It is quite a while since I posted something but I was busy all these weeks and I achieved lots of things. Today, it is a special day: I give a talk for the SEE seminar at UC about Operation Deep Freeze I (OPDF I). The talk will cover the context of the OPDF in 1955/56 and the way Admiral Dufek wanted to promote his event. The presentation is an extension of the talk I gave in Lisbon and in Christchurch. It will be more historical background and some of the paintings in more depth examined. That took much time to collect information about it because there is not so much around.
Another reason for my posting absence is a book chapter I am currently working on. The book title is Things and the Global Antarctic. It will be an interesting publication for the wider public because it covers arts, heritage, and archaeology as well as chapters about the National Maritime Museum Greenwich and much more. The editors invited me to submit a chapter.
My chapter is on Logbooks and climate science. I worked long time with scientists together to extract historical weather data from logbooks of all kinds. Even when I worked long time with logbooks, to squeeze the experience in one chapter turned out to be more work than I expected. It came to my mind that I worked on a real complex topic over many years. It is fun to write about it and it shows again how important that work is for the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic because the database is still quite on the thin side considering that we have data only from the last 200 – 150 years ago and that did not cover the entire Southern Continent.
Another reason of being busy was the organisation and preparation of the parts of the Days of Ice, the official Season Opening in Christchurch when the overwintering teams are coming back and the new teams go down to the ice. On Wednesday will be a panel discussion about Life in a Frozen Ocean – 3 women will discuss sea ice, algae that lives under the sea ice and Emperor penguins they live on the sea ice. I will be the MC for the evening. It is part of Days of Ice.
Dr Ursula Rack 
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