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.