run in Antarctica, which was rather neat!

Cheers, Kathy