Thursday, January 22, 2009

Barrow 2009 Packing and Shipping

...also known as Herding Boxes ...

We're on our way back to Barrow. Alexis and I will depart for Barrow on Feb 10, but our supplies and equipment need a bit more time to make the journey north to Alaska. After many days of packing and bubble wrapping, our cargo was loaded into a Roadway truck and departed from the Villanova University campus yesterday afternoon. It will make its way to Seattle to be put on a ship bound for Anchorage. From there, it will fly to Barrow, hopefully for a Feb 12 arrival.

Shipping went a little easier this time ... many of the heavier, bulky pieces (like our air samplers) stayed in Barrow, awaiting our return. So this time around, we merely had to send up our "consumables" - the stuff that we couldn't reuse from last year. Oh, and our main piece of instrumentation (a gas chromatograph) that was too precious to just leave alone in Barrow for a year ... that had to get shipped back up again, too. (That is what is in the large wooden crate you'll see in the video).

So with that, I leave you our YouTube video of this year's packing and shipping exploits ...