Weekly snapshot #44

It's pretty warm out today, and nothing too striking in the weather brief.

I do think this week's snapshot is kind of cool, though. It's really overcast today, so the growing light in the sky is kind of diffused across the entire sky rather than concentrated on the side of the horizon where the sun is lurking. So, for the first time since April, probably, you can see some light in this photo (you can even see the telescope buildings)...and it's not moonlight!!!

Big dig

All the wind we had a few weeks ago led to a lot of exercise. These are (from the inside) the bay doors in the arch where I work, and this is the snow that piled up inside of them over the course of those windy days. (Read: it blew through the cracks in the closed, barricaded doors until the snow that was building up on the outside of them completely covered the doors and all the cracks.) 

So once the wind died down and we had a nice, -40F day when we could move some stuff around between the inside and outside, my boss K and I got our shovels out and started shoveling.

Until finally we reached the bottoms of the doors.

In the meantime, coworker H was in a machine with a bucket outside, scraping the snow away from the other side of the doors. Remember it was clear up to the top of them when she started, and when we'd shoveled out enough to be able to open them, there she was like a big metal monster, causing the pile still on the outside to cascade in very dramatically.

It was hours after that that we finally had a clear set of doors and could take out all the trash that's been building up and go out to the berms (rows of stored crates out in the "backyard") and bring in some crates of food that the galley needed.

A morning in the life of a Materialsperson at South Pole. When we are not busy counting everything in sight for inventory.



Weekly snapshot #43

The temps still say winter...

...and I'm super excited that in this week's weekly snapshot, you can see the glow of an aurora against the black of the sky (and a few squiggly stars--darn my shaking hand...).

The reason I'm so excited about that aurora glimpse because I have a feeling it's the last time you'll have the chance to see stars or auroras in a weekly snapshot. And the reason for that is clear in this next photo--one of two bonus pics this week. I took this shot just a few minutes before taking the one above, but had the camera pointing off the opposite end of the station. Seein' is believin', and that, my friends, is the glow of the beginning of the 2016 South Pole sunrise.

It's a pretty incredible thing to see at this point, let me tell you. I'm so excited for the parade of beautiful sunrise colors headed our way, but also very sad to see the stars fading from sight by the day.

And here's a second bonus shot, just for fun. Since spring is about to be sprung, we're soon going to have to start thinking about the tasks on deck for getting ready for the influx of summer people that will start happening in just a couple of months, and the busy summer season. So my boss/friend K and I walked out to one of the Jamesways in the "backyard" that acts as storage for a lot of housekeeping supplies. The main access door was miraculously free of drifting and we didn't need shovels at all to get inside. But when we opened the back door, it was a different story!

WIFFA

Every August the Winter International Film Festival of Antarctica is organized and opened to all inhabited bases on the continent. Then everyone watches each other's films and votes on which are the best.


There are two categories: the open category, which has few or no regulations, and the 48-hour submission category. These films can be a max of 5 minutes long, and they have to be produced in a 48-hour period after a group of requirements are distributed. This year's requirements were that each film had to include: the sound of an elephant trumpeting, the phrase "may the force be with you," a stethoscope, a mythical creature, and a catwalk strut. It's really helpful to know this before watching any of those videos, or they're likely to be even more confusing to you that they're already going to be.


Let me be clear: I'm not saying these videos are actually good or that you should invest the 2+ hours of time out of your life that I and a bunch of others down here invested to watch them all recently. Most of them are completely confounding and some are gross, if you want to know the truth. But they are a reflection of life and culture on Antarctic bases across the continent...so here you go! (Minus a few that are password protected, so I have to assume the people who made them didn't want them available to the world at large.) I do really recommend that you watch the South Pole open category submissions, as they're videos of the night sky down here taken by one of our winter-overs, and they're really beautiful.

Open South Pole             https://vimeo.com/177573714  
Open South Pole             https://vimeo.com/168154047  
Open South Pole             https://vimeo.com/162807842  
Open Vostok                    https://vimeo.com/174517929  
Open McMurdo BFC        https://vimeo.com/171511769
Open Kerguelen               https://vimeo.com/176870836
Open Syowa                     https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ai1iJr3njUqGgaR0vtS9VB44gsp0qA  
Open Esperanza              https://vimeo.com/user55067202/wiffaopen_faith-hope-and-lovebae
Open McMurdo Mactown 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzWdzWp_tabZZmg4Qm05UWxCaE0/view?usp=sharing_eid&ts=57a77353

48 Crozet                        https://vimeo.com/177937377

48 Davis                          https://vimeo.com/177968697
48 Arctowski                   https://vimeo.com/177944376
48 Casey                         https://vimeo.com/177909174
48 Vostok                        https://vimeo.com/177888206
48 SANAE                       https://vimeo.com/177887608
48 Amsterdam Island     https://vimeo.com/177852096

48 Scott Base                  https://vimeo.com/177891121/be4c4c67ae
48 Esperansa                  https://vimeo.com/177868253
48 Troll                             https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/biftoj02obuqeox?oref=e&sm=1
48 Syowa                         https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ai1iJr3njUqGgaVur1bNJLh1Tn_4gA
48 McMurdo Rebekah     

     https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6s5fzDGSI4yUEdRMDhhWHZkb0E/view?usp=sharing
48 KEP

     https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1m41y7yfsxl3b18?oref=e&sm=1

48 South Pole 

https://vimeo.com/178029951

Weekly snapshot #42

The moon is back!

And if this snapshot had happened a few days earlier, you would have seen temps in the 30's. (The negative 30's F, that is--but for us, that's disorientingly, oddly warm at this point.) Spring is definitely on its way....

And by the next full moon, the sky will be quite light, just a week before sunrise. Very bittersweet, knowing this really special (to me) winter is nearing its end.

Plastering

We recently had a particularly entertaining time at our regular weekly meeting for the medical emergency response team down here, when we got to learn to do casting--or, as our Kiwi doctor calls it, "plastering." (One of the best parts of this team is hearing our American PA balk or be totally confused by half the stuff our NZ-trained doc says.) Still casts are casts, and we had fun messing around with them.

My attempt was highly unsuccessful; it's the one on the left in the picture below, and because of some less-than accurate instructions I was given when wetting the plaster roll, it never got saturated and therefore never set. But I already could have told you that this experience on the medical team was not going to lead to me discovering a latent desire to work in the medical field, so...oh, well!

My favorite part of the whole thing was this great moment caught on video when it was time for the casts to come off. (No humans were harmed during the making of this clip.)



Weekly snapshot #41

The wind has been even stronger this week than last, and a few days ago it reached 30 knots. The cold and dark here has started to feel so normal--dare I say even comfortable--that it's kind of fun to step outside into a gust and have it slam the realization into my face: I am at the South freakin' Pole!



Unfortunately for you, nothing at all in this week's snapshot. The wind blowing snow around makes visibility pretty awful.

As a consolation, here's a blurb and pic that one of our NOAA reps just sent out. This taken with an (obviously) much longer-exposure camera, looking back at the station from the NOAA facility about a kilometer away. It's a good reminder that sunrise is on the way (we WILL see the sun again, someday!). The igloo he mentions (which can be seen on the far right of the frame, on the same level as the station) is this mammoth thing constructed by a group of the guys here over the past couple weeks. (They also slept in it a couple of nights ago.) I'll see if I can get some decent photos of it for a future post before they have to tear it down this weekend. Anyway, from NOAA:

"Screen capture from the NOAA webcam during a lull in the winds this morning.  Note the faint glow of twilight above the station and continuing to the right edge of the image.  Note also the brighter glow from the illuminated igloo."



Yoga at 90 South

I know I've posted about teaching yoga down here before, but I just had to share these two things.

We've got a great little group of 5-7 people who have been coming to yoga really consistently once or twice/week all winter. It's so much fun to get to work with same people for such an extended time, and to see them improve and change along the way.

At first we were doing our classes in the gym, as we do during the busier summer season. But as you can see from this picture, the gym tends to be the coldest place in the station and really was not at all conducive to any floor work, much less final resting pose.

So, since both the station doc and PA are regular attendees, they offered up the medical center as our new, regular yoga locale. It's way cozier and works surprisingly well. With the smaller space and our small group, things sometimes get a little silly, though, as they did one recent week when I fulfilled a request that I play a "female empowerment" mix during class and, among other Three Stooges-esque behavior, this happened....



Weekly snapshot #40

How on earth did we get to #40!?!? Boggles my mind.

Most striking aspect of today's snapshot--the wind!



It's actually pretty warm out, but those seventeen knot gusts blew the heavy door to the station observation deck back against me when I tried to open it and made it difficult to hold my camera steady to take this picture. As a consequence, you can't even see the stars that are out. Just dark, dark, dark. Happy August!