It has been a month since we arrived on station and we have settled into our roles. Every week seems to bring some form of excitement to keep things interesting, and we’ve had a few good wind storms, but thankfully nothing too dramatic. We are doing well and the station is running fine.
When we arrived it was full on autumn, the sun rose at 8:30am and set at 4:34pm. It was blustery with lots of blowing and drifting snow. Temperatures were erratic; cool, but not terribly cold. Over the past month we have shifted into winter. The sun began rising later and setting later…each day losing 10 minutes, then 15 minutes, then 20 minutes of daylight. Finally, earlier this week on November 13, the sun rose and set for the last time. A mere 1 hour of daylight: 10:46am-11:48am. Unfortunately, that day was cloudy and cold and we did not get a proper view of the sun. But the days since have had beautiful periods of dusk and dawn, the sun stopping just short of breaking the line of the horizon. It’s a magical time with vibrant colors, long shadows, and the potential for auroras though we haven’t seen much yet.
The lowest temperature we’ve seen so far was -67.5°F on Nov. 12. Not the coldest I’ve been in, that was -107.9°F at the South Pole in 2013, but it’s pretty chilly. There seems to 
be a shift at -40°F where materials become a bit more brittle, the cold just a bit more sharp. Around -60°F there is another step; the solid steel of the loader tracks creaks and crackles, bamboo shatters, leather becomes solid, and your exhalations whoosh loudly past your ears as the moisture freezes instantly.
As the temperatures have dropped it has grown darker. Below is a solar chart showing hours of daylight in light blue, twilight in greys, and night in black throughout the year at our latitude. The x-axis is months of the year and the y-axis is hours in the day. The break in the graph is daylight savings time here in Greenland. The white double-line on the right is the showing today – which is also broken down at the bottom. You can see that between late May and August the sun never sets while between mid-November and late-January it never rises. Here is my post from sunset last year: Antarcticarctic.wordpress.com/2016/11/23/sunset.
This just a fascinating affirmation of grade school physics and astronomy – proof that our earth is tilted 23.5degress off the elliptic and spherical. For comparison, here is a graph of today at the South Pole – the sun rises and sets just once a year at the poles (which I wrote about here) so you can see they go from 24hrs of daylight on the equinoxes to 24hrs of twilight and night.
And this is a graph of Nairobi which is very close to the equator, you can see there is very little change in daylight throughout the year.
Regardless of the cold and the dark there is work to be done inside and out. We try to wait for good days (warmer temps and lower winds) to do the more involved outside tasking, but we still need to add snow to the melter to make water, fuel the generators, move between buildings, and check on scientific instruments.
AntarcticArctic 