31 December--New Year's in Antarctica

Panorama of Mt. Erebus crater

Brilliant days...

...alternate with cloudy ones.

The cloudy ones are the hardest to drive in.  The light is "flat" making it difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to see the road features.  You drive blind and hit the bumps and holes. 

Ob Hill



There is a whole series of newer Cases with Red themed names.  Think of how many you can guess.



Known as Apples or Tomatoes, these emergency shelters are scattered around the base and on hiking trails and are stocked with sleeping gear, food, and a stove.





This is the floating ice pier.  When the Swedish icebreaker arrives here in 2 weeks, it'll dock here, as will the fuel tanker and the supply ship when they arrive about 2 weeks later.  It floats to adjust to the tides in the Sound.

This is a photo of the Swedish icebreaker in dock last year.

This is the broken route in from the open water to McMurdo Station.  While here, the icebreaker opens up a wide turning basin.

Readers may remember an earlier posting about the Russian cruise ship in the area and some of their passengers visiting town.  Wild rumors said that the passengers had paid huge sums to come down here.  A Google search showed that corner cabins with a view went for just over $55,000 and rooms without a view for $35,000.  This is actually even slightly more than what the rumor had said.

The big doing tonight, New year's Eve, is Ice Stock.  It's an outdoor concert featuring all of the many bands active down here.  Lots of talent, but the ones I listened to as of 2100 were still garage bands.  It's supposed to get better as the night wears on and it did.

28 December--Food Miles from Where?

I'm looking at my plates today for dinner and midrats and I see fresh strawberries, fresh asparagus, fantastic salad greens and I'm struck at how far everything we eat here is transported.  We moan and groan about the C-17 not coming in, delayed by weather for at least 3 days, and how that means no freshies.  They're a bit beyond their "best by..." dates, but oh how good they are after 4 or 5 days of none at all.  The canned and frozen veggies grow old.  The Christmas meal was the original destination for all of this and their delay hampered the cooks quite a bit, but the value of the morale boost of the meal was incalculable. 

But imagine flying a LC-130 7-hours one way with all that fresh food!  And then back when they couldn't land.  I doubt that they were the only cargo items on the manifest, but the expense and the carbon footprint must've been immense.  How expensive were those luscious strawberries in dollars and carbon?  And how is that different from what you, the reader, do daily during the winter in your corner of the planet?

Much of the rest of the food comes down once a year in a ship from Port Hueneme, California loaded with all of the supplies for an entire year, including canned and frozen food, as well as motor oil, plywood and office supplies.  The ship must maintain those frozen foods in a frozen state all the way down those thousands of miles and through the tropics.  (On the way back north the ship retrogrades all the waste of the base.  The food waste must likewise be kept frozen all the way, including through the tropics, to prevent a huge, stinking, rotting mess.  Also retrograded is what they euphemistically call "cake," the sewage sludge from the waste treatment plant.  I can't imagine the stench if the refrigeration plant failed!)  All of this also has a cost and a carbon footprint, though pound for pound it must be a great deal less than that exquisite New Zealand produce.  Is there nothing that they can't grow in New Zealand?

"Cake"

I stumbled across this blog in today's New York Times Science section.  The author is a geologist out in CTAM, a remote field camp.
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/life-in-the-deep-field/?ref=science

24 December--Christmas Eve in Terra Australis Incognita



Skuas have this bad rep down here, but the ones I've seen have always been sort of gentle and non-aggressive.  And if they can get aggressive, isn't that what you'd expect in a "Harsh Continent"?



It is indeed Christmas Eve here.  The big dinner celebration is tomorrow with a promised feast to rival Thanksgiving's blowout.  Rumors include lobster tail and prime rib.  The C-17 didn't make it in today (or yesterday, or the day before that), so fresh vegetables and salad will be missing.  It will be the desserts to really look forward to it.  "Life is short; eat dessert first."

The flight problems have all involved dense fog.  As the open water gets closer, the air is able to pick up lots more moisture and as that moister air hits the ice, especially the much colder ice of the glaciers, it cools and condenses into fog.  It swirls down from the heights and pools out on the sea ice and the Ross Ice shelf.  A few days ago they called a Condition 2 out on the ice shelf and the road to it, while in McMurdo it was clear and balmy.  You'd hit the fog just past Gas Pass on the way to Scott Base, which has had solid fog for days on end now.  A few times you could see the fog swirling through Gas Pass and over Ob Hill.

The open water has meant that tour ships are starting to come closer.  A Russian ship is the one that I'm aware of.  It is said to be a converted icebreaker with passenger cabins added as an afterthought.  The wild McMurdo rumor mill has it that they are paying $54,000 for a room with a view and $30,000 for a room without a view.  Someone said they saw some of their passengers being escorted in a tight little knot around town, all clad in identical yellow cold weather gear (if only they knew what real cold weather was!). 

I heard several Russians in Building 155, probably crew members, though sometimes Russians come in from their Vostok Station.  Vostok is at an even higher elevation than the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and has had the coldest temperatures ever recorded on the planet, something like -102 degrees F. (Google it if you want the exact temperature.).

The biggest event for me was getting stuck in a Delta last night on the Pegasus Road.  Things have been soft and squishy there for a few days in the warmth and Fleet Ops hasn't been able to do much to correct the condition in the warmth.  I was driving back and in several places I could feel my wheels begin to bog down. In the rear view mirror I could see a small "bow wave" of snow develop, but I could always find a harder track and get out of it.  This time I wasn't able to.  My speed slowed down dangerously.  The bow wave got bigger.  My speed slowed some more.  Eventually I was just plain stuck.  Backing up and charging again didn't help.  "Crabbing" the wheels had no effect.  We were stuck.  The hole I was in was huge--they always are with such huge tires.  One of Canadian passengers got out and laid in it for a photo.

The passengers were amazingly cheerful and offered to help dig us out.  There are 4 shovels in the passenger cabin of the Deltas, but no amount of digging was going to free the 54,000 pound beast.  I had to call in Fleet Ops and they pulled me out.  The operator took a quick photo, hooked up a chain, pulled us out easily, and said he'd bring his dragger to fill in the hole.  Without a roller, the result of that will be a deceptively smooth road surface over a hidden "hole" of loose, uncompacted floury snow.  Oh, my!

19 December--Miscellanea

Mt Erebus on a quiet day.  Lately they've all become quiet.

 The drives out to Pegasus Airfield are relatively easy.  The bad spots are at the transition from land to the sea ice (near town) and between land near Scott Base and the Ross ice Shelf.  Meltwater pools are forming earlier than people remember.  Currently, both take about the same amount of time, 35 minutes one way.  That will change as the road deteriorates with the warm days.

I'm becoming really attached to our cast-off, hand-me-down Deltas.  They seem unstoppable.  Riders don't like them nearly as much because of the ride back in the passenger box.  It can get pretty rough if you're not constantly looking out for the smoothest road conditions and moving, almost swerving, from side to side in that road like a drunk sailor.  There are days when it reminds me of driving the Parker 400 course again for BLM  --at least when I don't have passengers.  But my goal is to give them the same sort of ride I'd want for my family.

We had a medivac a few days ago from Casey Station, an Australian station not too far away, when their ski-way became flooded from meltwater.  They helicoptered the patient to here and then we flew him out.  It was said to be pneumonia with a collapsed lung.

The Ross Ice Shelf from the Ob Hill Loop Trail.



Sunning on the ice is comparatively warm for the Weddells.

18 December--Back to the Pressure Ridges

It's been hard to stay away from the pressure ridges over near Scott Base, but tonight there was a Rec. trip over there and I signed up.  It may be the last for the season as the ice is melting fast and there are lots of melt water pools.  The snow along the way was very soft and giving, not at all hard and loud underfoot.  The seal pup is substantially grown now.  The beauty is, if anything, more intense now than the earlier visits. 

A roller forming and beginning to open up to the sky.

Human yoga.

Seal yoga.


The last few days there have been such dramatic skies.  Clouds, sun peeking in under and through the clouds.  Snow drifting along the surface.in thin tongues.

\

15 December--Ice Roads and Pressure ridges

Blake's Delta dropped a wheel in the ice transition and needed to be pulled out.   The crazy angle caused the full diesel tank to leak and the Spill Response Team had to deploy.  Not a pretty picture.

 The ice roads out to Pegasus Field have gone bad more quickly than anyone can remember.  Today is supposed to be up to 37 degrees F. and yesterday must have been at least that much.  Lows have been in the mid 20s.  (How there can be that much of a diurnal range each day when the sun never goes down is something to ponder.)  With the 24 hours of sunlight, there has been a lot of melting and it seems to accumulate in melt water pools on the surface.

I had to drive out through the same transition a few hours later, so I got out and scouted a route through it, threading between 2 lakes and deep ruts where others had become stuck.  Successful!  Whew!  But for how long?

Some of the passengers aren't very understanding when it takes us longer than normal to transport them.  Many also don't like that we're using Deltas almost exclusively to go out to Pegasus; the ride is much, much worse.  They don't realize that the ride for us in the front cab is only marginally better.  Our seats are set up like Pogo sticks and we bounce a lot, too.  McMurdo talk has it that one shuttle driver had her seat set too high and was bounced up to hit the ceiling and received a compression fracture.  The trip out in a Delta using this route takes about 35 minutes.  If we were to take vans, we'd have to go via Scott Base and that's about an hour ride, one-way.  Not a great choice.  We'll be going that way later in the season when the Pegasus Cut-off gets too bad.  It's only a matter of time. 

Where the pressure ridges meet and force the ice to curl back, the ice will often reach vertical and can occasionally double back almost over itself.  How long this can last before succumbing to gravity is anyone's guess.

The pup has gotten bigger and bigger.

Only a memory now, but coming back in the not-so-distant future.

13 December--Field Camps

A Jamesway field building.  They are apparently no longer manufactured and some have labels dating from before the Korean War.  They can be lengthened indefinitely.  They're most usually used for kitchen and dining areas, but can also house science labs.

Today--that is to say, last night and this morning (how disorienting!)--I took several runs in a Delta out to the new Pegasus City.  At this point, it's a half hour run, but after the short-cut closes and we have to go through Scott Base transition, it'll be a full hour.  The ice road during the first run at 0330 was smooth, but it deteriorated a lot by the 0530 run.  Instead of 20 mph, I was down in places to 15 mph.  Soooo.... anyway, not many photos today and I'll pull these from the Common drive and focus a bit on the remote field camps. 

The Interior of an LC-130

Field camps aare supplied by air, either by LC-130 flights if they have a large enough landing area, or by Baslers if they have a small landing area or difficult topography.

The old trustworthy Scott tent, extremely stable in the wind and warm.  Most tents here are modern mountaineering tents, like North Face or Kelty.

A lake out in the Dry Valleys.  It's a myth that no rain has fallen here in the last 2 million years, but in some areas the last precip was in the 1970s.  That's still plenty dry.

The Indian-American scientist I introduced to the Ob Tube studies the bacteria and algae growing under the ice of the lakes and sea.  The lakes will sometimes thaw around the margins by the middle of summer.



At first glance you'd think that the area is sterile of life, but there is a wealth of nematodes living in the upper area of the "soil."  Because of the extreme aridity, they go into a sort of suspended animation, only to come roaring back to life at the first intimation of moisture.  In at least one study, a nematode resumed life after being dry for 60 years!  A nematode might be as long as one millimeter.





A ventifact, a rock carved by wind blown sand, snow, or ice crystals.