Too warm to fly to Antarctica.

It is too warm to fly to Antarctica. ?!? At present the temperatures at MCM are above freezing and the runway at Pegasus is too soft to land a wheeled aircraft. We got all dressed, packed, boarded the plane, sat for a while and de-planed. Now we are back in the departure lounge waiting. Our new departure time is 2100. This would put us into McMurdo in the middle of the night when the chance of having a cold, iced-over runway is highest. There are a handful of IceCube folks on the flight.

Just had dinner with an engineer/project manager from Raytheon who is in charge of setting up Pegasus as the only runway at MCM. They want to consolidate all traffic on that airfield. The ultimate goal is to allow year-round flights to MCM and make a landing at least once a month in the winter. This would change the dynamics of the station quite a lot. No more summer vs winter mentality. I also learned that they are using glycol tubes in the sea ice fields to cool down the runway and facilitate the  temperature exchange between the air and the ice. There are also ideas of getting wheeled airplanes to Pole. This would require compressing the snow and ice with big machinery.

Some people believe that ice coring at the Vostok station may have penetrated into the lake. To keep the ice core hole open they are backfilling it with Kerosen. A 14000ft deep hole filled with Kerosen. That's a lot of fluid that could leak into the lake.