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Introducing Mystery Class #3 Halley Research Station, Brunt Ice Shelf, Coats Land, Antarctica 75.583 S, 26.650 W     Hello, and welcome from Antarctica!  Congratulations on finding Halley! My name’s Tamsin and I live and work here at Halley Base in Antarctica. I'm an Antarctic Meteorologist, working for the British Antarctic Survey. This is my dream job, and when you read below and see some of the photos, I think you'll see why. Antarctica is a really amazing place to live and work! Here I am inside an ice cave known as Alladin's Ice Cave At Halley, you could say we're not really a school. But I think we are certainly a classroom, just in a slightly different setting. You see, Halley is a scientific research station, and so there is a lot of learning that takes place here all the time. Here's a photo of one of our science stations at Halley: Life here is always busy with a wide variety of scientific projects and experiments. I study the weather, so I give regular weather reports, and look after lots of different experiments. The science here is really exciting, it’s helping us understand more about global warming. Here's a photo of me trying to launch a weather balloon on one of the windy days. And here are some photos of me and my colleague Dave. We're climbing a mast to do an annual check up on some of our weather instruments. These instruments measure visibility and snowfall. In addition to having exciting experiments to work on, it's also exciting because the weather is so extreme -- it was minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit here on the morning when I wrote this. You really need to dress properly here. Take a look at this photo of me in one of my many extreme cold weather suits. Check out the leopard pattern mittens! There are 18 people here at the moment, including scientists, mechanics, a doctor, a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, and a base commander. We’ll all live here until the end of the year, then we’ll leave again on a ship, and a new team will take over our jobs. The Halley Team, Winter 2007 All of us have plenty of everyday chores here too and we all pitch in doing things like digging snow to melt for water, clearing snow from doorways and digging to find our vehicles, which get buried when it snows a lot. We recycle nearly all of our garbage, it has to be packed up and taken away on a ship at the end of a year. We only get food delivered once a year too, so there aren’t many fresh fruit and vegetables, but we have a great chef who cooks all our meals. He even held an "extreme BBQ" outside one night in temperatures of -30 and below! By the time you ate the grilled sausages they were semi-frozen on the outside, but still hot in the middle. Extreme BBQ Get 'em while they're hot...(which is not very long). One day, they even let me loose in the kitchen. Here's the menu I served with varying degrees of success: Tamsin's Tasty Menu Breakfast: Cheesy rolls, cheese and olive rolls, cheese and sundried tomato rolls, cheese and herb rolls...you get the idea. Various experimental seedy breads and plaits. Lunch: Vegetarian Lasagna, Pizzas, Chicken in a red wine and herb marinade, Cabbage (which started off purple but somehow turned blue), Guacamole and Marinated Olives. Rhubarb yoghurt for dessert. Dinner: Tartiflette (French potato gratin with bacon), Honey and Mustard Chicken, roasted vegetables, courgettes and spinach with feta (which went more than a little bit wrong). Chocolate Mousse for dessert. Sometimes, at the weekend, we travel to the coast to visit the penguins. There’s a big colony of Emperor penguins who breed nearby. I can’t wait to see the chicks, they’re really cute! Hail to the Emperor (penquin and chick that is) Another recreational activity down here is snowboard kiting, where we ride a snow board that is connected to a parachute-like kite, that pulls us across the snow very fast with the wind. Take a look at a few photos of "kiting". Think you could do this? Come on down under and give it try!! Lean back or else... I'm really movin' now... Can't beat the scenery--look at that horizon! Do you have any guesses how I got this job, or how I traveled down here? I come from the North of England, where there are lots of trees and beaches and castles and shops and all sorts of other things that we don’t have here in Antarctica. I studied science at university in London, and then decided I wanted an adventure. I love the snow, snowboarding and skiing are my favourite sports, so I couldn’t think of a better place to work than Antarctica! It took a long time to get here, over two months onboard a ship. On the way I visited South America and lots of islands. I saw dolphins, whales, icebergs and penguins! At Christmas time in 2006, the ship got stuck in the ice where it was so cold that the sea had frozen. We spent two weeks going nowhere, but eventually made it to Halley on New Year’s Day. My ride here and back home Good-bye from me and the rest of the Halley winter team! Would You Like to Write to Me? If you want to correspond with me, you can write to this address: tgray@bas.ac.uk I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions about life at Halley!