Trav's Travels: New Jobs in Antarctica

McM Week 1

21-Oct to 28 Oct.

This year at McM I made a position change. I gave up being an assistant supervisor of laboratory operations to become an environmental specialist. I’m excited for the change. Although I’ll miss all the people in Crary, I believe this job will give me the chance to get out in the field more, so I’m excited about that. My friend Spring is the environmental specialist lead and a gal named Laura is my supervisor. We all share an office together, and they are both hilarious and super nice. So there’s lots and lots of laughter! I really like them both a lot. Spring was one of my supervisors at shuttles back in 2011-12, and she helped me get the job at summit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she helped me get this job. I can tell (and Spring tells me) that Laura will be a great boss. Elisha also has a job change this year. She’s working in Carp supply instead of crary supply.

The first week was a lot of trainings: lab safety, snowmobile, pisten bully (snow cat), mattracks (a truck with snowcat tracks instead of wheels), etc. We had a couple of days that were truly Antarctic like. Super windy and low visibility. We had one day where the 3 of us walked through town to a training and all of a sudden all the buildings disappeared from view behind a white curtain of blowing snow. During the training when we walked out to do a walk around of the mattrack, a few people were blown over to the ground! I had trouble walking against the wind. A bit later while we were driving in the pisten bully, as we were driving with the wind, snow chunks and rocks were blowing past us from the wind, blowing faster than we were driving. At one point a rock came straight at us and smashed into the windshield. One of the girls ducked as it came right at us, before it smashed into the windshield, so we all laughed.

We've slowly been getting back into town activities. Elisha had some various get togethers at Hut 10 with friends she met while in NZ and an arts and crafts group. We also went to a very good open mic night.

We had a pretty chill weekend. Watched some football, worked on my paper, and went to a Czech Republic independence day party with pizza and cake that our friend Amy threw for one of her teammates who is from the Czech Republic.

If you’re curious about what my new job entails, here is the official line:

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (The Protocol) and the Antarctic Conservation Act (ACA) as amended, 16 U.S.C. 2401, et seq. form the backbone of the Antarctic Support Contract (ASC) Environmental Work Plan actions.

Environmental stewardship includes providing environmental education to all deploying personnel, monitoring human impacts on the environment, reviewing selected field activities for compliance with environmental impact assessments, and contributing to oil spill response and reporting activities.

So under environmental stewardship, we also deal with: Waste management, spill prevention and pollutant handling, non-native species monitoring, remediation of impacted sites. And under support for NSF environmental in meeting program regulatory requirements, we do: Spill reporting, end-of-season reporting, ASPA and ASMA management, and reporting to Master Permit

Additionally we test the town’s and field camps’ drinking and wastewater. And then a bunch of other random things as I’m finding out.

Week 2

29 October

One of my duties is to do station water sampling once a month, so I learned how to do that this week. One of our other duties is to clean up and remediate spills in the environment (such as fuel or oil), but this week there was a large, 75 gallon sewage spill, so we are going to have to put on tyvek suits and go out and scoop the poop.

2 November.

Because the old airfield that they use for flights that go to and from the South Pole (Willy Field) was at risk of becoming an iceberg that calved off a glacier (the ice sheet that the airports sit on can move up to 1 foot per day), they removed the airfield this winter and built a new one several miles inland from the more temporary sea ice. So as environmental, part of the job is to go remove anything left so that it doesn't eventually end up in the ocean. So I went out with the airfields manager in a mattrack and used a sawzall to cut out all of the bamboo runway markers. It was a lot of fun being out their on the ice shelf sawing away with power tools. It's also so beautiful out there and such a cool feeling being on this huge, empty expanse of ice that is surrounded by distant mountains and frozen islands.

A letter we got from the Hazardous Waste lead thanking us for helping with the sewage spill:

To the Sewage Spill Team of November 2018,

It’s not in the dictionary, but for me a hero is someone willing to put on a Tyvek suit and shovel frozen sewage and still be smiling (most of the time). You all represent the very best part of the McMurdo community. It pushes the definition of “other duties as required”, but we got the job done together.

You all made McMurdo better last week (except for the awful poo-puns, but whatever it takes…).

Thank you so much for your time and your muscles and your positive attitudes.

~Clair