Flurries-and-frost - Do You Remember Your First Snow?

rest in peace thomas armitage. died tragically and miserably under mysterious lead-based circumstances in the arctic tundra circa 1848 on a failed expedition only to have your decaying frozen bones get mislabeled, shoddily reburied, have your boyfriends wallet and diary taken away from you to be archived, meanwhile you get gnawed on by various creatures for another hundred years, just to be rediscovered again later and laid out on a piece of plywood from the Home Depot, and then get shoved in a bag which was placed in an acid free box and then shipped to ottawa in the early 1970s just to have some unpaid intern along the line lose your bones. and no one even gives a fuck.

“The Ascent”, photo by Mikhail Litvinsky (1970s)

Arctic Menu

On 15 May 1875 John Barrow attended a dinner at the Admiralty in honour of Capt. George Nares' upcoming Arctic Expedition. Also present among others: Sirs George Back & Leopold McClintock. There was some interesting Arctic cuisine written on the menu!

[Pic by me, John Barrow's private journals, Weston Library Oxford]

BOB KUHN Seal Hunter Acrylic 24″ x 36″

The barque Europa on her way to the Antarctic

In temperatures that drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two of our scientists are surveying an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice. 

They’ve packed extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and after a stop at the South Pole Station (seen in this image), they began a two- to three-week traverse.

The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018.

This traverse provides an extremely challenging way to assess the accuracy of the data. ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.

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