The last plane left about 5 weeks ago now. There are 153 people at McMurdo, and 26 at Scott Base for the winter.
The sun is actually rising and setting at this time of the year, but the days are getting shorter by about 15 minutes each day. In 3 weeks from now the sun will go down, and we will not see it for another 4 months.

We have been running into a lot of problems this year with badly melted ice out on the Ross Ice Shelf between here and Black Island.
This makes it very hard for me to do my job here in the winter. Because we have no helicopters available, it means we have to drive across the ice shelf to get to our satellite earth station at Black Island to do any work required. While I can control all the equipment remotely, sooner or later hands-on work is required to keep things running smoothly.
We have been trying for the last couple of weeks to get there, but have had to turn back because the ice shelf melted out so badly this summer. It is the worst I have seen it in the last 10 years.
We will be heading out again next week to see if we can get through on an alternative route.

Here's a few photos from my last trip out...

Sunrise on our last trip out to try and find a safe route to Black Island, looking north towards Mt Erebus.

Looking south-west towards Mt Discovery.
The exposed deeper blue ice (on the right of the picture) often still has water pockets not far below the surface at this time of the year due to a glass-house type effect from the sun over summer. It is one of the things we need to be wary of, and will drill down through the ice to check the thickness in any doubtful spots before driving on it.

Raised up volcano shaped domes like this form when water pockets below the surface re-freeze, forcing the ice up.
Notice the noon sun is only a few degrees above the horizon now.


Driving into some of the melted-out ice fields, and it only got worse from here on out, so we had to turn back.
Even the Pisten Bullies cannot drive up chest-high walls of rock-solid ice.