Just talked to a woman who went to grad school at UCSB...at the end of this conference. She was on the ice last December in Marie Byrd Land Antarctica when a storm came up so strong that it lifted 2 snowmobiles, fully loaded with fuel, up in the air and dropped them. The mountaineers came yelling for everyone to get out of their tents because the tents were downwind of equipment...they all went to a tent that was upwind. The sound (of wind) was so loud they pretty much had to yell into each others ears to communicate. I guess the severe wind lasted 9 hours. The erosion of the snow was severe so a plane that came to retrieve them had trouble finding a smooth place to land. The debris field was 4 km-long and they found the windshield of a snowmobile 23 km away.
Meanwhile, my one trip to Antarctica was flying to the dorms at mcMurdo, then onto a research ship for a month (quite comfortable, generally no sea motion at all because ice muffles the seas), back to McMurdo, and then the 2nd to last flight out of Antarctica for the season...the last flight was from the south pole and left McMurdo a few minutes behind us. If you missed the flight, you were there for 7 months.
There was a lot of interesting things on Geology, climate, etc. I'll post some things of I get around to it.
Chris