Much of downtown Christchurch remains closed off 6 months after a devastating earthquake.
We arrived in Christchurch, NZ last night via Los Angeles and Auckland. We weren’t the only ones, almost everyone on our flight from Auckland to Christchurch were staff heading to McMurdo to take the place of the winter personnel. After a much needed night of sleep Shelly and I set out to explore Christchurch. Christchurch was hit with a major earthquake on February 22 and we were keen to view the reconstruction. Much of downtown
Christchurch is still off-limits to everyone except for demolition crews, but we were able to walk around much of the perimeter. The reconstruction has been going slowly in part due to continued aftershocks. A total of 4305 (and counting) tremors have been reported in the Christchurch area since February 22nd. Click this link to view a very informative time lapse of earthquake
location, magnitude, and depth (and important factor in how damaging an earthquake is) for all of these tremors. This time lapse works well as an illustration of how energy contained in a fault slip is dissipated over time.
After touring Christchurch we visited the USAP clothing distribution center to get our issue of cold weather gear. Two duffel bags later we stashed our issue for tomorrow morning’s departure and headed back into town. If (and it’s a big if) all goes according to plan we will get up at 3 am tomorrow morning to rendezvous with our flight at 4. Departure is scheduled for 7. HOWEVER, weather has grounded flights on the 24th and 25th. We were fortunate to get bumped to that flight’s third attempt, the rest of our original flight will sleep in tomorrow and hope for good weather on the 28th! As of right now the forecast isn’t promising for either flight, so we shall have to see what tomorrow brings…
We also received word today that the National Science Foundation (which funds and oversees the USAP) has contracted with a Russian icebreaker Vladimir Ignatyukto break out McMurdo Station this year. Sighs of relief all around the Antarctic scientific community!
