Another beautiful day today with bright sun in the morning and absolutely no wind it’s incredible how varied the weather can be. Again we took advantage of the perfect conditions though, for some these are not perfect conditions – the caleta was filled with sea ice which prevents Christian, Nina and Dolores from doing their studies. Today we also had help from the German girls (Ilona, Julia and Anna) who came up to do some ground penetrating radar (GPR) of our lake for us – and Nina who came “for some exercise” and to do some “site-seeing”. GPR is really useful to give us a quick way to get information on the thickness of the ice, the water depth and where the deepest point of the lake is, and how much sediment there is. Steve and Tamara continued with ice coring while I worked in the catchment doing vegetation surveying and sampling. This, as yesterday, was a very productive and successful day.

In the evening Dirk was told he could get a lift with the Argentinian Castillo Navy ship back to Marsh tomorrow at 8am for a flight back to Punta so we decided to have a leaving party for him. After dinner he found out there are no scheduled flights from Marsh to Punta until December 1st so what was going to be his leaving party became his “welcome back Dirk” party instead. Now he has no idea when he will leave but I think is actually not so upset that he will stay with us for a bit longer.