c. What were the key achievements of your visit? Include any key preliminary findings that are of particular interest.

• Automatic weather station set-up, maintenance, and data retrieval:

  Weather station data were downloaded and the instruments were serviced

• Submergence Velocity Measurements at Victoria Lower and Evans Piedmont Glacier

  High resolution GPS measurements were conducted and the devices were serviced

• Snow sampling for aeolian material

  An excellent spatial coverage of 55 snow samples were collected along three transects on the McMurdo sea ice (Figure 3). Sampling was carried out using ultra clean methodology to prevent contamination from personnel, sampling equipment and sample bottles. Two samples at each site were collected and duplicates of these taken at every second site to evaluate local and regional scale variability. First, snow samples from the snow surface to a depth of 2 cm above the sea ice (to prevent sampling saline snow), for elemental concentration and bio-availability measurements of dust were collected in pre-acid washed Nalgene polypropylene 500 ml or 1000 ml bottles. Second, larger volume samples of the full snow depth were collected for dust concentration and grain size measurements.

Figure 4: Dust layers in snow. A) First year ice downwind of Black Island, B) First year ice downwind of Black Island.