To: St. Edwards C of E Middle School, Leek, Staffs. Hello all, I hope everyone is well back there in the UK and not all coming down with this flu we've been hearing about. There's one good thing, there's not much chance of it reaching us out here 12,000 miles away! Well I've been out here on the Evans Ice Stream for the past 6 weeks along with seven colleagues trying to make a seismic survey of the area. I say "trying" as we are having a very hard time of it due to the weather. Over half of my time out here has been confined to the safety of my tent, with blizzards raging outside. It's in one of these blizzards now that I write to you! The temperature outside is -20ºC, the wind is 20 knots and you can see probably no more than a few metres because of the blowing snow. To lose your tent when moving outside in these conditions would mean certain death!! So when it's like this we don't venture outside unless it's absolutely necessary. On a nice day though, this place is awesome. A while desert rolling to every horizon with an unimaginable vastness. The sun at this time of year does not set and just circles around our heads, only dipping slightly towards the southern horizon to tell us it's nighttime!! I suppose this place is as close to being on the moon as you can get on Earth. What are we doing here? You may ask. Well not an easy one to explain this. A seismic survey is looking to see or should I say hear to what's under our feet. I am sat on ice which is thousands of feet thick and underneath this you have the rock of the continent. It's this rock which the scientist are interested in. What we do is basically this. Imagine going into a room with your eyes closed, you don't know the size of this room and so you shout out. From what you hear you get some idea to the size of the room. If it were a small cubicle your shout would sound loud and short, but if you were in a large hall the same shout would sound less and with an echo. So here we are doing the same, instead we're not shouting at the snow, we use 500 kg's of high explosives to make the noise. Then we have some very scientific equipment which records the sound echo. From this data you can discover the thickness of the ice, the type of rock below and a lot more. This then all goes towards giving us a better knowledge to how the Earth was formed millions of years ago. Anyway back here in my tent, things are not as bad as it may sound. I know it's -20ºC outside, but in here it's cosy and warm with our Tilly Lamp on and the CD player is drowning out the sound of the wind outside. Going to the toilet out here is far by the most horrendous experience especially in these conditions. All I can say about this is it's done very quickly!!! Two days ago, Alfie (my tent partner) and I traveled by skidoo from one supply depot to another. We covered over one hundred miles seeing no change to the landscape from mile to the next. So to travel on this land we follow a compass bearing just as if we were crossing an ocean. Once we arrived at our destination after 8 hours sat on our skidoo's it looked no different from the place we had left 100 miles back, flat and white!! I had better close there, it's time to start cooking some dinner. I hope this letter gives you some idea of my life in the freezer, a very hard place to live, but also very rewarding. Look forward to hearing from you all. Regards, Steve Marshall.
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