February 12th, 2008
Time: 7 am
Latitude: 42.40338 N
Longitude: 71.11346 W
Temperature: -18°C(-1°F)
Wind speed: calm
Wind Chill: -
Clouds: clear
Wind direction: -
Relative Humidity:35%
Barometric Pressure: rising
Precipitation: about 10" at my house since I have been home
Animals: 1 dog, 4 rabbits, 9 chickens, 1 rooster
Breakfast: bagel and not enough coffee
Lunch: The macaroni and chesse, and toasted cheese sandwiches I missed in the field
Supper:Pasta, pasta, pasta

It is about two weeks since I returned and It feels like it was a lifetime ago since I was in Antarctica and New Zealand. I have not fully adjusted back into this life but I am moving full steam ahead with the next round of trips and work that I do here through my office. The educator workshops that the Wright Center hots each summer are filling up and we are all looking forward to working with new and former educators. Certainly if you are an educator or know one then please direct them to our free workshops for this summer http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/workshops/wkshps08.html
There is certainly nothing better than learning content during actual hands-on work and all of our workshops offer that to participating educators (formal and informal classrooms K-16th grade). Other than preparing for this summer I am busy compiling slide sets of this last field season. I have about 30 gigs of slides and video and there is more that I have not received from colleagues. Little by little we wil be posting it to the outreach website at http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/wdop/index.html Many of us are also posting notices of public sites where we will be doing live presentations about the WAIS Divide ice coring project. If any of these are in your area then please attend or if you would like to have a live presentation by a member of the science/field crew then please contact me at my office zach.smith@tufts.edu with your preferences of date and time and we will do the best we can to accomodate all requests. We are also working on taping some presentations and posting them to the website.

Lucky the weather has been cooperating for me and it has snowed almost every other day since I have been home. The beach in New Zealand was nice but my personal biological clock is still set for winter and the more snow the better. We have been doing a lot of skiing and skating and hope to keep doing it for many more weeks. I am scheduled to be (working) on another private tropical beach in less than a month but it is the cold and snow that I prefer now.

Today's images are of what was left of the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, USA July 2008, and a private beach in the Bahamas. Both places I will work this summer with teachers during our workshops.