The Galley here provides four meals a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midrats (midnight rations, this is an ex-Naval base, so they use a lot of Navy terminology).

If you arent bothered by the lack of fresh fruits, vegetables, and eggs, the meals provided by the galley staff are great.

It's cafeteria style, but theres plenty of choices and they even make it possible to keep up most diets while youre here (vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, etc). We look forward to mealtimes as a good opportunity to set work aside for a moment and enjoy a cup of coffee with coworkers and friends.

The holiday season is a pretty big deal around McMurdo. From Christmas dinner, to holiday parties and art galleries, there are many activities centered around the season.

For celebrations, the galley breaks out special foods theyve imported just for these events. They also had a Christmas party with a Santa sitting in the back of a Pisten Bully snowcat! All this was topped off with the annual Christmas Day baseball tournament held down by the sea ice.

What a privilege it is to be among those able to follow in the footsteps of those early pioneers of science.

A special treat was getting to step inside Scotts 1902 Discovery Hut from one of his early voyages to Antarctica. Other than the weather, there isnt much here to damage or break down the building over the years. We were excited to see that some of their original scientific experiments were still visible! What a privilege it is to be among those able to follow in the footsteps of those early pioneers of science.

Right next to the hut was a small group of Adlie Penguins out on the ice harassing the sunbathing seals.

The New Year celebration gets its own spotlight at McMurdo. The biggest celebration for this holiday is the annual Icestock, the southernmost music festival in the world, with bands made up of USAP staff and NSF grantees/employees performing until midnight.

Icestock was probably the longest I have spent outside in my whole time down here, and it was definitely not a warm day.

It was surreal counting down to 2020 with the sun still far above the horizon -- the next sunset in Antarctica won't be until March 3! New Years day itself saw a lot of hikers exploring the area around the base via the various hiking trails. Im looking forward to venturing out for some hiking when the chance presents itself.

We are having a great time down here so far, enjoying the opportunity to learn about our own work, as well as the work our new friends are doing. Dr. Chu has run this campaign for almost 10 years now; it is a long campaign for many reasons, but one of the main goals is to identify how the behavior of the atmospheric layers relate to long-term solar and terrestrial events.

Weve been learning about the lidar system all semester, and took a whole lidar class back in Boulder but are thrilled to finally get our hands on the actual system itself.

The lidar is being operated for the Antarctic winter by two of Dr. Chu's research assistants, Cissi Lin and Xianxin Li. Amanda and I are training so that in the coming years, well be able to run the system over the winter. Weve still got about six weeks left on this deployment, and theres a lot of work to be done!

Good luck to our lidar team members over the long winter!From left: Jandreau, Amanda Steckel, Cissi Lin, Xinzhao Chu, and Xianxin Li.

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24 hours of sunlight life and aerospace research in Antarctica - CU Boulder Today