Transportation in McMurdo, Antarctica

There is a lot of snow, ice, dirt, and rock in Antarctica, so vehicles have to be able to drive on many different types of surfaces. Landon took pictures of some of the different vehicles used for transportation (the red fleet) and work (the yellow fleet) around McMurdo, Antarctica. Take a look at these awesome planes, trucks, and other forms of getting around and getting work done.


Oh, I almost forgot. Wellington, our little polar bear, went along with Landon. He tried out a few of these vehicles for himself. See if you can spot him in some of these photos. He's so small compared to these huge trucks that it might be hard to find him, so you'll have to look carefully.



The left picture shows the C-130 military planes. We will fly in one of these to our remote field area in a few days. The picture on the far right is the C-17 military plane that we flew on from New Zealand to Antarctica. Cool planes.

This is a picture of the Delta we rode in to and from our Snow School. There were 20 students and all our cold weather gear in this one truck.







Ivan the Terra Bus also takes people to and from different areas around McMurdo. It has extremely large tires, much like the Delta, which allows it to drive on the ice, snow, rock, and dirt. Can you see Wellington sitting on Ivan in the picture to the left?






We'll be using snow mobiles like this one quite a bit in the coming weeks. In fact, once we leave McMurdo and head far onto the ice sheet, we will only have snow mobiles to get around and pull all our gear. Our snow mobiles are the biggest, most powerful snow mobiles around.








Believe it or not, there are even bikes in Antarctica. You might want to clean off the icicles before riding this one.







Below are pictures of other cool vehicles. I don't know for sure what all of them do, but I do know they look like a lot of fun to drive! Wellington is in three of the pictures below. See if you can find him.