In search of sunlight and warmth

I leave tonight for some much needed R&R&R&R (research and recreation and rest and relaxation) in New Zealand. I fly into Wellington, which is located on the southern tip of the north island, where I will meet up with Andrew Mackintosh (professor) and his post-doctoral researcher Brian Anderson and student Tom Paulin.

Shortly after my arrival we'll head north to a glacier on top of Mt. Ruapehu, an active volcano. This will be my first time on an active volcano - in fact it just gave out a little burp about two months ago. Cool! We'll be at Ruapehu for just one or two days; I'm not even sure what sort of work we'll be doing, I'm just going along for the ride and the ski down from the summit.


After that we're going back to Wellington and packing up our gear for a bigger project on the Tasman Glacier - New Zealand's largest glacier. We'll take a ferry across Cook Strait, then drive down the east coast past Christchurch and onward to Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park. We plan to be on Tasman Glacier for 2-3 weeks, depending on how things go. And how things go depends largely on the weather, which can be very rainy. Thankfully, we'll be staying in a nice, cozy mountain hut.

After the field work is completed I will hopefully still have a week or so to travel around a little and see some other parts of New Zealand. I'll arrive back in Fairbanks on December 20, which means that within one day I'll be going from 15 hrs, 25 min of daylight to 3 hrs, 42 min of daylight. That's going to be rough.