Tânia Casal, ESA Earth Observation Campaign Coordinator, has arrived in Antarctica as part of the CryoVEx/KAREN campaign, and sends her next blog entry.

The commute to work isn’t without the odd challenge… well actually we’re training for fieldwork. (Tania Casal)

It has taken days to get here, but on 8 January I finally arrived at the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera Research Station on the Antarctica Peninsula.

I travelled from Chile with Adriano Lemos, Andrew Shepherd and Anna Hogg from the University of Leeds, UK, who I will be joining in their fieldwork. Since getting here, BAS has put us through all sorts of training, the most important of which was the ‘field module’ where we had to learn the basics of camping on the ice.

We also met up with colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark’s National Space Institute before they left to complete their set of flights.

With teams here from numerous institutes this really is a huge international effort – an effort that is investigating new ways of observing the changes in the polar environment from space. It’s very exciting to be part of it, and very exciting to be here in Antarctica.

Antarctic beauty. (Tania Casal)

It’s absolutely amazing here, so beautiful, albeit a challenging environment. I have seen penguins and elephant seals – not my usual view from my office window at ESA in the Netherlands!

Local wildlife is pretty relaxed. (Tania Casal)

We are now waiting to hear when we will be deployed to the field so that we can start gathering our precious measurements as part of the CryoVEx/KAREN campaign.

Read more about CryoSat

Post from Tânia Casal (ESA) in Antarctica