Goings on

Just a collection of random happenings for you from the past week+.


First, as mentioned a couple of weekly snapshots ago, we had our final sunrise/sunset and are now officially in polar winter and won't be seeing the sun again for several months. On the penultimate day of sun, I got to go with a group back to Arrival Heights to watch the sun rising past the flanks of Mt. Erebus (which you can see on the right of this pic, the mountain in the background; it's actually 20 miles away!), creeping a bit across the sky, and then setting again an hour later. It was a cold (as I was determined to stand outside for the whole thing but it's pretty windy up at Arrival Heights) but fun way to mark the occasion.

Next, to give you another peek into the social scene here: there's a building called Hut 10 here that looks and feels like a normal suburban house in the States feels, and there's a public calendar for renting the space and hanging out there in a weird limbo where for a few hours you might feel like you're in Topeka rather than Antarctica. One night last week, one of the Stewards turned 30 and put a truly impressive amount of effort into turning Hut 10 into a club for a rave to celebrate her milestone. And it was a really sweet, nice community feel when so many people turned out to participate.

Final activity to share: on April 25, New Zealand's Scott Base, 4 miles down the road from us, celebrated ANZAC Day (the Aussie/Kiwi version of Memorial Day). Since there are only 12 people on Scott Base for the winter, they invited a delegation of McMurdoans over to help them observe the remembrance. I felt lucky to get to go along with about 25 others. There was a short outdoor ceremony of lowering the New Zealand flag for a poem reading and a moment of silence...

And then everyone was invited to enjoy coffee and tea and biscuits and scones afterward. REAL BUTTER, people. This was a momentous occasion for me in multiple ways. Looking at this picture now, it feels like a dream....

Weekly snapshot #9

I'm cheating a little here and giving you a picture from yesterday morning at 10am and the accompanying weather snapshot, because yesterday we had our first real inclement weather in town and it was irrationally exciting for me. It never actually got to Condition 1, though at one point they thought it might and rope lines were set up leading from the main building (where I work) to the dorms. By the time I closed up the store for the night, the winds had died down and they'd released the rope lines. But here's a shot from when I went into work that morning, 10 hours earlier.

So fantastically eerie, and the very bright white light on the post on the left side of the frame is meaningful: it's the Condition 2 warning light. I'm told that in Condition 1, a set of bright red lights appears on the very top section of the pole, though I have to imagine that at times that wouldn't even be visible in real Con 1 conditions.

I also like the weather report for that same time, since it's not the Condition 3, green-across-the-board showing that I'm usually posting.

I'm told that at one point in the early evening (while I was busy with having the store open), every location in the vicinity EXCEPT McMurdo town was in Con 1. But the temps stayed this warm through the whole thing, which is so striking to me. I have definitely re-adapted to life in Antarctica at this point, because 14F feels absurdly warm out to me, for sure. Even when there's a Con 2 wind whipping.





Arrival Heights

There are a whole bunch of places on and around Ross Island that I've long heard of but haven't gotten to visit yet. But thanks to a Research Assistant here, I (along with one of the stewards from the galley) got to take a ride on our day off a couple of Mondays ago to Arrival Heights.


I didn't even know exactly what was AT Arrival Heights, and it turns out it's where a lot of the science experiments going on here are based. In the summertime it's apparently hopping up there. In the winter, various members of the research team make near-daily trips a couple of miles up into the volcanic hills above station to check on the equipment, troubleshoot, etc. The RA who kindly took us up there, G, also very kindly spent well over an hour telling us about all of the experiments he's in charge of tracking, from geomagnetic signals to nuclear explosion detection to auroras to UV measurements.

As much as I loved getting a better sense of the science those of us who are support staff are supporting, I LOVED the views from Arrival Heights--which, as its name implies, is at a higher elevation than McMurdo itself, and has a view out to the sea (it's apparently where the intrepid explorers who used this area as a base would go to watch for ships arriving). There's also a view of Mt. Erebus, the southernmost active volcano in the world, which is 20 miles from McMurdo and which I've only otherwise seen from the airfield on the sea ice. Soooooo beautiful.

Weekly snapshot #8

By next week's snapshot, we will officially be in polar winter, in the sense that the sun will have stopped rising at all (though I'm sure there will still be some light in the sky for a few more weeks). The view outside today at noon:

Still pretty mild temps, with an overall atmosphere that still feels way less like the planet is trying to kill us than it does at Pole.





The other big news of the week is that there was a plane! Nearly 60 people left, and a bit less than 20 arrived, and now we are a family of 133 for the next two+ months, till the June flight. Here is the cargo bay of the building where everyone had to check in for the outgoing flight. I'm standing at the doorway where the passengers are about to start filtering through, and I got to be part of the "hug line" you see here, a McMurdo tradition of those of us (pictured) who are staying behind, saying goodbye to the departing folks just before they climb on board transport to the airfield. A bittersweet experience, with so many people leaving whom I'm grateful to have gotten to know!



Goings on around town

Just some bits and pieces for you this week.

I'm still working on making my peace with the local bar (Gallagher's) being the epicenter of the social scene around here. I'm never going to be able to make myself go there to just hang out, but luckily some fun/interesting activities have been going on there. I joined a trivia team for a little friendly competition, I was recruited to play a role in a read-through of a play set in McMurdo (written by someone who washed dishes here one season; the organizer used random number generation to assign the roles, and I ended up playing Tom the maintenance man), and there was an open mic night full of friends and co-workers revealing their knacks for poetry, music and more. I was happily just an observer that evening, though if performing with the safety of being shielded from audience eyes by a sheet of fabric becomes generally acceptable, the idea of participating is less unappealing to me.

I also got to participate in a classic McMurdo tradition, the Skua Sorting Party. Which probably takes a bit of explanation. Skuas are the ever-present scavenging birds of the polar climes. And in their honor, the Antarctic version of Goodwill is called "Skua"--there are Skua bins in every dorm and a container set up that is Skua general--the place you can go to find a used article of clothing when your last pair of pants rip, or you need a half-used bottle of lotion, or you're wondering if anyone has ever brought purple stilettos to McMurdo (yes, they have) that you can use for a costume party. In the mass exodus of the end of summer, some of the hundreds of departing folks are not very conscientious about what they throw in the skua bin as they frantically clean out their rooms. The Wasties (those employed in the trash collecting and sorting business) faithfully collect the contents of all the Skua bins daily (if not more) during the end of summer rush, but there are those community members lacking in civility who have put their dirty galley dishes or outright trash in the skua bins along with everything else from their rooms, and there is no way the Wasties can sort it all. So one afternoon at the end of March, they invited everyone to come to the Waste Barn for a three-hour party to sort multiple triwalls of "Skua" into accurate bins: actual Skua (of course), or bedding/towels for Lodging, or landfill waste, or galley utensils, etc. And the bonus is, you also get to see all the really good stuff that comes through (like those purple stilettos) and keep it for yourself if you wanted.

So, here we have a still of the Skua Sorting Party in action, and then a video as a loader brings in a couple more triwalls for the crowd to attack.

Finally, if you're curious about what happens to the stuff that is actually trash and not Skua at McMurdo (and at Pole--as Pole trash is brought out to McMurdo and combined with what McMurdo produces), check out this article.