SuperDARN

One afternoon I put on the skis and accompanied one of this year's Research Assistants out about a kilometer from the station to one of the projects she is responsible for monitoring. SuperDARN stands for Super Dual Auroral Radar Network, and consists of two arrays of antennae plus the electronic equipment monitoring them, which has its own little outbuilding.

As I understand it, one of the arrays sends a variety of frequency signals up into the ionosphere, where they collide with atmospheric plasma, which reflects them back down at other various frequencies. That information is collected by the second array of antennae, and voila: scientists receiving the info communicated from Pole have information about atmospheric activity that can affect everything from satellite communication to the Earth's magnetic field. Down on the ground here, it just looks like a confusing panel of this:

One of the fun things about getting away from the station to one of the surrounding buildings is that once you're there, the vast emptiness of the Antarctic plateau stretches out into the distance...making for quite a bad-ass picture, if you don't think about the fact that the view in the other direction is of the station and all the human activity here.

That day, a grantee working on more atmospheric research equipment installation and waiting for his onward flight to East Antarctica, came with us and on the way back to the station took us back to the trenches he and his colleagues had been digging for the past couple of days to unbury some equipment they need to transfer to a new site. The trenches they dug out are pretty impressive and would make a frighteningly good setting for a World-War-II-in-Antarctica film of some sort.

Q&A and Lounge

Today's picture is of one of the common areas on station, which is almost always full of people hanging out talking and playing cribbage, cards, or pool. Just a little contrast to the picture I posted previously of my little alone-space in my room. This is a typical Saturday night in B1 lounge.

 

Also, today, another question from the peanut gallery:

Q: From Grandma (Poynette, WI): Will you have to eat seals while you’re there, since that’s the type of wild game available in that area?

A: As you probably all know by now from previous posts, the answer is no, for two reasons:
1. There are no seals at Pole because we are not located near any water and seals are water creatures.
2. They can't/don't bring seals in from the coast (from McMurdo, for example) anyway because seals and every other form of life on the continent is currently protected by the International Antarctic Treaty. Humans are forbidden from interacting with Antarctic wildlife in any way that affects their behavior. Killing and eating them, even if we wanted to (and seal, for some reason, does not sound good to me), would definitely be covered by that blanket rule. All of our food at Pole is flown in from New Zealand via McMurdo, with the exception of the limited veggies that can be grown in the station greenhouse.

Ice tunnels

Thanks to one of the carpenters who works down there, I got to take an amazing field trip to the ice tunnels, which (for those of you who have watched the YouTube video of the station and have an idea of its layout) start from the bottom of the beer can on the way to the arches, in an ominous-looking side-path...

...and extend about 1900 feet out under the backyard, with several side tunnels included. The reason the tunnels are a popular destination for people who don't have to work there is that over the years, Polies have built dozens of weird and interesting shrines into the walls.

(Apparently there's a whole population of grown men obsessed with My Little Pony? Am I the only one who didn't know this?"

But the reason the tunnels exist to start with is that they are the place for and access to the station's water and sewer lines. Kind of unnerving to have those two existing in conjunction, but as I explained in an earlier post, our water is melted by and pumped up from a melt-hole by a machine called a Rodwell, and when the cavern in the snow created by the Rodwell and station water use gets big enough that no one wants it to get any bigger, they move farther out, create a new Rodwell tunnel for getting water, and start filling in the cavern left at the old Rodwell site with the sewage from the station.

This season, there are at least two carpenters assigned nearly full-time to widening the wall of the main tunnel. This involves spending six+ hours per day in the -60F temps of the tunnels, using chainsaws to carving huge 70-lb blocks of ice out of the side of the wall....

and then towing those blocks by sled to defunct tunnels (such as the tunnel that was for Rodwell 1, which has already been exhausted as a water supply and completely filled in with human waste--euphemistically deemed "outfall"--and in theory will never need to be accessed again) to fill those in.

This is Rodwell 2, which used to be the water supply until it too was exhausted, and now it is the current outfall. This was the biggest, most spacious part of the ice tunnels.

And then, at the very end of the current tunnel system, we reached that wood-encased pipe, which is connecting to Rodwell 3, the station's current water supply.

This is one of the warmer parts of the tunnels, since there is machinery operating and a fair amount of human presence. As a result, the ceiling and walls have developed these amazing ice crystals all over them.

J the Baker and me after about 45 minutes in temps up to -60F! Don't we have lovely smiles?

Q&A / Stewards

Q: From Mom (Mequon, WI): “Clear something up—is the Antarctic only ice or is the Arctic only ice? Dad is reading that South Pole is a land mass and north is on the ocean.”

A: That’s correct. There is a landmass under the glaciers of Antarctica, which is why it can be considered a continent. The ice around the north pole is just ice.

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Meet Z and M, my fellow stewards here at Pole this season. They have been hilarious fun to work with.

 

For each of us, 2/3 of the job is this lovely dish pit, which I managed to photograph in an impressive state of organization and cleanliness. (The other 1/3 is janitorial rotation.) In the heat of a meal service moment, it is usually total chaos, but there is always good, loud music and laughing to make the scrubbing go quickly.

Q&A & sastrugi

Q (from L.W. in Washington, D.C.): "I'm curious to hear more about your daily life and your job."

A: Since the USAP is paying lots of money to bring and keep us all down here and they want to keep us out of trouble and maximize bang for their buck, summer work schedules are pretty intense and keep us all very busy and tired. Everyone on station works at least 10 hrs/day (with an hour’s worth of break time), 6 days/week. Lucky for me, since I like a lot of variety, my work and schedule shift several times during the season. There are three of us stewards, and we rotate through three work assignments. For the first 4 weeks here, I was on janitorial, which was mopping lots of floors and doing lots of laundry on a 7:30am-5:30pm, Mon-Sat schedule. In early December, I switched to a split shift in the galley. So for 5 weeks, I was working 5am-1pm and 6-7:30 pm—mostly spending my time in the dishpit, but also wiping down tables in the dining area and maintaining supply and cleanliness on the coffee/tea/juice/ice cream/cereal line. Now, for the final five weeks of the season, I’ve switched to the evening galley shift, so I’m doing dishes and the juice (etc.) line from 11am-9pm, and now my day off is Thursday rather than Sunday.

So my typical day is pretty much spent working! It’s actually been a struggle to find enough time to sleep between work and all of the other fun things to do. I’ve been teaching yoga twice per week (though with my new dish pit schedule, just once per week), taking guitar lessons from someone here who is offering them, trying to visit a lot of the science projects that go on, reading, writing, exploring the fun stuff squirreled away in the Arts & Crafts room, making sure I get enough exercise, and so on. And people are always organizing movie nights or playing card games or board games or pool or cribbage. Really, it’s overwhelming how much there is to do and how quickly the days go by!

Finally, the photo of the day: I took this picture of a sastrugi, which is a snow/ice feature created by the wind. This is a pretty tiny one; they can be enormous and make traveling across Antarctica exceedingly rough. Beautiful, though!

Traverse

SPOT1, SPOT2, and SPOT3 are the three annual (well, this year there are three) South Pole Overland Traverse operations, which are basically tractor pulls of fuel from McMurdo to South Pole. SPOT1 reached Pole in late November and its ten-person crew of mechanics, mountaineers, and other specialized personnel invited us Pole station folk out to tour their operation. They parked in the station "backyard"...

 

...in roughly the same configuration they'd used throughout their 3+-week trip from coast to pole.

It was fascinating to see the route they took from there to here and hear about the scenery along the way (which sounds amazing)...

...see their portable galley, where their team made dinner and watched movies each night...

...and especially to hear about their waste capture techniques. Because of the environmental protection measures put in place by the International Arctic Treaty, it's basically illegal to just pee out in the snow, here at Pole or anywhere else on the continent. So like anyone doing anything in Antarctica, the Traverse folks have to keep their bodily waste with them, which involves a special toilet called an Incinolet. You put a little paper liner on the inside, do your #2 in it, and then when you flush it down, the toilet alights and your poop is incinerated on the spot.

Except for the ash, which has its own bucket.

 

In addition to the portable galley unit, there is also a sleeping berth, with five rooms of bunks to accommodate the 10 traversers.

 

And #1 can't go down the Incinolet without repeatedly putting out the flame, so everyone has his/her own pee bottle, which can be emptied periodically into the big pee barrel that one of the tractors pulls.

Most significantly, though, they were pulling fuel: 140,000 gallons of it (though a good chunk of that was used getting here) in these black bladders, pulled on very low-friction plastic mats.

Totally incredible. So now, of course, I am obsessed with working on the traverse some year, mostly for the experience of seeing the scenery involved in overland Antarctic travel. Just have to work on getting some heavy equipment operation experience. Hmmm. If only I'd grown up on a farm driving a tractor...

SPICECORE

One of the research projects that is new at South Pole this year is South Pole Ice Core drilling, wonderfully shortened to "SPICECORE." There are close to a dozen drillers and scientists (core handlers) down here working on this project. They had to build the structure you see below that goes around the drilling equipment and have so far drilled down about 500 meters, straight into the ice sheet of the Antarctic plateau. 

One evening recently, the night crew sweetly took me out to the drilling camp (just a few kilometers from station) with them and gave me a tour and even let me help with some of the more no-brainer aspects of the drilling. I was out there for 2 hours, which is about how long it takes to lower the drill 1500 feet, drill a length of core (around a meter long), bring it back up to the surface, clean/measure/document it, and pack it up for transport back to the States. (The samples are flown to McMurdo, sent by vessel to San Francisco, and then trucked to Denver; they have to be accompanied the whole way by someone responsible for making sure they stay frozen.)

Recently the night team pulled up a core that had a visible ash layer in it from a volcanic eruption hundreds of years ago. So amazing to see this stuff.

G & D in their protective clothing to guard against the noxious drill lubricant that is all over everything in this building...and somehow all over them by the end of their shifts. In this part of the building it's basically the same temp as outside, so it's a chilly night for them.

J operating the drill from the warmed control room.

The core of ice we brought up while I was there.

Scientist K examining the core before packing it up for shipping.

Entertainment at 90 South

It occurred to me that probably at no point in my entire life up until now have I stayed within a 5-mile radius of the same place for more than three months. Since I like to travel so much, you'd think that being still for this long would bother me, but I really cannot explain to you how busy things are here. There is really never a dull moment. First and foremost, we all work 10-hour days 6 days/week. Then there's sleep, and meals, and occasional showers (2 two-minute showers per week allowed) and laundry (one load per week allowed). That leaves maybe 4-5 hours/day of recreation time, which is crazy easy to fill...and then some, making it difficult to get enough sleep! With getting exercise, watching movies in the lounges here, card and cribbage games, guitar lessons, teaching yoga classes, making things in the craft room, reading, and trying desperately to snag a few minutes of internet time while a satellite that actually works is actually in range, we are BUSY down here.

Plus, there are the special events. Since I've been here, a galley staff friend has thrown a "mustache party" in one of the Jamesways in the backyard (if you can't grow a mustache, you had to make one to wear to the party or put one on at the door)... 

...and open mic talent show in they gym...

...a cribbage tournament, a MARATHON (I mean, for god's sake; and this was not a joke), a "race around the world" (you do a several km loop that encompasses the station and geographic pole, which means you've gone through all time zones during the race), and we're gearing up for this year's South Pole International Film Festival, wherein people make their own short film to submit for everyone to watch. Plus people are always organizing movie nights, sports nights, and anything else you can think of. So if you wondered what the heck we're doing down here in one of the most isolated places on Earth, I can tell you: we're just trying to find enough time to get our beauty rest!

The Russians are coming

Well, by the time this post goes live, this is old news, as they have already come and gone. But one of my janitorial tasks in the early weeks of the season was to (with the help of some fabulous volunteers)...

 

 

...go out to "summer camp"--an area of additional housing in the backyard of the station where there are several hypertats set up to accommodate overflow when the 150-person capacity of the main station is exceeded (yes, that's an outhouse you see on the left side of the frame)--

 

...and make up beds for half-a-dozen Russian millionaire oligarchs who were transiting through Pole on their way to the Russian station Vostok (where the coldest temps on the planet have been recorded), which they are considering investing in rebuilding. I was actually pretty impressed with how clean and cozy the inside of the hypertats are, but I doubt it was up to oligarch standards, even though I left cookies on their pillows.

And then after they left, I got out one of the sleds that are kept under the stairs of the main station and used it to haul the dirty sheets back to the station for washing. Who needs sled dogs?!?!

Hippocampus travel piece

I'm super-excited to have a piece I wrote (long ago after a vacation I took from Madagascar when I was living there) published in this month's issue of the online magazine Hippocampus. Please check it out if you have the time. I'm embedding live links to the magazine homepage, and also to my article in particular.

Thanks for reading!

Skiing and ARO

Over the years, the program has brought down quite an impressive collection of cross-country ski equipment. How could I turn down a chance to ski at the South Pole? It took me awhile to get adjusted and get my act together, but in early December, with a couple of others, we got ourselves outfitted with skis and set out to explore the base a bit.

One of the people I was with is a Research Assistant this year and had to check on some experiments that day at ARO (the Atmospheric Research Observatory). That is one of the science buildings I hadn't been to before, so we set off skiing in that direction.

It's a very cool-looking facility, with atmospheric experiments all over the roof, and is one of six NOAA stations around the world. It's located in the "clean air sector" of South Pole, which means it's upwind from all of the human operations and is said to have the cleanest air in the world, as the wind blows past it across the Antarctic plateau.

Inside, we got to see all of these iconic atmospheric experiments. The electronics you are looking at here have been tracking atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons since they were determined to be a concern for the ozone layer. The poster in the background shows, on the left atmospheric levels of CFCs as they escalated, and then the sudden drop-off when they were banned. The four graph trends on the right show the rise in the hydrochlorofluorocarbons that replaced the banned CFCs. Pretty amazing.

People also like to visit ARO to pick up the fun souvenirs they offer: you can go out on the deck and then seal a bottle full of the cleanest air on Earth to take home with you.

And finally we got to check out the experiments on the roof. I don't even understand what most of them are doing, but wow.

And then we skied back to the station. I'm keeping the skis I chose at the back exit of my rooming hallway, so from now on I can just head out and ski around the station anywhere and anytime.

The view

Not the television program, but the view out the window from South Pole station. It looks pretty much like this, 24/7. You'd think it would get dull, but it's always strangely beautiful!

 

Sometimes there's a faint fog on the horizon, and I hear sometimes it gets socked in, but really, this has pretty consistently been it. Antarctica is the coldest, highest, and driest continent. So especially in the summer, it really doesn't snow much here. That's hard to believe when all you can see in any direction is snow. But when it does snow, it NEVER MELTS. So it just keeps building up, year after year. Pretty incredible.

Speaking of a TV show, though, let's take a question from the peanut gallery:

Q: From D.L. (Savannah, GA): “Is there satellite TV available at the Pole?”

A: Nope. There are TONS of DVDs, plus VHS and even Beta tapes here and two big screens in lounges to watch on, plus old TVs you can take to your room or plug in elsewhere to watch what you want, but no live TV available. Someone organized an "NFL night" on Friday nights where they show old games (not sure how he gets them), but that's about as good as it gets as far as current TV!

SPRESSO

I'm trying to always, in my free time, take advantage of opportunities to go out and visit the various science projects going on at Pole. In early December, there were two USGS contractors here for a few days to install new electronics at the seismic station that's about 5 km away from the elevated station. I was lucky enough to happen to sit down with them at lunch and snagged myself an invite to go with them that afternoon to see that seismic station (which has the acronym SPRESSO, though I'm not totally sure what-all that stands for). 

So the two of them, plus one of the two research assistants here this year, plus another lucky interloper and I got in a piston bully and drove 5 km away from the station. It's by far the farthest away from the station I've been since I got here. And I got to try driving the piston bully!

SPRESSO is a couple of rooms that are actually underground, and get deeper underground each year as the snow drifts bury it more and more. So the first thing we had to do was dig out the "door" from the drifts that had accumulated in the few weeks since anyone else had been out there.

We paused to appreciate the multiple ladder extensions that have been installed as the snow builds higher and higher, and then had to tie the two computer-filled boxes that the USGS people had brought with them up with a piece of rope and lower them down the tunnel...

...before climbing on down ourselves!

The rooms where the electronics are kept are pretty tiny, but we stayed down there in that nice (heated!) space for awhile asking questions of the USGS folks, who were so generous and have what might be one of the coolest jobs on the planet, traveling around the world to the 100+ seismic stations maintained by USGS contractors.

Also, since so few people ever get out to SPRESSO, those who do write their names and the date on the wall. So I got to add mine to the list!

Then took our now-empty sled back to the piston bully and then back to the station. The piston bully is so slow that it takes 40 minutes to cover 5 km, so I had plenty of time to process the great adventure on the way back.