In and around Mactown

McMurdo (Mactown) is the largest base on the continent. Summer population often exceeds 1000 people. Because it is on the coast, and close to a lot of mountains, most of the oceanographic and biological science gets done here, in addition to glaciology, petrology, geology, ice studies etc. McMurdo is also close to the Dry Valleys, one of the most interesting areas on the continent, if not the world. By some quirk of nature/geology, the Dry Valleys have not received any rain or precipitation for over 2 million years (at least that is what the scientists tell us). Also, it is extremely windy here, so much so that there is no snow or ice accumulation in the Dry Valleys. In addition, a large number of fossils (including some dinosaurs) have been found here.

Right outside McMurdo is Mt Erebus, an active volcano. Why people would place the largest base in Antarctica right under an active volcano, I have no idea. The volcano gives rise to one of my main reasons for disliking McMurdo…a fine, gritty, black volcanic dust that is irritating and manages to find its way into everything. Also, the food Mactown is nowhere near as good as Pole’s. The one good thing about Mactown, though, is the scenery. A couple days in Mactown will almost surely guarantee at least one penguin or seal encounter, and the mountains surrounding the base make for some postcard-perfect shots.

A somewhat overexposed shot of Erebus. Check out the clouds though, and the ones in this pic

I think my favorite thing about Antarctica is the skies and the clouds. I have seen some simply amazing skies here…blues so blue that you simply stand and gaze in wonder. The clouds are the whitest and puffiest clouds you’ll ever see. I guess the continent makes up in intensity what it lacks in variety. There are only a couple of colors on Antarctica, the dominant one of course being the never-ending, blinding white of the ice. There’s the blue of the sky, and the brilliant blaze of yellow from the sun. Nothing else really. No green whatsoever. Of course, during the white-outs, you get only one color—white.

A seal and the icebreaker cutting a channel out in the sound for the re-supply ship, which comes through once a year. If it wasn’t for the frigid cold they have to live in, I think being a seal might not be too bad…all they do is lie around and waddle about all day long…oh and dodge killer whales and great whites…

More seals along the coast...

The White and Black Islands. The Black Island is highly windswept, and hence has very little snow cover.

The C-17 flight back to new Zealand got cancelled for over a week because of mechanical problems. There were people in Mactown who had been stuck there since Christmas and they were about to pull their hair out. Anyway, someone got quite sick and they had to make an emergency medevac flight out and her bad luck was my good luck because I got scheduled out on that same flight. The same thing happened last time: we had been stuck in Mactown for days and were going absolutely crazy when somebody died out on the ocean and for some reason they had to get the body off the ice ASAP so they had an emergency flight and I got on it (actually I volunteered, alot of people were leery about flying back to NZ with a corpse but Lisandro and I were ready to get out of McMurdo).

Aaah, an old friend, the C130 Hercules. The flight is 3 1/2 hours longer than on the C17 and atleast 3 1/2 times more uncomfortable...

Leaving Pole

Starting this last dispatch from Pole with a shout out to: Themba, Thalli, Whitney and Aaron!!

The last couple days at Pole were a sleep deprived blur…things always crop up at the last minute just when you think you have everything under control and are wrapping up…

The New Years' parties at Pole are um, interesting to say the least…although they seem to have really toned them down lately. This year’s was nothing like the one I attended a couple years ago. People have on all kinds of funny outfits. The parties don’t last that long though because with the altitude most people get drunk really fast.

This is one of the bands that played. The lead singer was a last minute addition—one of the members from the British 47 day expedition. BK, station supervisor, was the lead female singer.

Letting everyone know what year it is, in case you didn't know…Jared and Ryan must be on the fire watch...that probably explains why they were drinking 7-UP. A fire is probably one of the most serious disasters that can take place at Pole so there is always a fire watch, 24 hours a day.

The new marker for the 2007 geographic South Pole, minutes after it was unveiled on New Years Day, 2007. The entire ice sheet on Antarctica drifts about 30 feet a year, so every year a new survey is taken by GPS and the exact location of the geographic south pole is determined. Its interesting to look back along the line of previous poles and see the progression of markers…the pole marker that was unveiled last time I was here, in 2004, is now close to 100 feet away from the current marker.

A view I was well acquainted with, from the window in our building. Pictures cannot capture the utter bleakness and bareness of the pole, especially in the upwind direction, where there is no human activity.

Me, at the pole, minutes before we left. I did not get a chance to get my hero pics (at the pole with no shirt on…maybe next time...)

Couldn’t resist some more pics from the Trans-Antarctic mountains on the way back to McMurdo. You can almost reach out and touch some of the mountains!

IceCube

Not much going on with post other than ranting about IceCube, one of the projects here. So you can skip this post if you want. First off, the poor British expedition which was waiting for favourable winds so they could kite out had to wait over a week because the wind absolutely died down and there was nothing they could do about it. They had been camping out in the galley and sort of eating our leftovers but eventually they were requested to leave…it sounds kind of heartless but if the U.S. housed and fed every expedition that came to the Pole then we might as well open up a motel and start shutting down the science experiments because there are quite a large number of these expeditions and the incredible cost of getting food and supplies to the pole would eventually deplete the station’s budget…anyway…on one of our last nights Jeanie, a lady I know because she looked after our instrument suite in the 2004-2005 winter, gave us a tour of the IceCube project.

IceCube is the project people love to hate (all the IceCubers though love to love it). A little background on IceCube: the project has the ambitious goal of detecting neutrinos. Neutrinos are exotic sub-atomic particles that are predicted by the energy-mass deficit in the fusion reaction that powers the sun. Basically, there is a miniscule but definite amount of mass that is unaccounted for, and to balance the books, scientists know that there are some particles that are released in the fusion process; however, these particles are exceedingly difficult to detect. They travel very fast and can pass through thousands of miles of matter without any interactions, and thus are almost impossible to detect. So, enter IceCube: a huge array of detectors buried 1.5 miles in the ice. At project completion, there should be about 150(?) detectors in an an octagon about 80(?) meters on each side. As I mentioned, these detectors are going to sit about 1.5 miles deep in the ice, so for now the focus of the project is drilling the holes. Needless to say, it is quite an ambitious project: just drilling one hole 1.5 miles deep and deploying the sensor and corresponding electronics is quite a challenge. The goal is to not to actually detect the neutrinos themselves, but some sort of interaction between the neutrinos and the ice…and get this, the neutrinos indirectly detected at the south pole are neutrinos that have entered the earth from the North Pole and have traveled through the entire planet. For some reason I’m not sure of, these are the neutrinos they are looking for, and not the ones that they can observe directly from the atmosphere.

So why do people love to hate IceCube? First off, it is HUGE. When they went to the National Science Foundation (the agency that funds most of the research at Pole), NSF quickly turned them down, because NSF simply did not have the money to fund them. From what I hear, IceCube wanted such a large amount of money that they would suck the entire budget for Polar research dry and essentially shut down most of the other smaller projects (like us). So, NSF refused, and IceCube went over their heads and lobbied directly to congress, and they got the funding. Now, the main issue many scientists have with IceCube is that it is has not demonstrated results that justify such excessive funding. A scaled down predecessor to the project, AMANDA, did not produce any significant findings, and yet IceCube got funded in spite of that. In a field where competition is fierce for the limited amount of research money, people don’t understand how AMANDA and IceCube continue to get such exorbitant levels of funding, and yet do not produce correspondingly significant results.

The project is already hogging a lot of resources…one out of every five people at Pole is working on the IceCube project…and get this, at full load, IceCube alone will draw 2 times the power that the entire station does!

OK, now that I have that off my chest, here are some pics….

Between the maze of buildings that is IceCube...these are some of the heater buildings

These are the hot water heaters. There are four of these buildings, each with 8-9 heaters each. The heaters run on gasoline...by the time 1 gallon of gas gets to Pole it costs $16 dollars and these guys go through hundreds of gallons a day. The drills used to drill the holes in the ice are not mechanical drills, they are actually hot water drills. So, they have a well, where they pump hot water (~200 F) into a cavity and melt the ice to produce water (this is the same kind of system the Pole uses to generate all its water).

This is the well...

When the water leaves the well it is about 40 F, not very hot, so they heat it again and send it out to the actual drills, below.

Because the holes are quite far from the heaters, the pipes have to be very well insulated.
Plus, the water generally loses some of its heat in the 1.5 mile journey it has to travel to get to the drill head in the ice.

This is an actual hole in the ground, not complete. It is about 2 feet in diameter. The hole takes 2-3 days working round the clock to drill, and the deployment team generally has only a couple of hours to deploy the sensor and electronics 2.4 km into the ice before the hole freezes solid again. Talk about high pressure!

The two drills. The pilot hole is dug with an ice auger, not shown. Then the “fern” or starter drill, in the background, takes over. The copper tubing that wraps around it has thousands of small holes in it, and the hot water basically just seeps out and melts the ice. Again, there is no mechanical action. I don’t know how deep the fern drill goes. Then they raise that out and use the final drill, the one in the foreground, and this goes all the way to 1.5 miles down. Once they start using the final drill they have to actively pump all the melt water out.

Polar expeditions

Today’s blog is dedicated to some pretty inspiring people: first, Hannah McKeand. She just broke the “unsupported skier to South Pole speed record.” She skied over 600 miles, finishing in just under 40 days. The previous record was 42 days (the three fastest times are all held by women). Its hard, even for me who has been here at the Pole, to imagine what those days must have been like. She skied for 12 hours a day, for 39 days, dragging her sled across the most inhospitable landscape on this planet. All alone. No re-supplies. No human contact. Very inspiring. And she is very fun to talk to also; she has a great sense of humor. You can read more about her here.

Also at Pole are an expedition of 4 chaps from the British Royal Marines and Royal Navy. These guys skied about the same distance, but in 47 days. They were also very cool to talk to. Because they were not after the speed record, they took a somewhat more leisurely pace. They also took alot more pics (2000 as opposed to Hanna's 13!) and some video that is going to air on Discovery and National Geographic. Their sleds weighed about 200 pounds when they started. Imagine pulling a 150 pound sled for 47 days, in the freezing cold. These guys brought people here at Pole down to earth. A friend of mine who wintered over was talking about how you can be emailing someone telling them its -100 F outside and you think you are all hardcore but you are sitting at a desk in your room in your underwear. Well, these guys, and Hanna especially, are the real deal…

Pole is actually quite crowded…another expedition from the Indian Navy rolled in yesterday…they “only” skied the last two degrees, about 97 miles. They were quite a large team of 11 members. The interesting thing though, is that most of them were novices at this kind of thing, and quite young (one of the guys was only 20). Their leader though was quite tough…he’s summited Everest 3 times and has climbed 6 of the 7 highest on each continent.

So, even today, getting to the Pole is still enough of a challenge that countries and militaries view it as something to do to instill national pride (or for whatever reason they do it). Hey, I claim I do it for the science, but is that really more justifiable than those who do it for the adventure?

Christmas festivities at Pole

Christmas at Pole is quite memorable. I might have mentioned how good the food here at Pole is…well on Christmas day the cooking staff goes all out. It is sort of a tradition—you can read accounts from the earliest expeditions about cooks who went to great lengths to make sure Christmas dinner was something to write home about.

Since almost everyone here wears the same drab coveralls and ECW gear, any chance to dress up is taken full opportunity of. I don’t know if I should say “dress up”, because some of the outfits that were on display should have been left in the closet…

Anyway, back to the food…the main course was Beef Wellington, asparagus, and crab legs. There were also all kinds of dessert (Jake the Baker had warned people to wear clothing with elastic waistbands), wine, snacks, salads etc. It was quite a feast. For hors devours we had several shrimp and salmon dishes.

Since most everyone had Christmas day off, apart from the usual festivities (caroling, etc), there was the annual Race around the World. This is a 2 mile race around the South Pole. Factor in the altitude (~11,000 feet), the temperature (-40 F windchills), and the extreme dryness of the air, and you have quite a challenge. The fastest time ever is slightly under 10 minutes, which is amazing.

The winning time this year was slightly over 15 minutes. I placed 45^th out of about 65 who actually ran/walked the race, with a time of 35 minutes. I walked 2 laps and ran 1 lap; last time I walked 1 lap and ran 2 laps, so I guess the years are catching up with me!! Every breath felt like I was inhaling flames that were burning my air passages all the way into my lungs. I was panting and gasping for breath after only a couple steps. Most people don’t even bother running…I think only about 20 people ran the entire course. Like most things down here, anything goes…there were people skiing, some on ski-doos, some on couches being pulled behind tractors. The race is a great time for people to be ingenious, and I think IceCube topped it off this year…they put together a portable shower, hitched it up behind a tractor, and some dude did the race while taking a shower!!

I wonder how he felt when he stepped out of the shower into -40 degrees…

Looks like Santa’s “sleigh”, with Dr McEwen (in jeans) bumming a ride…

This is me after the race…

And just in case you thought I was lying about the weather:

Airdrop

The big excitement the other day was an airdrop by the C-17. An airdrop is when a plane drops supplies/packages etc without landing. Airdrops by the C-130 are pretty common but there has never been an airdrop by the C-17. There are several reasons why the USAF wanted to make a drop with the C-17, chiefly because it is a new, computerized system that has never been tested before. All previous drops were computed and executed by the navigator but computers have done away with the navigator.

Airdrops are absolutely essential in the polar winter, because once the station closes in February, no planes can land or take off until October. So, the station is totally isolated from the outside world for 9 months. Nothing and nobody can leave the station and the only way the station can get emergency supplies is by airdrops, which are not without danger: the extreme cold affects the airplanes, it is pitch dark outside so there are no visual navigation aides, and obviously, the plane cannot land in case of an emergency.

One of the most dramatic airdrops occurred in 1999, when there was a physician wintering over at Pole who discovered she had breast cancer. With no way to evacuate her for a couple months and with her cancer spreading rapidly, the USAF made an emergency airdrop of medical supplies and the physician was able to perform a biopsy on herself…she had some help from doctors in the States who were viewing the whole operation on closed-circuit TV.

Anyway, the USAF decided to practice a drop with the C-17 in case they ever have to make a real one in the winter. It was quite an impressive sight…the C-17 is huge, and to see it flying so low to the ground is quite impressive. Then the rear hatch opened up and about six pallets popped out, each of them with a bunch of parachutes.

Although it was only a practice run (some non-essential supplies were dropped), people were whooping and cheering as if we were stranded on some desert wasteland and the plane had dropped some life-saving supplies. It doesn't take much to get people here excited...

It was all good, though. In total, 4 each 16 foot pallets weighing about 17,000 lbs. each were dropped, for a total drop weight of 68,500 lbs (almost 30 tons).

The Kiwi (New Zealand) cargo loaders wrote us messages on some of the pallets...Kiwis are among the coolest people I've met.

Adios for now....

Dispatch from Pole

So, I’ve been at Pole exactly a week and this is about the first chance I’ve had to write. I've been busy with work and getting adjusted. I didn’t sleep well the first couple nights: Pole is so high (on average about 10,500 feet) and so dry that it is very difficult to breathe, because the air has very little oxygen. At night, when you respiration slows down, it is even harder to get enough oxygen. Because of an unusual low pressure system, they have had to medivac 7 people out of here in the last ten days…all 7 were suffering from altitude sickness.

Anyway, I got assigned a pretty sweet room in the new station, but the guy next door was a horrible snorer and one night I did not get a wink of sleep so I requested to get moved, and now I’m in a much smaller room but at least I can sleep at night.

Work is coming along ok…I am basically done with the calibrations and waiting on Stephen, he gets here today and we are going to start on the computers which should keep us occupied for the next week or two.

I haven’t had much time to take pics around the station, but here are a couple…

This is the ARO (Atmospheric Research Observatory) where our instruments are located. It is about a 6-8 minute walk from the station. That does not sound like a long walk but believe you me when you get there the first thing you do is sit down for a few minutes and catch your breath. We share the building with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), even though our research doesn't have that much in common with what NOAA studies. Because of the clout NOAA has, they have established the entire area upwind of the building as the "Clean air sector." No human activity is allowed in the entire area upwind of the building, all the way to the coast, many thousands of miles away. Basically, what this means is that the wind that blows across the building is the cleanest, purest and least polluted air on the planet. The air that NOAA samples here is a baseline against which all the air on the planet is compared against. In this next picture I am pretending to be a NOAA technician and getting some air samples of the cleanest air on earth. I usually am wearing lots more clothing, but since I was only out for less than a minute, I didn't get fully dressed.


I got seven vials of the cleanest air on earth (CO2 concentration 379.44 parts per million)...start bidding folks...this is premium air!!

Anyway, I don't have any pics of our instruments or of me doing what I was actually sent down here to do...here is a pic of the skylab (the orange building) where our instruments were before they were move to ARO last year. Skylab is now shut down...it was getting old and rickety.


The dome is what was the old station. Many people are sad that the dome is soon to be decommissioned. It was built in the 1970's and many people are attached to it. The new station is on the right...its nice but doesn't have character like the dome. By the way, one of the reasons they are building the new station is because snow accumulation has buried the dome. Can you believe that the top of the dome was 75 feet above ground level when it was first built? Now it is only about 10-15 feet above the ground. Surprisingly, it snows very little at Pole (we mostly get ice crystals as precipitation), but the wind blows tonnes of snow across the continent, and any time the wind comes across an obstacle (in this case any man made structure), the snow gets deposited, hence the 60 feet of deposited snow around the dome. Why doesn't someone just dig it up, you ask? The problem is that it accumulates too fast, and eventually even the new station, which is built on jacks, will eventually also get snowed in. More later...

McMurdo to Pole

OK, so were off to Pole today. If we get there today this will be about the fastest I've heard of anyone getting there from the States (5 days). BTW, they found my bags the day before we left CHC.

Only the C-130s fly to Pole, and they are loud, slow, vibrate like crazy, and uncomfortable. The "seats" are actually netting.


However, they are bulletproof and one of the few planes you'd want to be flying to Pole. The view is pretty boring until you start crossing the Trans-Antarctic mountains, then it is simply incredible. As always, I asked if I could go up onto the flight deck and they agreed...I got some great pics but they still don't do the scenery any justice...

These pics give you an idea of how thick the ice is in Antarctica. The mountains are, on average, about 12-15,000 feet high, and only the upper 2-3,000 feet stick through the ice. Do the math...



The following are pics of the mighty Beardmore glacier, the largest glacier in the world. It is over 100 miles long and over 25 miles wide at its widest point!!

Blog too long

Somebody complained that I was being "too chatty"...lol...how about you don't read the blog if you don't want to :)
I am attempting to both keep up a blog and have it double as my journal, so, it is bound to be long...anyway, I won't bore you with more of my chattiness, here are some pics instead

ECW clothing that you have to be wearing on the ice flight




Suiting up...it gets hot real quick



The inside of the C-17. I found it as enjoyable, if not moreso, than coach on a commercial airline. The C-130 though, is a totally different matter...


The C-17 Globemaster...it is too big to use skis so they have to land on a special ice runway that is on the permanent ice shelf about 45 minutes outside McMurdo


Transport from the ice runway into town. Wonder how this ride would look with some rims and spinners on it...



Some pics from just outside of town...the only thing McMurdo is good for (IMHO) is the pics...otherwise I really don't like the place too much...