After six months of preparations and great support by Campbell Scientific and AWI logistics, the overwintering scientist, Damián López, and I finally installed the sensor to measure the water vapor and carbon dioxide content of air back to the eddy covariance system.
This year, the arrival to the Argentine station on King George Island was very smooth. The Chilean Hercules left at 8:20 on September 25. after arriving on the Fieldes Peninsula, King George Island, I just waited about an hour at the landing strip for the weather to clear up so that the helicopter could take of.
Back from Antarctica since three weeks, we are waiting for our equipment and the samples to return on the Russian cruise vessel Polar Pioneer. Next to sediment and porewater samples that we collected together with Jan, about 250 kg of filtered water from Maxwell Bay are making their way to Germany.
More than a week ago the last scientists and our two AWI colleagues, Dirk and Eberhard, left the station to make their way home.
On March 5th 2012, the Argentine President Cristina F. de Kirchner announced the renaming of Jubany Station to Dr. Alejandro Carlini by the official Decree 309/ 03.05.2012.
This is my second visit to Jubany. I have already visited the Jubany station in January-February 2010 and that was an extraordinary experience. So I was really excited to find out that also this year our application was approved and that I could leave for another expedition to this wonderful place near Potter Cove on King Georges Island.
After our rather late arrival at Jubany station, we first had to deal with several problems connected to the last overwintering crew like missing or broken equipment. But after a two weeks of reorganization and a lot of help of the present station's crew and commander, we find ourselves in the middle of a very nice and smooth campaign.
About one and a half months ago, Jöran and I (Sanja) started our trip to Antarctica. Everything went different than planned. Actually we should have arrived at Antarctica before New Year’s Eve, but the Argentinean logistics thwarted our plans.
We arrived in Jubany (Isla 25 de Mayo) on Tuesday, 15.01.2012. The temperature difference to Buenos Aires, where we started our travel, was about 25°C and the both of us directly caught a cold.
Last week we were able to work five days in a row. Every day the video recordings improved a little bit more and at the end of the week, we managed to drive the first video profiles from approximately 90 m to 3 m depth.