Monday, December 29, 2014

Still waiting

It's now a little after 8am on Monday morning, the 29th.  Today is the day we were originally scheduled to head south but I'm assuming that since we didn't get a 7:00 call this morning, we won't be heading to Antarctica this morning.  I'm doing some computer things here in our room and Anders is still snoozing.  We'll get up in a bit and join our team--if it looks like we're here for a while, we may venture out a ways from town and go check out some penguins...

In the meantime, here are some maps of the 7th continent to orient things:

The map below is of all of Antarctica.  The south Pole is where all the radiating lines converge, towards the center of the map.  You can see the majority of the continent lies to the "East" (actually, everything is north of the South Pole, but by convention, the continent is divided into the East And West parts).

We are currently to the "west" od the pole, if you extended further upward to the left on the long peninsula you see, you'd get eventually to South America.  Due west of the pole, towards the bottom of the ice sheet you can see at the base of the peninsula is where Vinson is.

Here is a close up.  The pole is on the far right and you can see Vinson in the middle of the Ellsworth Mountain range.  Vinson is at about 79.5 degrees latitude or about 10.5 degrees from the pole--this is about 650 miles.  BTW, this is about 2200 miles from where we are now.

This last map shows a close up of the Ellsworth Mountains.  Union Glacier is visible towards the bottom (click on the map to see an enlargement) and Vinson is in the middle of the upper group--the Sentinel Range:

No comments: