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.