Trav's Travels: November 2017

11/22

Yesterday was an incredibly beautiful day, so Elisha and I hiked up to the top of Ob Hill and then did the cool hike around ob hill. It's snowed a lot here recently, which is fairly unusual. The last storms brought in over a foot of snow. So the hike had a lot of snow and some drifts past the knee. After the hike we stopped by the big gym where they were having a tug-o-war as part of the Governeror's cup between the USA and NZ. The American girls won, but the men lost. In between matches, there was a fun performance by the McM dance team who do hip hop type dancing similar to what they do at basketball games, except it's both men and women. They're always fun to watch.

Some interesting groups here right now. We just received a bunch of scientists who will be heading out to the Shackleton Glacier camp. One of the groups, from the University of Washington, is searching for fossils from the Triassic period, which means they will be looking for vertebrate fossils, including dinosaurs. Another group is looking for Permian fossils, which will just be plants.

Another group, funded by NASA, who has been here for a while, is starting to launch their cool little submarine robot. They will use it to go under areas such as the Ross Ice Shelf and the Erebus glacial tongue to make various water measurements to characterize the environment and to also search for life in those remote areas. Eventually they hope to use this robot to send to other bodies in the solar system to look for life, such as Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons), which is covered by ice, like Antarctica.

I’ve pasted in a description of their project b/c it’s pretty cool:

Over the next three field seasons, the Ross Ice Shelf and Europa Underwater Probe (RISEUP) researchers will seek to improve understanding of the environments below ice shelves and sea ice. The science team will use the purpose-built Georgia Institute of Technology hybrid remotely operated vehicle-autonomous underwater vehicle (ROV-AUV) submersible vehicle 'Icefin' to search in-situ for biological communities, map the ice and seafloor, and understand ocean water structure and currents. Through improved constraint of terrestrial ice/ocean cryosphere processes, this project will enhance the science team’s understanding of the evolution of other ocean world environments in our solar system (e.g. Europa’s ice shell), which are prime targets in NASA’s search for life. This project aims to continue chasing the limits of life on Earth while developing techniques for future exploration of other planets or moons.

11/23
Thanksgiving Day in McMurdo

I was sick today. Not terribly sick. I could have gone to work, but decided to stay home to rest for the big weekend up ahead. It was nice to rest b/c it allowed me to make some phone calls home. After work, the dive shack (Rob and Steve, the ASC divers) hosted a movie night just like we used to do the last time we were here. People bring different sorts of alcohol to make drinks that we then add glacial ice to. It's kind of cool b/c the glacial ice can be nearly a million years old. Instead of watching a movie we watched the CNN Anthony Bourdain show that was filmed here. That's always fun to see the people we know and the places we are familiar with. Marci, the 3rd lab assistant this year, was in it quite a lot b/c she was living in the dry valleys last year.

After the movie, we headed up to the galley where they were hosting the 3rd annual McMurdo Museum. It was really cool. The various work centers have kept a hold of old items and momentos from times past here, so they put them all together in the galley, serve wine, cheese, and cookies, and do a museum night out of it. One of my favorites, that was more of a joke, were the janitors who had old pictures of some of the early explorers here (like shackleton and scott), and they had captions like "1779, first person to pee in Antarctica" "1891, General Byrd winters over by himeself and becomes the first person to clean up after themselves in Antarctica"

It continues to snow here. It's very unusual how much snow we've been getting. Very beautiful, but very strange for a desert. I'm curious to see if we've broken some precipitation record for November this year. Normally by now the town is completely dust and dirt, but now it's all white.

11/24
Another sick day, though I managed to go to work for the morning until lunch.

11/25

Celebrated Thanksgiving Day in McM

I woke up still feeling sick, but decided to run the turkey trot anyways. I was a bit bummed b/c I had been training pretty hard for it, and I felt in good shape, so I wanted to go out and run it hard. I did still run it pretty hard, but not as fast as if I'd been feeling good. I ended up running 22:10 for the 5k, which is pretty good as the first half of the race is a huge hill on snowy and icy roads. I figure on a flat course in good conditions, I could have broken 20 minutes, which I've only done a couple of times before in my life. The night before had been a wild blizzard, but we had clear skies, 19F, and no wind for the race, so everyone was sweating. Elisha ran the race with 2 of the seal researchers and they did it more for a fun, chat pace. I ended up getting 9th overall, 7th among guys, and 6th among American guys. Elisha finished somewhere in the 70's out of about 130 runners. I think I was the fastest person over 30 years old and as our Research Assistant (Neal) said, Elisha no girl taller than Elisha finished ahead of her. Neal is 6'6" and he was also proud that no one taller than him finished ahead of him.

The girl that won is a grantee from the Colorado School of Mines. She's an All-american in cross country as well as the 3k in track and field and finished 13th in the nation in D2 at the women's cross country national national championship (6K is what they run for that).

During the race, one of the gals from Waste played inspiring trumpet music (like theme to rocky and various John Willimas themes) from several spots, including the first hill, which was really cool.

After the the race, we went with some fellow runners to daybar for a drink, then we hiked out to hut point and then onto the hut ridge loop. The weather was so absolutely beautiful. The first nice weekend day we'd had! We sat out at hut point for a long time. The rocks were warm from the sun, and the sun felt hot on the face. We watched the seals who were busy making breathing holes in the ice with their teeth as well as one mom and pup cuddling.

After our hike, we walked around the McM carp yard b/c Elisha wanted to take some photos of the cute and various living spaces they have. I then did some of the lab checks I needed to do, and we went and got ready for dinner. I decided to shave my beard to surprise Elisha (I grow a crummy beard, and I don't think she likes it), though I left my moustache as a joke for a couple of days. Funny is that Neal also surprised us all that night by shaving his beard off. His ladyfriend Clare (who runs haz waste here) wouldn't let him keep his moustache though. But I think Elisha thought my moustache was so laughable that she wanted me to keep it for a couple days. Of course all the dudes around here are loving it.

We had the 5pm seating for dinner with most of the rest of Crary staff. It was a fun night with delicious food. The management, as a thank you, gave us free wine, which was nice. They had a great spread and told us they had prepared 900 pounds of turkey for the 890 people on station. There was honey baked ham and all the traditional turkey day things as well as pecan, pumpkin, and other pies.

After dinner, Mitch, Carolyn, Elisha, and I headed up to the BFC (Byrd Field Center, aka building full of chicks) for an invite only party. They have a really sweet upstairs hang out room, so we hung out there for a while mingling with the crowd. They provided free beverages, but I was too stuffed and hot to drink anything. Before the dancing really got going, Elisha and I ended up taking off b/c we were just so stuffed. As we walked home, the night was still glorious. The sun is so intense here mixed with absolutely no moisture in the air that even when it was 15F like last night, it's t-shirt weather when there is no wind

11/26
This was one of the few 2 day weekends we get, so it was a restful day. In the morning, our dorm 211 neighbors Elaine and Kathy threw a coffee party in the dorm lounge. They had coffee and hot cocoa as well as yummy things to add to the hot drinks such as whipped cream and baileys. They also had the mixings for bloody marys. And lots of sweet snacks as well. It was nice to hang out with the dormmates in our PJ's for the morning. B/c I have the duty pager today, I couldn't really hike. So I did some of the lab checks and just hung out, doing some computer work, brunch, reading about how good the gators are doing in bball, etc.

After dinner we went to the science talk given by the NASA group. It was super interesting and the PI is a good speaker. There were also cool NASA graphics in the presentation. It's cool to be helping out a group with people who are astrobiologists and who are also helping to build robots that will one day be used elsewhere in the solar system as well as who are smart enough to also be helping with the orbit mechanics regarding getting the satellites up there that will have the best coverage time to communicate with the robots. After the talk we visited the ob tube again, which is always fun