October 21

After dinner I went for a walk to what is locally known as 'hut point'. There's a hut there that was built ~60+ years ago. It's locked. There was a dead seal laying outside the hut that's been sitting there frozen for about 60+ years as well. It's kind of nasty looking, but sort of exciting to see too. The entire walk is probably not much more than a mile and it was windy and cold. I enjoyed the walk very much so.

Attended the Sunday evening science lecture. The topic was about microbial activity in and about Antarctica. The parts I found most fascinating were 1) that there are these liquid lakes under about 4 km of ice in Antarctica, they call them sub-glacial lakes. The scientist have never been to the lakes, the Russians will drill into one in two years. In theory, there is probably microorganisms in the lake. As the glaciers move, they rub a thin layer of dust off of the bedrock and some of this dust would end up in the underwater lakes. The continuous introduction of new dust is, in theory, enough energy for the microorganisms to thrive. 2) They drill in and take these core samples of ice that has been frozen for like 1/2 a million years, and there's microorganisms living in the ice. Just been living there, doing their own thing. 3) Parts of Antarctica are colder than parts of Mars, so since things can live in the coldest, frozen of here, than they can probably do so in the frozen ice on Mars too.

Spent the better part of the night mopping hallways and scrubbing toilets. There were ~8 pair of women's panties scattered throughout one of the men's restrooms. Different sizes.

I witnessed it snow for the first time in Antarctica over the night. The weather was relatively warm and the snow was so dry and soft. About 4am the wind started up and it switched to condition 2 because of visibility issues.