From the Ice

Few things in life are more disconcerting than realising you’re in the middle of a minefield. Of course, for thousands of unlucky people around the world that’s a daily reality, but that’s another story. Here we’re comparatively lucky: the ground doesn’t go bang when you step in the wrong place, but it might just give way. Crevasses: the bugbear of icy travellers, and for the last week…

Written at 1900 BST yesterday: The area that we are in is a disturbed blue ice feature with extensive ice upheaval. This creates unpredictable crevassing in terms of location and orientation. GPR is producing a confused set of data due to the multitude of fractures lines within the ice. Reconnaissance on foot has taken us 1.8km south and this also has not identified a viable safe route. We hav…

Despite high winds this morning the visibility was sufficient to allow us to move south along our flagged route and then push onwards for a total of 2.2km. Poor traction on the ice required us to break down into eight loads however. All cabooses and fuel are now at this new position which is at the transitional section between blue ice and snow (ground conditions are currently a mixture of…

Crossing the Mother of All Blue Ice Crevasse Fields – a video by Ian Prickett, featuring Spencer Smirl and Brian Newham. Filmed two days ago, edited yesterday and aired today! &nbs…

By Spencer Smirl During our initial 250hr service 200hrs ago we had discovered that Seeker was transferring oil from both final drives into the transmission. This is the result of a failed lip seal where the axle shaft runs between the two gear boxes. This can be a fairly common failure at low temperatures but very unlikely at such low operating hours. The failure of the seal is the result of on…

by Brian Newham All eight remaining fuel scoots have been brought up to last night’s camp in pairs by double-head. We then started to move both cabooses further south but very quickly encountered difficult terrain with honeycombed ice. Progress has been very slow and with fading light we called an early stop for the day whilst we formed a strategy for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will recce the rout…

The Ice Team have had more than their fair share of blue ice on this expedition, and they are getting more and more used to coping with it – which is not the same as they like it! Here is a video Ian Prickett made some time ago which gives a good reminder of what blue ice is and how it hampers progress so severely. Watch out for those tracks spinning! &nbs…

Spencer at Work – by Brian Newham I have had to diagnose and repair a variety of different faults and failures on a variety of Cat machines. This would be expected of anyone with nearly ten years history with Finning, Caterpillar’s largest equipment retailer. Even though I have had a broad range of experience, a powertrain system overheat was completely new to me. Being in Antarctica, t…