winter camp

Today I had to go do a job out at Pegasus field. Pegasus is the runway out on the permanent ice shelf that gets used once the sea ice starts breaking up. It's about 45 minutes outside of town. The airfield is so named because of a plane that crashed here some years back. It's still there, in fact.

(not my picture)


What made the trip memorable, besides just getting out of town for a bit, were the following two things. First, I witnessed the atmospheric effect known as a sun dog. And second, I saw Ross Island from a new perspective. Click on either of the following photos to pop up a much larger version.

This sundog picture has only had its contrast modified a bit, otherwise it's untouched.



Here, you can see how HUGE Erebus actually is. The bastard is almost 14,000 feet. From town, you can't see it. From the top of Ob Hill (considerably closer to Erebus than where I took this picture), it just looks like a taller hill. It's strange the way point of view can skew your perception of size.

There's a couple more photos now. I've been going up Ob Hill after dinner as much as I can each day (so far it's been four times now, I think). It's a good walk, and thorough (thuruh). The view is fantastic. My little camera box can't come anywhere near an approximation. And the silence. I'll say it again: the silence. No one has ever experienced silence till they've been to Antarctica. It starts at your ears, but begins to enter through your every exposed opening; eye or nose or pore. Except then a bunch of LC-130s decided to do flight checks and my reverie was broken.

Read 'em and weep.

My boss took this picture of me. If you really love me, you'll make it your desktop background (don't think I won't check). Click on it to pop up a bigger, more desktop-worthy version.

The temperature is warming a bit. The roads are thawing a bit. We're moving into McMurdo's mud season, which directly precedes McMurdo's dust season.

Yesterday, some beakers at a fish hut (where they --surprise-- fish) pulled up a crinoid (cry-noid). This made me happy for a number of reasons. Firstly, a crinoid was a Dr. Who monster from an episode that took place in Antarctica, except it's spelled Krynoid,
and it looked like this:
instead of this:          
Secondly, they're creepy amazing creatures. One of those nebulous in-between plant/animal things. I'm not certain which was named after which, the critter or the monster, I assume the monster came second. Although the reverse is always possible, they just named a lemur species after John Cleese.

Here's the current status. I'm sure you're all overjoyed.

Here is an oft-heard exchange down here, in one form or another.

Said, for example, while deciding how to dress when going out for the evening:

Guy one: "Hey man, is it cold outside?"
Guy two: "Dude, it's Antarctica."

So, you've seen March of the Penguins, right? You saw how harsh and bitter the climate is down here, especially in the winter time. Those filmmakers must have been a rugged, burly bunch to be able to handle that filming. This is definitely true. But did you know that they were most likely not more than 40 miles away from a latte at any given time? That's maybe a 10 minute helo flight.

This weekend I had happy campers. Happy campers is a snowcraft school that's made for folks who are going out into the field, wintering over, or get signed up to go by their bosses (although, there's every likelihood I may need to go into the field, so it's still relevent). A lot of the course involves lectures on things like hypothermia and the evils of cotton clothing in cold weather (it retains moisture). Also, all the exciting ways that cold weather can make you die. We started with about an hour and a half in a classroom, then loaded into the Delta (a huge, orange, insectoid bulbously tired thing) and drove out to the permanent ice shelf, where most of the course is given. The Ross ice shelf is kind of like the sea ice, except instead of 9 feet thick, it's a couple hundred feet thick. It's basically a glacier that fell off the land, and is now sitting on top of McMurdo Sound.

Once out there, we had some more classroom instruction in the I-hut jamesway (quonsset hut-like tent thing). This was about setting up stoves and other stuff that I probably should remember but can't right now, off the top of my head.

The whole point of the class is that we set up a functioning camp in the snow and the instructors ditch us to fend for ourselves. The camp consisted of a couple of mountaineering tents, two Scott tents (so named because they're of the exact design that Scott used on his expeditions -- one of the few well-designed things he included), and any number of snow shelters. We also had to build some snow walls to act as wind-breaks, as well as to prevent drifting in the event of a storm. Just two days earlier, it had been Condition 1, the days I was there, it was perfect and pristine. Bright sun, no wind, not too cold, beautiful. It's not always beautiful. As I keep being told, this is the windiest place in the world. Katabatic winds come sweeping down off the polar plateau and blast the hell out of the Ross ice shelf and its environs. So you make a snow wall, and put your tents on the north side. Conveniently, the worst winds around here are always from the south, so you just chuck up a wall, set up your tent, and off to dreamland you go. Except building a snow wall requires several hours of grueling labor, even with fifteen people making it. You gotta dig trenches, and saw, saw saw. Then drag big blocks over to the wall and assemble it. It takes a long time. But I guess it's worth it to not get buried under crushing, suffocating snow drifts.

The snow shelters vary. The best of them (and, I'm told, the most comfortable) is the quinzee. Quinzees are like igloos, except they're not made out of blocks. We took all our sleep-kit duffles (huge sleeping bag, two thermarest-things, fleece bag cozy) and piled them up in an enormous mound. Then, we shoveled. And shoveled. Until the whole thing was covered in a mound of snow about two to three feet thick. Then, you cut a hole in the side, drag out all the bags, and fill the hole back in. Then you dig an entrance that goes down and back up into the quinzee. The downward nature is (I'm told) a "cold air sink". It's supposed to let the cold air drop down in there. But we have a lot of cold air here. I'd think it would fill up pretty quick. Quinzees are great. I didn't sleep in one. I slept in the Scott tent, badly. Other people just dug trenches in the snow, hopped in, and covered the top with crude A-frames made of snow blocks. One guy just slept outside. In Antarctica.

One of the coolest things that happened (that I didn't take any pictures of) is when we were digging holes for tent-stakes and broke through into a quinzee from last year. We tunneled down into it and a couple people slept down there. They probably had the best night's sleep of all of us.

Camp set, the instructor said "seeya" and woosh! we were left to fend for ourselves. Dinner was melted snow mixed into yummy dehydrated backpacking meals. And beef sticks. Which were frozen.

Our beautiful camp:

Oh yeah, we built an arch on top of the snow wall.

I slept pretty badly. The ground was very hard, and it was very cold. I also managed to somehow unzip my sleeping bag AND cozy in the middle of the night, while asleep. That sucked, because I was still asleep for a while, but cold as hell. Once I managed to zip the bastard back up though, I was reasonably warm.

The next day, we had radio training. I managed to hail the South Pole on HF, which was pretty cool. We also had scenarios. One of those was a whiteout simulation. NASA has developed for the program a highly sophisticated means of accomplishing this. It's called a bucket. On your head. Our instructor had supposedly stumbled out into a Condition 1 storm and we were meant to find her. With buckets on our heads. Like this:



We managed to find her, and the other team didn't. So we got to sit back and chill while they cleaned out the I-hut (suckers). After the scenarios, we went back to town, and had two videos (which dragged, let me tell you). And then we were done.

The next day I went for a nice hike. On top of the hill, there's a dog statue with a little dildo in a bag underneath it. There's a very well-written note on it to the effect of "This dildo has traveled the world and come to its final resting place of Ross Island, Antarctica". If I go back up there, I'll try to transcribe it, because it's pretty funny. That's the end.

I've changed the name of this thing to more acurately reflect the general experience of being here. Also, I entered the beard contest. It started on Saturday with a clean shave. Judging is on January 1st. Wish me luck.

It's my firm belief that every bowling alley in the world has some sort of "cosmic" bowling. Whether it be "cosmic" or "futuro" or "atomic" or whatever. Basically, they all have that one night a week where everything is more expensive and there's blacklight stuff everywhere to make it a trippy, more exciting experience.

This is no less true in Antarctica than it is anywhere else. Except perhaps the expense part, although I was slightly shocked to discover that it costs money to bowl here (it's a buck a game).

I went cosmic bowling with a bunch of GAs, the station doc, and a lab tech from Crary Lab. Basically, the Christchurch crew (folks I met on the trip down here). It was a blast, and lived up to all my expectations. The lanes were well warped and not at all greased. I'm not a good bowler, but I can make a ball curve if I try. Not on these lanes. My general pattern for bowling held up: First frame: strike, subsequent frames: worse and worse. I found that one great advantage to having human pinsetters is that they can occaisonally be persuaded to kick over pins that otherwise would have remained standing. UPDATE: Due to overwhelming interest, I realized I should add that the pinsetters do, in fact, wear striped socks. This is because in the dark, with blacklights, their vulnerable little ankles aren't very easy to see, making them prone to the litterally bone crushing onslaught of 15 pound bowling balls. The striped socks, however, are perfectly visible under blacklight, and glow like a prairie moon in July (with emphasis on the first syllable, as in: JUly).

my perfect form:

first:
This morning as I was on my way to work, it was condition 2 again. According to the USAP safe travel policy, condition 2 is defined by one or more of the following conditions: wind speeds of 48 to 55 knots sustained for one minute, wind chills of -75 to -100 F sustained for one minute, or visibility of less than 1/4 mile sustained for one minute. As I walked out the door and toward work, I noticed a strange humming noise pervading the scene. You know those plastic tubes you wave over your head? It sounded like about 14 of those all woooo'ing at once. Very surreal. It took some time before I realized that the wind was blowing across the exposed ends of any number of pipes and conduits attached to the various buildings around town.

second:
It snowed a bunch here today. The snow we get is different from what I'm used to as snow, which is mostly in the Sierras. Our snow is much more like sand. It's very dry here, and very cold, so the snow doesn't stick to much. It gets compacted by the wind pretty quickly, but it also blows all over the place. It's strange.

I took a couple of (crappy, low resolution) videos at the ranch yesterday. I present them here, for your viewing pleasure.

adelies running	5.6 mb	21 seconds
around the ice hole	9.8 mb	33 seconds
can't get out	6.0 mb	21 seconds
hanging out	4.4 mb	14 seconds
penguin song	5.2 mb	17 seconds

I went to the penguin ranch today. And yes, it was awesome. I felt like if
I had an answering machine, I would have used Cooper's message:

"Hi there, this is the Coug. I'm out doing awesome stuff, so leave a
message, and I'll call you back. If you're cool enough"

Or some such thing.

Here's an explanation of the penguin ranch. I got a couple of things
wrong from before. It's a field camp made up of four or five huts
out on the sea ice about 20 or so miles away from McMurdo. In choosing
the location for the camp, they try to find a place as far away from any
natural ice cracks or openings as they can. This is so the penguins don't
just swim away when they bring them in. Then they go out to the ice
edge about 60 or 70 miles away, grab some penguins, and airlift them
back to the chosen spot. In said spot, they've constructed a little
corral and drilled two big holes in the ice. Outside the corral, another
hole has been drilled and the "ob tube" installed. The ob tube is a
fiberglass tube with a clear bubble on the end. The whole thing is about
15 feet long or so (the ice is nine feet thick). You climb down a
claustrophobic ladder and emerge into a serene otherworldy weirdness. There's
an incredible ambient blueish greenish glow that pervades the universe
on all sides. The bottom of the ice is made of complex, beautiful fractal
structures. The light fades slowly to black as you look down. I was told that
the water depth there was 1242 feet.

The tube is used to observe penguins diving and surfacing through the holes
provided in the corral. I was mistaken however in thinking that that was
the purpose for the camp. The scientists there implant monitoring devices
in the birds that record the levels of oxygen and nitrogen in their blood,
specifically while diving. They've found some amazing stuff. You'd think
that diving animals have incredible lung capaicty. That's not exactly true,
they just have incredibly high oxygen retention in both their blood and
muscles. Also, they've recorded heartbeats as slow as 3 per minute when
the birds are on extended dives.

At any rate, our purpose in going there was to build a new snow fence around
the edge of camp. They tend to get very drifted in when the wind blows up
and they were worried about the corral. When we got there, there were four
Adelie penguins hanging out outside the corral. Adelies are smaller than
emperors, and they're solid black and white (no color on the breast).
These birds had apparently shown up the night before (walked in from who knows where). We watched and
photoed them, and walked over to the corral where the emperors were. As
we were walking up, one person noticed four emperors approaching from across
the sea ice. These were penguins who hadn't been flown in, they had just walked.
The ice edge was, as I said, about 60 or 70 miles away.

Then, folks, we got to wrangle penguins. We fanned out in a semicircle around
the approaching emperors, spread our arms, and slowly hearded them into
the corral. A couple of times, they would drop to their bellies and try to
escape, but the scientists were not above pouncing and wrestling them back
into line. As these new birds were approaching, all of the ones in the corral
had moved to their side of the fencing. They started talking to the newcomers.
There's no other way to describe it. Also at this point, the adelies came up
and joined the conversation, before running away. Runing adelies is probably
one of the most heartbreakingly adorable sights I've ever seen. It very
much seemed as if the penguins in the corral were saying "run away"
to the newcomers. It was fascinating.

After all that, we got to work building the fences. A dozer had come by
earlier and plowed up a berm around the camp. We drilled holes in this
with a couple of ice augers and planted bamboo and two-by-fours. Across
this we ran fencing material, attached with zip ties. The whole fence
building job only took about two hours, so we got to spend the rest of
the day hanging out with the penguins. A better day off I could not have
asked for, and it was a work day. There were only six of us on the trip,
so I feel very fortunate to have been selected to go.


penguin ranch photos

Quickly, here's some more photos for y'all. Halloween, midnight sun, scott base, my work place, some other stuff.

Click the picture at right to see them.