26 February--Eddied Out in Antarctica

Wave action, tidal fluctuations, wind, and relatively "warm" currents under the ice continue to nibble away at the Ross Ice Shelf.  No one can remember this part of the Sound being so open in 20 years.  Climate change?  Maybe.  But we have to keep in mind that every year is different and we'd have to look at the trends over many years to draw conclusions.  The ice in the ice shelf is advancing every year and when in some years it's not knocked off, the front will advance.  In other years, perhaps like this one, it will be cut back and appear to recede.  What's it all mean?  Too soon to tell, in this case.

Look near the horizon for the Pegasus Road.  It's going to have to be rebuilt this winter and it's estimated that it will add 10 miles to the 13 mile route to the airfield.

Also, note that the pressure ridges have been blown away.

This an entirely new sort of ice to me.  It was floating on the open water and acted like thinly set Jello, dampening the height of the waves coming in.

17 February--Packing in a Few More Visual Treats. Wiki-Leaks Magnitude Download

The weather has been definitely turning colder and colder.  The austral winter is nearly here.  The last 2 of the 6 LC-130s left today.  The last ship will leave tomorrow.  All the field camps are shut down and people pulled in.  The South Pole is now cut off until November.  Only 5 more flights will go north before McMurdo is cut off, too.  The water along the near shore has been freezing into odd shapes and then is blown north by the winds.  It will take several months before the sea ice will be fast to shore and relatively safe to walk on.

This ice reminds me of the giant water lily pads in the Amazon with its slight ridge along the edge.

Multi-depth lenses of ice.  The surge and current were jostling these back and forth.



The molting process isn't always pretty.



A molting Emperor penguin.  Note how thick his down coat will be.  Toasty.



The sun keeps getting lower and lower in the sky and has dipped below the Royal Society Range peaks several times now.  The official first sunset is on the 20th.

This is the most active I've seen Mt. Erebus in my 5 months here.  The trail of sulfur fumes extended miles downwind.

Skuas ground nest while here.

Winterquarters Bay of McMurdo Sound (of the Ross Sea) opened up 2 days ago in front of the station.  Most of the sea ice melting is the result of relatively "warm" currents, not from the sun hitting the surface.  So even though it has been getting much colder, the melting is still going full speed.  The blue colors against the white and grays of the ice were spectacular.  Hiking the Ob Hill Loop today I saw a Minke whale surface and heard it breathe deeply.

"What the...?"  Nature sculpts; man does his best.

Pressure ridges highlighted by the low angle sun.





1 December--Let the Holiday Madness Begin



An LC-130 taking off from the Ice Ski-way.

The Ice Runway (or  Ski-way) is built on annual sea ice. The temperatures are getting up to to the point where its strength is diminishing.  On December 3rd the Ice Runway will be closed and all operations will move to Pegasus Field.  The entire Ice Runway Town will be disassembled; Pegasus Town is currently being built.  The advantage of Pegasus is that it is on the Ross Ice Shelf, a glacier floating on the Ross Sea.  In places the ice shelf is hundreds of feet thick.  The disadvantage is that a trip from McMurdo to Pegasus Field can take an hour.  That's why it is worth all the effort to keep the Ice Runway operating as long as possible and not just permanently using Pegasus. 

You just can't keep those kids down!


Over the Thanksgiving weekend I hiked over to Scott Base and returned via the backside of Ob Hill.  Among other things, that is where the Americans go snowboarding.  The Kiwis have their own slope and it's rumored to be much better.

1. 

I think this is what is called a ventifact, a piece of rock shaped by the wind.  It is a piece of sandstone found on a slope that is otherwise almost entirely basaltic.  That in itself is a bit odd.  The wind doesn't seem to have the same effect on the basalt, perhaps due to hardness, but it's created a form of desert pavement by blowing away the fine materials.

People had told me that I wouldn't believe what a special meal food services would prepare for Thanksgiving.  They were right!  But it was nothing short of astonishing.  People were all dressed up for the occasion, some in outfits like you'd expect back in the states for a big family get-together and others in McMurdo chic.  Like a dress and basic issue, blue Asics Tiger FDX boots (these are issued for people going to the really cold places like the Pole or people going to be out all day long unprotected.)  There was a definite style and flair.  The line began outside the galley at least 30 minutes before dinner and there were 3 scheduled sittings at 2 hour intervals.

There were both turkey rolls and 2 carvers slicing off birds recognizable as turkeys.  Several different iterations of mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes.  Gravy, of course.  An apple and sausage stuffing that was phenomenal. Fresh roasted asparagus.  Several other vegetables.  Rolls and fresh breads.  The vegetarians were not forgotten, either.  The dessert table rotated during the evening but I'd guess that there were at least a dozen different desserts, including the traditional pumpkin and apples pies, torts, cakes, fresh strawberries and fresh strawberries dipped in chocolate.  There was a dark chocolate layer cake with cherries between the layers, topped with a dark chocolate icing/glaze.  That one was so good that I had to go back just to convince myself it was as good as my first impressions said it was.  And it was.  Most people had wine and it flowed freely (the galley is normally dry with the exception of Saturday nights.).  sorry, Kathi--no tomato aspic.  No Mama Stamburg's relish, either.  The cooks were brought out to the galley by a long and extended standing ovation.  They certainly deserved it.  We were finally scooted out after 1.5 hours so that they could strip the tables of the linens and do the whole thing all over again for the next sitting.

The only downside: a person from the kitchen was discovered drinking on the job and immediately fired.  Flown out two days later on the first flight north.  As they say, it's a harsh continent.

Imagine a holiday dedicated to glorifying gluttony!

I went back for a sixth and seventh visit to the Ob Tube.  Good thing too since they removed it on the 30th.  The quality of the sea ice was deteriorating on the approach and it was only a matter of time.  There were white, 6-inch jelly fish propelling their way past the window.  Lots of krill.  We heard the calls of seals but another friend actually saw a seal pass by the tube 5 feet away.  When we surfaced, a seal was hauled out and completely oblivious to us.  They generate enough heat laying there that they melt a shallow indentation itno the ice.  Even with the tube removed, this will be a great place to come back to to watch the seals.



Weddell seal.  Blissfully unaware of the bloody seal genocide of 100 years ago.  Rest sweetly.



Scott Base

Only Flagstaff is missing.

Scott Base holds a certain fascination for the Americans here.  They take a shuttle over on Thursday evening for American Night at their bar.  They take a shuttle over on the half hour on Sundays to visit their shop.  They tramp over every day to shop some more during open hours.  Is shopping genetic?   A drive for the less familiar and more exotic?  To fill an empty niche in our souls?

The entire base is painted a single color.  It's much more modern than McMurdo and the various parts are mostly all connected by enclosed hallways, so there's no need to bundle up and scurry between buildings.  I suspect the reason is that it was either much more recently established than McMurdo or it recently replaced something much older.  McMurdo has been stitched together piece by piece over the years with little central plan.  Thus the Mine Shaft Modern Eclectic style at McMurdo.

As the open water of the Southern Ocean gets closer and closer, there is more tidal action on the sea ice and open pools are created along the shore in places.  This one gets used by the Weddells from time to time.

Holiday Greetings!


21 October--Goodbye to Sunsets

Yesterday was the last sunset here for the next 4 months.  What a weird thought!  The latitude of 77 degrees and change south latitude brings the sun out full-time until around February 21st, approximately.  That will be about when I'm heading home.  Some local wag has posted a flyer asking for sacrificial virgins for a supposed pagan ceremony today.  I would love to see an atlas to see what the comparable latitude in Alaska and Canada might run.

Because of all the flights into and out of here, there is an amazing array of experts here to give flight weather predictions.  McMurdo is the center of it all, but there are observers in all the remote field camps and at the Pole and a network of automated weather stations all over the continent, including one on the shoulder of Mt. Erebus.  Here's a pretty good place to check out the weather here, but keep in mind that experienced hands here laugh at the predictions even the local forecasters make, so it's hard to know what Wunderground's reliability might be:

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=mcmurdo+station&searchType=WEATHER

These are known as Baslers, which are thoroughly modernized versions of the C-47 (military version of the civilian DC-3 .

One of the interesting things I heard yesterday is that one of the reasons they cancel flights to the Pole is a temperature of -57.  The C-47s are not allowed to be flown into that sort of weather even if the sky is cloudless and the winds light.  The Twin Otters are scheduled to be coming in a few days.

Yesterday I noticed the snow softening up.  Rather than being hard and bearing one's weight, it was soft and you could sink in to it.  Maybe even perfect for snowballs?

The big news is that tomorrow "evening" (what is evening but an arbitrary social construct when it's light all day long?) the entire department is going on a training trip to Cape Evans.  That's the location of Scott's second hut and it's the much better preserved of the two.  It was found some years after he had used it filled with snow and had to be dug out, but it's much truer to the original condition than the nearby one at Hut Point.  The second was  built after one of his ships was crushed by ice when moored off the hut here.  His thought was that, by being closer to the margin of the sea ice and open water, it would be a safer spot to anchor.  There is a large ice berg that calved off last year that is frozen into the sea ice.  It's supposed to be an eerily beautiful color of blue.  Return here to read more about it on Saturday (Friday in the US).

18 October--Daily Routine?

Cold, windy and harsh.  Just what you'd expect from Antarctica. The good weather there for a few days was just a teaser.  But the views are always phenomenal.  The Royal Society Mountains across the Sound are 50 to 60 miles away and you'd think you could ski out to them in a few hours.

I get to drive up to the Golfball several times a day and the views from up there are the best on station.  It's also the windiest.  There is a detachment of 4 Kiwi Army carpenters building a stairway project up there and they're exposed to the worst of the worst weather here.  I certainly can't begrudge them their morning, lunch, and afternoon rides down to the Galley for tea and a warm-up. The gusts up there can drive you sideways as you walk and they don't have much protection beyond their ECW gear.  I love the chance to take in the views of the glacier and Mt. Erebus.  At 12,400 feet, it's almost the height of the San Francisco Peaks at home.

This morning was the first day that the C-47s are here.  They're also known as DC-3s.  They were one of the workhorse cargo planes of World War II, carrying cargo over the Hump from India to China.  I rode one in the Amazon in 1970 and thought it was pretty old even then.  Several companies have been scouting out Third World countries and snatching them up.  One of the companies takes them up to Sandpoint, Idaho and completely tears them apart and refurbishes them.  They're in high demand for places like this, anywhere that needs a tough and reliable tail-dragger.  Not bad for a 70 year old plane!



C-47 or DC-3 on the Ice Runway



The Antarctic Heritage Trust on Scott Base helps preserve the old buildings of the Continent.



The Antarctic version of Banksy's tweaking of Matisse's Water Lillies.



9 October--Driving in Beauty, McMurdo Style

McMurdo itself is not what anyone in their right mind would call beautiful.  That's just a given.  But the area it's set in is as exquisite a place as anyone could hope to be in.  This day was especially so.  Throughout the day I was driving around town, out to pick up the people at Happy Camper Camp (out past the Kiwi Scott Base), and around town the rest of the day.  From time to time the views were just so drop-dead beautiful that I had to stop briefly and take a photo.  It's a truism that the Grand Canyon changes minute by minute through the day, but this is vaster and the changes occur even faster, so fast that from the moment the intensity of the beauty registers to the moment I can get the camera out, the lighting, the sky, and the colors have completely altered.  I know my little point-and-shoot digital camera is not up to the task of the huge immensity of the Royal Society Mountains and the vastness of the frozen Ross Sea, but it is something that I can keep in the front pocket of my Carhartts and take out easily.  I try to have it with me everywhere I go.  I have yet to take the larger and more feature-packed camera out of my dorm room and it may never get out.  It would have to be kept under my Bid Red and that would have to be unzipped every time I wanted to take a photo, something that would be cold and inconvenient..

Rumor has it that I'll be able to go to Happy Camper Camp sometime in November and that would be wonderful on its own.  But going there is also prerequisite to going elsewhere, such as the Dry Valleys or the South Pole (the biggies of the morale trips) or to Capes Evans or Royce.  There's a day trip going to one of those capes tomorrow (Sunday) and I overheard one of the involved people say that there is a seal hole just off the Ice road..  These holes are miles from the open waters and to survive, the seals must keep their holes open at all costs or die.

My work week is Monday through Saturday with Sunday off.  Each day is a 9 hour workday.  That's pretty common here, so Sunday is almost everyone's day off and the laundry and common facilities are crowded.  Towards the end of October shuttles will go to 24 hour coverage and I'll be going to five 12-hour shifts that will rotate through the day and night.  The days will be great, but I'm concerned for when my rotation calls for the night shift.  But it is possible that with 24 hours of light and a room without any windows, it might not be an issue.