sound travelled through the underlying rock. As some of this would be refracted by each strata of rock and ice, this could be measured on the surface; apparently. Anyway there was absolutely shed loads of gear to lay out, bury and to constantly monitor. By some fluke I had a complete winner of a result and was to set off the explosives rather than have the science bit to do. Some of you may feel this merely reflected sound judgement in keeping me away from anything that needed safe handling and wasn't to be thrown away. Having never set off this amount of explosives in an snow hole before I asked our leader, Ed, for some guidance.

"Well", he said, "I don't think there will be any surface expression so you could fire it from 50 to a 100 metres away"
You can probably guess the rest. There I was 50 metres away and expecting a muffled boom. What I actually got was a 200-foot high mushroom cloud with chunks of charred ice. Mind you the surface expressions were quite short. (Four letters from memory.)

Doing all this on one line had taken us nearly two and a half months. We had about two weeks to complete another complete line. The weather had been awful with nearly 60% of the days being "lie ups". It was now February, the days were getting shorter with the sun nearly setting for the first time since October. It was getting very cold at nights with our breath freezing inside the tent. Then a miraculous thing happened and we got five dingle* days in a row. Work was cracked off and I was able to start the shooting of the explosives by the 9 February. This was its usual fun, culminating in a 1200 Kg  surface shot. The explosion was heard a hundred miles away at Sky Blue. 300 metres away I heard it as well! Then the bad weather arrived again and it was a while before we "Escaped to Rothera"

* Dingle  ---- No cloud, No wind, Good contrast (It's a silly word but there you go.)

The guy who came in from the cold
Three days in Rothera. Showers, flush toilets, beer and bread. Heaven. Then I was off again to close down the refuelling depot at a place called Fossil Bluff. (Its on the map, do keep up.) A very different kettle of fish from the Evans and a lot warmer. It's in mountains/hills about 2500 feet high and on the coast, although the sea is frozen most years. Even so, it is commonly known, along with Rothera, as "The Banana Belt". The planes can only land with skis and global warming is opening up more crevasses each year. As the name suggests, there is a wealth of fossils there. It really is possible to find them anywhere but it's not

Travelling between the sites was great in good weather. In soft snow it was rather less pleasant. An odd phenomenon, that you often get here, is nil contrast. There can be excellent visibility but you can't see your own footprints and it's really embarrassing to walk straight into a snowdrift. The real problem with it when travelling is that you can't see any hills (not a problem on the Evans), or much, much scarier, any crevasses. For the non-mountaineers these are holes in the ice that wait to swallow unsuspecting polar heroes. The really worrying thing is that the Evans has some really big crevasses. Another polar hero called Phil and I abseiled into one such slot and there was a lot of disagreement between us as to its size. Phil reckoned it could have swallowed St Paul's but I felt that it could only accommodate Westminster.

Having put all the explosives into the hole it would seem sensible to then blow them up. So I did.

Unfortunately it was not quite that easy. The point of the project was to record the speed that the

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