A Polar Scientist in the Tropics

Welcome back to the blog; sorry I've neglected it for a while.

The work in the arctic (Svalbard and Greenland) was great, but I didn't have the time to write about it, or the possibility to send email easily, so the blog suffered. Perhaps I'll be able to write a bit about what I did in those places,and post a couple of nice photos, but the coming months are pretty busy with more work and travel, so I hope there'll be enough exciting new stuff.

I'm in Papua New Guinea! As well as the Antarctic project I was working on last summer, the group I work with at the Australian National University does some research here. Like the Antarctic project, this one is 'GPS geodesy' - using precise GPS receivers to measure the movement of the Earth's crust. In Antarctica, we are trying to measure the movement caused by changes in the thickness of the ice there.

Here in PNG, we are measuring the movement of the tectonic plates. Where the Australian Plate is colliding with the Pacific Plate, there are a lot of fault lines and earthquakes, and the land is pushed up into high mountain ranges.

I arrived in Port Moresby on Monday, and stayed a couple of days to collect the equipment I'd shipped here from Australia, and make other arrangements. Today, I flew to Wewak, on the north coast of the island.

PNG's airlines have had experienced a lot of delays recently, so I arrived 2.5 hours early for my 10:00 flight this morning, having anenormous stack of excess luggage and remembering the long excess-baggage payment queue from when I was here last year.

After a lot of waiting without check-in for my flight being opened, it was announced that it was delayed four hours. At least I was able to check in and queue without fear of missing the flight. It turned out to be five hours delay, but I am now in Wewak. Flying over the Highlands, the land was mostly covered with cloud, but sometimes there was a glimpse through to rugged misty jungle-clad mountains. The plane did a wide turn before landing, and I saw the town of Wewak on a long coast, fringed with coconut palms.

Checking in early was a good idea. Though I felt a little guilty when it turned out on arrival in Wewak that a dozen other passengers' bags had been offloaded before we left, while all my 7 bags, 140 kg, arrived with me.

I'm staying close to the airport, where I'll start my work tomorrow. A healthy and contented-looking tree kangaroo is browsing in an enclosure outside my room, along with a couple of raucous parrots, and the frogs have started up in the evening rain, not quite loud enough to drown the sound of the surf at the beach just 50 m away. Very different to Antarctica and Greenland!

Lukim yu bihain ("see you later" in PNG pidgin)

Dan