Week 41 at the Pole

sunbathing
Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSF

Sunbathing at the South Pole? Well, why not! The sun is out (in fact it’s not going away…for months), and for reclining there’s a nice smooth snowbank, compared to the choppy snow surface all around, corrugated with sastrugi, seen here and in a more close-up view in the image below. It was a relatively quiet week at the Pole. But quiet or not, they usually have some sort of celebration going on, and last week it was Alaska Day, a legal holiday in the US state of Alaska, where 8 of the 42 winterovers hail from. Reason enough to bear the cold for a nice group photo.

sastrugi_flagline
Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSF
AlaskaDay
Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSF