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...