End of last year I was living and employed in Juelich and now I sit in sunny South Africa with my German ex-colleagues. This seems strange to me as for the last 3 months I have been living and working in South Africa, yet I am again working with my old colleagues from Forschungszentrum Juelich.

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On 29 January 1833, Charles Darwin sailed on the HMS Beagle through the strait now known as the Beagle channel. Sailing on this ship, Darwin came to his first ideas on evolution – for which he became famous. Nowadays this very channel forms the border between Argentina and Chile. We decided on our day off to retrace his ‘steps’ by taking a sailing trip in the Beagle Channel.

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Our time here in Argentina is drawing to a “pause”… The end of the first campaign is within sight and most of our teams are on their way home. We, however, still have 2 weeks left in Argentina, what is work without a little bit of play?? But I leave our holiday plans for the next post, first I will say a bit about the last couple of days…

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Another nightshift… It’s 3 AM and I have to stand outside in the cold to have a mere feeling of being awake. Coffee is not doing its job anymore, I ran out of Mate Tea (for those of you who don’t know, Mate is a local tea from Argentina with half as much caffeine as coffee but with supposedly double the buzz…) and I still have 3 hours of my shift left…

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(Ex-)Hurricane Ophelia kept us busy the last days. IEK-7 campaign seem to attract natural catastrophies. Or is it that we are going wherever the weather is exceptional? No-one knows… However, we found ourselfs in the middle of national weather warnings from Sunday midday onwards. According to the NOAA Hurricane Center, Ophelia was the easternmost hurricane in the Northern Atlantic on record. Of course, being the dedicated climate researchers we are, we had to take the chance to probe the hurricane in front of our doorstep.

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