No fly ...

The weather is always sunny and bright at Concordia, absolutely perfect for flying... unless of course you're counting on it.

Today we are grounded by bad visibility. The original plan was for the Twin Otter to first take fuel to Vostok for us to use on the flight back from our farthest station, then on the way back here test-land at our five sites in order to determine the snow conditions. Unfortunately, the weather has taken a turn to the worse over the whole region, and there is not enough visibility to land anywhere except a well prepared and marked runway. The pilots have given us the "No Fly"...

The forecast - such as it is on the Antarctic plateau - is not good: the current cloud cover is predicted to remain for the next three days, which corresponds exactly to our flying window. We can only hope for the forecast to be inaccurate, and for a bright sunny day to appear before the end of the weekend, or all the CASE-IPY deployment may be delayed until our second flying window sometime after the January 22nd.

While waiting for the sun to appear again, we are going ahead with the second part of our summer campaign protocol: calibrating the two seismometers currently in the Concordia seismic vault, and installing a third instrument there. We have already measured and cut the length of signal cable required (70m), and are in the process figuring out the pinouts of the various connectors.

As Leonardo Di Caprio says in the film "Blood Diamond" : "TIA!", which I've reworded to "This Is Antarctica!", or as we say in France : "C'est l'Antarctique!"...