How to be sensible...

How to be sensible..., originally uploaded by compilerbitch.

Just in case any of you start thinking of me as a Serious Rocket Scientist...

About to leave Edmonton...

Going off-grid. Hopefully I'll be able to post again tonight from Resolute.

*zoom*

Safely in Resolute

We made it safely to Resolute about three hours ago, after three flights, two on a 737 cargo plane and one on a little Beechcraft 100 twin-engine turboprop.

I shot a load of photos today with the Nikon -- I'll process them and upload a few to flickr later tonight, and I'll do a photo post here, so watch this space.

The arctic is OMGWTFCopter stunning. You'll see what I mean later. The quality of light here is amazing -- clear and sharp, and asking to have large format cameras pointed at it. Which will follow in due course, assuming that mine has survived being out in the rain (in a Pelican case) for 3 weeks, but...

Weather here is 'warm' (i.e. about 1C). I like it, anyway -- it actually reminds me a lot of a clear, still day in winter in Northumberland. Except it's the middle of summer, there is almost no vegetation anywhere (it totally really does look like Mars), and the sun doesn't set.

Arctic arrival

Where do we go from here?
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

I'm posting this from Resolute. It's... cold. Bright. Sunny. Midnight. Strange, familiar, unfamiliar, weird. It's a long way from everywhere.

I'm not that good at expressing my feelings in prose, but the following photo captures my impression of the bleakness of this part of the arctic:


Resolute bleakness
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)

Scale is weird. It's very hard to tell how far away something is. Is it a polar bear? Is it a signpost? Is it a paper cup much closer? That sounds silly out of context, but it's one of the most striking impressions I've had since arriving. The other one is a nagging feeling that something has gone wrong with time. During the arctic day, or at least what would be day in the same time zone much further south, there isn't a proper sense of time passing. I now realise that I somehow automatically track the passing of time relative to, if not the position of the sun, but perhaps its warmth, brightness, angle or some combination of these things. Here, the sun doesn't do what you expect it to, and it seemed to cause a strange disconnect inside myself, a feeling of knowing, intellectually, that all is well, but feeling deeper down that there is a degree of wrongness here.

Nevertheless, it's completely stunning. Really, truly, stunning. The quality of light is extraordinary -- there is a crisp clarity about it that begs for a really sharp lens and a lot of resolution. Large format weather.

( More images behind the cut )