The days are getting rapidly shorter at the moment, we have been losing approx. 15 minutes of sun every day for the last couple of weeks and now we only have 7 days until there is no sunrise at all.

It is a very odd feeling not having much daylight, as the days have shortened I have started sleeping in.  I never sleep in, usually I am awake 15 minutes before the alarm and just enjoy lying in my warm bed and waiting for the alarm to go off.  Now I am struggling to wake up after 12 hours sleep, the alarm goes off and wakes me up and I reset it for 30mins later.  At 1400 when it starts to get dark, my instinct is to pack up my desk and head for home.  By 1800 I am ready for bed and yawning my head off.

 

It is like being jetlagged all the time with no sun to reset your body clock against!!!!

The sun just rises above the horizon and then it sets about 4 metres to the left, it never gets high in the sky.  The moon is in the sky all day.

These are the odd things that I have noticed about not having any sunlight in your life;

• The nights are very very long and my dreams are getting oddly vivid.  Totally bizarre and really brightly coloured.  Every-one else is the same and we swap dream stories at breakfast.  A lot of the guys seem to dream about spiders up their nose but I think that is just their horrible moustaches itching them all night.
• Everything is grey, in summer the blues, browns and whites that surrounded us were amazing and brilliant.  Now they are all faded to a muted shadow of their former glory, even when we get a little lightening of the sky the overall grey just lightens it never lifts.
• Every-one is just a little bit grumpy and fed up
• My brain doesn’t work and its not just me, no-ones brain is working.  Other people have the same trouble.  Two conversations from today to illustrate the point … “where’s that stuff you put on bread and tastes like fat?’  “butter?” “yeah yeah that’s it!” or “at least people won’t get those long thin bits of wood in their hands” “huh” “you know those things, bits of wood, things” “…?splinters” “yes”
• Your bones feel cold, there is something about having sun soak into your skin, even if it is not warm it feels warm and it makes you relax when you lie in it.

The good thing about the darkness, there are aurora’s.  Amazing aurora’s that dance across the sky and bring colour to our grey surrounds.  They are one of the most beautiful things in the world and yet it is so easy to think of them as alien.  They dance and leap across the sky like a colourful wind, swirling and gusting around.  The bright green is the most viewable colour, but sometimes pinks and yellows join in.  They can build slowly just a glimmer in the sky, teasing so that they look like an odd cloud, then all of a sudden bursting into bright green columns of light.  You feel like there should be a noise to go with them, like the rush of wind but it is a silent dance across the sky, a bit eerie.

To see an aurora was one of the reasons that I wanted to come to Antarctica so to get to experience them has made my trip.