Preparations are gearing up to begin operations soon. Once all of the equipment is set up, tested, and ready to go, the first thing we will do is melt an ~30 cm wide hole through the Ross Ice Shelf, which is approximately 590 m thick at the location of our drill site. This operation uses hot water jets to melt the ice, so we need to have a lot of water at the surface for the start of this operation.
Flubbers to the rescue! These large, yellow, collapsible containers hold 12,000 liters of water. To make the water, they are filled with snow that is melted with water from a much smaller container with heating elements. Now the flubbers are full, we are almost ready to start.
Hedley Benge and Tony "TK" Kingan add hot water to the snow in the flubber
