Thursday 14th November 2013

Finally I am starting to get on top of things after the busy past week with all the new people moving in. I spent quite a bit of time catching up with all my emails, doing ARPANSA and getting myself prepared to do geo-mag observations. I had to make quite a few changes to my geo-mag notes and I also made a few more changes to the geo-mag computer.

I sorted out all the spare hard drives we have and boxed them up and labelled them for easy access. We now have plenty of spares to get us through to V4 without worrying too much about the server crashing again. Late in the afternoon I went and did geo-mag observations. I was very tired by then and made a couple of silly mistakes which I rectified before sending off the results.

I have been praised for the accuracy of my results after such little training so I am happy with how things are going. It’s nice to be able to keep the data flowing after fifty nine years of continuous geo-magnetic observations here at Mawson, the longest continuous geo-mag data collection in the whole of Antarctica. It’s very tedious work which requires a lot of finesse and concentration and the absolute zero magnetic building is the oldest building on site having been brought to Mawson in 1954 from Heard Island and it smells like it too.