12/2/19
This morning at 6:30 am a handful of us loaded up into a Delta for the trip to Williams Airfield in order to fly out to the South Pole. When we got there, we hung out at the airfield galley for a while before we learned that the flight was cancelled. When we got back to McMurdo, they told us to keep an eye on the flight boards. We were put as a backup mission to WAIS (West Anitarctic Ice Sheet) divide at 3:30pm. 3:30 came and they delayed the WAIS flight another 2 hours. Then at 5pm, we heard we were supposed to transport at 5:30 back to Willy Field. I quickly scarfed down a dinner and got my stuff and headed to transport. We boarded the delta again for the hour trip out to the airfield. We then sat in the galley for what felt like ages before boarding the plane at about 10:30pm. It's a 3 hour flight, and we landed at the South Pole at 1:30am. The flight was on an LC-130 Hercules, which isn't the most comfortable airplane around, but most people tried to sleep. I maybe slept a little at the end, once we were flying over the flat white, but before then I stood at the back window (LC-130's have only a couple windows) to look down at the mountains, nunataks, and sparkling glaciers. Some of the biggest glaciers I have ever seen in my life!
We had our arrival brief and then a bit after 2 am, we were given our linens and rooms.
12/3/19
We had a free day in order to recuperate after the late flight, but more so as a day to acclimatize. Since the South Pole sits at 9301 ft high (on top of 2 miles of ice), but often has a pressure altitude equivalent of nearly 10,000 feet, it is best to avoid much work the first day in order to attempt to limit your chance of getting altitude sickness or even works, HAPE or HACE.
Marci my co-worker in environmental was supposed to be with me, but she was getting over being sick from the McMurdo crud, so she stayed back and instead I took with me Margee from Haz Waste. Margee is pretty cool. She's a flight nurse in Northern Nevada and went to college at Western Washington in Bellingham where my brother went.
12/4/19-12/7/19
Our main mission at Pole was to work on the SPRI (South Pole Retro Initiative) project, which is basically removing tons of stuff from the station re-build that never was taken out and instead stored in berms, which are now buried under over 10 feet of snow. So a heavy equipment operator digs out the big amounts of snow and then we dig out the rest so that a skidsteer with a forklift can take the boxes and crates out. There is all kinds of things in the berms from parts for telescopes to generators to giant insulated doors to giant nuts and bolts to insulation to light fixtures to cabinets. You name it. Besides the digging we do lots of banding, tri-wall building, organization, and sorting. It's pretty tough and physical work, especially at altitude and with so much clothes on. It's been cold by most standards (about -15F to -30F ambient and -30 to -45F with windchill); however, it's been sunny with low wind, so actually while you're digging you can feel quite hot, and several times I took of my big red jacket to shovel just in my light layers. Last year was so cold and stormy and miserable, but this year quite beautiful weather.
The South Pole Station is cool b/c it feels like you're on a spaceship. Everything is contained in the building (an elevated building to keep above the drifting snow), so you don't need to go outside, unless you work outside. They have lounges, aerobic gym, basketball gym, band room, library, post office, store, greenhouse, and medical. The floors are all cleaned by little robots that vacuum along the halls. Everyone lives in very tiny single rooms with a bed, dresser, and desk, and about 6 feet by 3.5 feet of floor space. My room had 2 windows which overlook the station grounds and the skiway.
Compared to McMurdo, the internet is quite fast b/c there are so few people and there are internet ports in each room. However, the internet only is reliable for about 5 hours while the satellites are overhead. While I was here that period started at 7pm to 12am but migrated slowly forward so that towards the end of my stay it started at 6:30pm.
There is less variety with the food, but it's probably better quality than McMurdo because they're only cooking for a small amount of people. And one of the best parts about the south pole is that they have real icecream! (mcmurdo does not). And t hey have 3 rotating flavors, which are usually good (fudge tracks, cookies n cream, chocolate chip, pistachio almond, and rocky road).
Our work out in the berms (aka bermaggedon aka bermingman) is tough physical work, but I've still been able to participate in many of the after work activities including volleyball, basketball, and other random things. There's a waste technician here who is also Travis G. He has been coming to Antarctica ever since Elisha and I first did, and we have always had a "Travis G" bond. The galley staff was hosting a beerlympics, and he asked me to be on his team for beer pong, so I joined up with him one night as team Travii.
I toured all of the major science facilities last year, so this year I didn't tour them all (I didn't make it out to the south pole telescope or IceCube (run by the University of Wisconsin) ) but I did take a tour of ARO and the bicep telescope. I also went to the south pole traverse (SPoT) open house as the tractor traverse from McMurdo arrived only several hours after we did, but of course their journey took nearly a month. ARO is cool b/c it's the equivalent of TAWO at Summit Station in Greenland where I worked as a NOAA technician. ARO and TAWO are of course two of NOAA's long-term observatories studying the atmosphere and climate around the globe and are some of the key sites that have noted the significant trend in rising CO2 levels and also the decline of CFCs (and thus decrease in the Ozone hole) after the Montreal Protocol which banned CFCs as refrigerants. I've always thought it was really cool to be part of that! The bicep telescope (and the south pole telescope) are super powerful! They are so powerful they are only looking at a portion of the sky the size of how much a full moon takes up of the sky with our eyes. Within just that small portion of the sky, they will find as many as 50 billion galaxies! And they would also be able to detect a hot cup of coffee on the moon (if there was such a thing). The telescopes are being used to look at photons racing off into space that were created during the big bang (roughly 14 billion years ago) in order to study the origins of the universe, so in essence, they are looking back into time as they are able to catch up with such old photons.
One of my favorite tours is of the ice tunnels. These are 1/2 mile long tunnels (like mine tunnels) carved into the ice to let pipes go to and from the rodwells. The rodwells are where the station gets their water and the empty rodwells is where the station puts their waste water and grey water. Basically, they melt water in the glacial ice and create these huge bulbous wells. I'm not sure the whole process behind it, but they melt ice from the inside out so that the bulb keeps expanding with more melted ice. Eventually I guess the bulb gets to big to keep melting, so they use up the remaining water and then you have this huge void in the ice. When this happens, they use the empty bulb to put the waste water in.
Based on the depth of where the ice is melting, you can tell what year the ice came from and thus from what year you're drinking water. As the ice here is over 2 miles thick, the very bottom of the ice is millions of years old. But right now we're drinking water from 400 AD. Not quite Jesus water, but close. There are glaciers near McMurdo where the ice is older than year zero, so if you put that ice in your drinks, it's called "Ice Before Christ"
Anyways, the tunnels connect pipes to these rodwells. It's really cold down there (-58F), so you get cool ice build up where your breath comes out. People have also put up all sorts of "shrines" by carving shelves into the ice. There's a giant mawsonii fish, a giant sturgeon, and the last bucket of vanilla icecream from winter 2008 (there is a back story to this b/c the people had an uprising against the kitchen b/c they believe the kitchen was hiding the vanilla). My favorite is that when astronaut buzz aldrin was here (he wasn't supposed to come to the station but got really sick and the USAP rescued him as he was on some tourist trip), one of the janos grabbed a kleenex he put in the trash and made a shrine for Buzz Aldrin down in the tunnels with the title "space germs".
12/7-12/8
It's the weekend! After my workout, I joined a team for trivia. Going into the last round we were in 2nd to last, but the last round was worth double the points, and we did well and ended up becoming South Pole trivia champions!
On Sunday we had Mexican brunch. Brunch is a big deal here just like in McMurdo. I enjoyed some egg and carnitas burritos and mexican chocolate waffle. They also had smoked salmon and other yummy things. And they had bloody mary mix (you have to provide your own vodka).
After the brunch I xc skied 8 miles on basically all of the roads of station that go out to the various research facilities. I also skied "around the world" which is basically going in a circle around the pole, meaning that you skied all of the longitude lines
12/9-12/11
Monday I did water sampling and over 24 hours from Monday through Tuesday morning I did wastewater sampling. During wastewater I dip this little cup (attached to a pole) into the wastewater drain to get 4 composite samples. It's pretty gross and smelly, but I wear a tyvek suit, 2 layers of gloves, and face shield, so it's not too bad.
I was supposed to be leaving the Pole on Wednesday, but it looked like bad weather was coming to the Pole, so I asked if I could hop on the Tuesday flight. No problem there, except that the flight didn't come b/c of bad weather in McMurdo. Elisha has been saying that McMurdo has been getting quite a lot of snow! We haven't had a flight make it to Pole in over a week. Basically, I arrived Tuesday morning at 2am and a couple flights came in Tuesday afternoon, but there hasn't been a flight since then.
As I said Wednesday was my scheduled flight, but despite good weather here in the end, McMurdo still had bad weather, so no flight came, so I went back out and worked in the berms. For fun after my workout, I attended a hootenanny that was really amazing. There were guitar players, a banjo, a mandalin, a violin, and a hand drum. I just sat and listened, but it was pretty sweet.
Then I went to the library for a podcast and puzzle where people work on a jigsaw puzzle while they listen to a historical podcast.
Today, was also a scare with Elisha. She had some weird heart rhythms and had to get an EKG and there was talk of being sent to Christchurch. It was hard b/c I found out around 7:30am and the internet went out at about 7:45 which means no more updates (no email, no phone calls, etc), so I was stressed all day. Luckily Margee the flight nurse, told me more about it and not to worry too much.
Tonight we were a backup flight to WAIS divide that would be leaving McM at 11pm, arriving to Pole at 2am, leaving Pole at 3am, getting back to Willy field at 6am and to McM at 7am (just in time for work!). So we all stayed up past 11, but never heard anything about whether they activated our mission or not or whether they flew to WAIS. As I mentioned, communication to the Pole isn't great. In the end it didn't end up coming
12/12/19
A flight for us finally took off and headed our way, despite iffy weather in McM. Part of this was because it had DVs (Distinguished Visitors--Heads of the NSF, Polar Programs, and some Air Force big wigs) on the flight, so we weren't a backup to anyone. In the morning I did my last bouts of water sampling, cleaned my room and such, but we had time to play some fun games as a group before the plane arrived. I also managed to cram a bunch of cookies n cream ice cream into my thermos mug to bring to Elisha. The flight was super crowded b/c of all the delays so we were zippered in and not able to walk about to look out the few windos.
I arrived to McM just in time for dinner. McMurdo felt so tropical! Compared to Pole, McMurdo is quite warm and humid and full of dense oxygen and air!
j
This morning at 6:30 am a handful of us loaded up into a Delta for the trip to Williams Airfield in order to fly out to the South Pole. When we got there, we hung out at the airfield galley for a while before we learned that the flight was cancelled. When we got back to McMurdo, they told us to keep an eye on the flight boards. We were put as a backup mission to WAIS (West Anitarctic Ice Sheet) divide at 3:30pm. 3:30 came and they delayed the WAIS flight another 2 hours. Then at 5pm, we heard we were supposed to transport at 5:30 back to Willy Field. I quickly scarfed down a dinner and got my stuff and headed to transport. We boarded the delta again for the hour trip out to the airfield. We then sat in the galley for what felt like ages before boarding the plane at about 10:30pm. It's a 3 hour flight, and we landed at the South Pole at 1:30am. The flight was on an LC-130 Hercules, which isn't the most comfortable airplane around, but most people tried to sleep. I maybe slept a little at the end, once we were flying over the flat white, but before then I stood at the back window (LC-130's have only a couple windows) to look down at the mountains, nunataks, and sparkling glaciers. Some of the biggest glaciers I have ever seen in my life!
We had our arrival brief and then a bit after 2 am, we were given our linens and rooms.
12/3/19
We had a free day in order to recuperate after the late flight, but more so as a day to acclimatize. Since the South Pole sits at 9301 ft high (on top of 2 miles of ice), but often has a pressure altitude equivalent of nearly 10,000 feet, it is best to avoid much work the first day in order to attempt to limit your chance of getting altitude sickness or even works, HAPE or HACE.
Marci my co-worker in environmental was supposed to be with me, but she was getting over being sick from the McMurdo crud, so she stayed back and instead I took with me Margee from Haz Waste. Margee is pretty cool. She's a flight nurse in Northern Nevada and went to college at Western Washington in Bellingham where my brother went.
12/4/19-12/7/19
Our main mission at Pole was to work on the SPRI (South Pole Retro Initiative) project, which is basically removing tons of stuff from the station re-build that never was taken out and instead stored in berms, which are now buried under over 10 feet of snow. So a heavy equipment operator digs out the big amounts of snow and then we dig out the rest so that a skidsteer with a forklift can take the boxes and crates out. There is all kinds of things in the berms from parts for telescopes to generators to giant insulated doors to giant nuts and bolts to insulation to light fixtures to cabinets. You name it. Besides the digging we do lots of banding, tri-wall building, organization, and sorting. It's pretty tough and physical work, especially at altitude and with so much clothes on. It's been cold by most standards (about -15F to -30F ambient and -30 to -45F with windchill); however, it's been sunny with low wind, so actually while you're digging you can feel quite hot, and several times I took of my big red jacket to shovel just in my light layers. Last year was so cold and stormy and miserable, but this year quite beautiful weather.
The South Pole Station is cool b/c it feels like you're on a spaceship. Everything is contained in the building (an elevated building to keep above the drifting snow), so you don't need to go outside, unless you work outside. They have lounges, aerobic gym, basketball gym, band room, library, post office, store, greenhouse, and medical. The floors are all cleaned by little robots that vacuum along the halls. Everyone lives in very tiny single rooms with a bed, dresser, and desk, and about 6 feet by 3.5 feet of floor space. My room had 2 windows which overlook the station grounds and the skiway.
Compared to McMurdo, the internet is quite fast b/c there are so few people and there are internet ports in each room. However, the internet only is reliable for about 5 hours while the satellites are overhead. While I was here that period started at 7pm to 12am but migrated slowly forward so that towards the end of my stay it started at 6:30pm.
There is less variety with the food, but it's probably better quality than McMurdo because they're only cooking for a small amount of people. And one of the best parts about the south pole is that they have real icecream! (mcmurdo does not). And t hey have 3 rotating flavors, which are usually good (fudge tracks, cookies n cream, chocolate chip, pistachio almond, and rocky road).
Our work out in the berms (aka bermaggedon aka bermingman) is tough physical work, but I've still been able to participate in many of the after work activities including volleyball, basketball, and other random things. There's a waste technician here who is also Travis G. He has been coming to Antarctica ever since Elisha and I first did, and we have always had a "Travis G" bond. The galley staff was hosting a beerlympics, and he asked me to be on his team for beer pong, so I joined up with him one night as team Travii.
I toured all of the major science facilities last year, so this year I didn't tour them all (I didn't make it out to the south pole telescope or IceCube (run by the University of Wisconsin) ) but I did take a tour of ARO and the bicep telescope. I also went to the south pole traverse (SPoT) open house as the tractor traverse from McMurdo arrived only several hours after we did, but of course their journey took nearly a month. ARO is cool b/c it's the equivalent of TAWO at Summit Station in Greenland where I worked as a NOAA technician. ARO and TAWO are of course two of NOAA's long-term observatories studying the atmosphere and climate around the globe and are some of the key sites that have noted the significant trend in rising CO2 levels and also the decline of CFCs (and thus decrease in the Ozone hole) after the Montreal Protocol which banned CFCs as refrigerants. I've always thought it was really cool to be part of that! The bicep telescope (and the south pole telescope) are super powerful! They are so powerful they are only looking at a portion of the sky the size of how much a full moon takes up of the sky with our eyes. Within just that small portion of the sky, they will find as many as 50 billion galaxies! And they would also be able to detect a hot cup of coffee on the moon (if there was such a thing). The telescopes are being used to look at photons racing off into space that were created during the big bang (roughly 14 billion years ago) in order to study the origins of the universe, so in essence, they are looking back into time as they are able to catch up with such old photons.
One of my favorite tours is of the ice tunnels. These are 1/2 mile long tunnels (like mine tunnels) carved into the ice to let pipes go to and from the rodwells. The rodwells are where the station gets their water and the empty rodwells is where the station puts their waste water and grey water. Basically, they melt water in the glacial ice and create these huge bulbous wells. I'm not sure the whole process behind it, but they melt ice from the inside out so that the bulb keeps expanding with more melted ice. Eventually I guess the bulb gets to big to keep melting, so they use up the remaining water and then you have this huge void in the ice. When this happens, they use the empty bulb to put the waste water in.
Based on the depth of where the ice is melting, you can tell what year the ice came from and thus from what year you're drinking water. As the ice here is over 2 miles thick, the very bottom of the ice is millions of years old. But right now we're drinking water from 400 AD. Not quite Jesus water, but close. There are glaciers near McMurdo where the ice is older than year zero, so if you put that ice in your drinks, it's called "Ice Before Christ"
Anyways, the tunnels connect pipes to these rodwells. It's really cold down there (-58F), so you get cool ice build up where your breath comes out. People have also put up all sorts of "shrines" by carving shelves into the ice. There's a giant mawsonii fish, a giant sturgeon, and the last bucket of vanilla icecream from winter 2008 (there is a back story to this b/c the people had an uprising against the kitchen b/c they believe the kitchen was hiding the vanilla). My favorite is that when astronaut buzz aldrin was here (he wasn't supposed to come to the station but got really sick and the USAP rescued him as he was on some tourist trip), one of the janos grabbed a kleenex he put in the trash and made a shrine for Buzz Aldrin down in the tunnels with the title "space germs".
12/7-12/8
It's the weekend! After my workout, I joined a team for trivia. Going into the last round we were in 2nd to last, but the last round was worth double the points, and we did well and ended up becoming South Pole trivia champions!
On Sunday we had Mexican brunch. Brunch is a big deal here just like in McMurdo. I enjoyed some egg and carnitas burritos and mexican chocolate waffle. They also had smoked salmon and other yummy things. And they had bloody mary mix (you have to provide your own vodka).
After the brunch I xc skied 8 miles on basically all of the roads of station that go out to the various research facilities. I also skied "around the world" which is basically going in a circle around the pole, meaning that you skied all of the longitude lines
12/9-12/11
Monday I did water sampling and over 24 hours from Monday through Tuesday morning I did wastewater sampling. During wastewater I dip this little cup (attached to a pole) into the wastewater drain to get 4 composite samples. It's pretty gross and smelly, but I wear a tyvek suit, 2 layers of gloves, and face shield, so it's not too bad.
I was supposed to be leaving the Pole on Wednesday, but it looked like bad weather was coming to the Pole, so I asked if I could hop on the Tuesday flight. No problem there, except that the flight didn't come b/c of bad weather in McMurdo. Elisha has been saying that McMurdo has been getting quite a lot of snow! We haven't had a flight make it to Pole in over a week. Basically, I arrived Tuesday morning at 2am and a couple flights came in Tuesday afternoon, but there hasn't been a flight since then.
As I said Wednesday was my scheduled flight, but despite good weather here in the end, McMurdo still had bad weather, so no flight came, so I went back out and worked in the berms. For fun after my workout, I attended a hootenanny that was really amazing. There were guitar players, a banjo, a mandalin, a violin, and a hand drum. I just sat and listened, but it was pretty sweet.
hoot·en·an·ny
/ˈho͞otnˌanē/
noun
INFORMAL•US
- an informal gathering with folk music and sometimes dancing.
Today, was also a scare with Elisha. She had some weird heart rhythms and had to get an EKG and there was talk of being sent to Christchurch. It was hard b/c I found out around 7:30am and the internet went out at about 7:45 which means no more updates (no email, no phone calls, etc), so I was stressed all day. Luckily Margee the flight nurse, told me more about it and not to worry too much.
Tonight we were a backup flight to WAIS divide that would be leaving McM at 11pm, arriving to Pole at 2am, leaving Pole at 3am, getting back to Willy field at 6am and to McM at 7am (just in time for work!). So we all stayed up past 11, but never heard anything about whether they activated our mission or not or whether they flew to WAIS. As I mentioned, communication to the Pole isn't great. In the end it didn't end up coming
12/12/19
A flight for us finally took off and headed our way, despite iffy weather in McM. Part of this was because it had DVs (Distinguished Visitors--Heads of the NSF, Polar Programs, and some Air Force big wigs) on the flight, so we weren't a backup to anyone. In the morning I did my last bouts of water sampling, cleaned my room and such, but we had time to play some fun games as a group before the plane arrived. I also managed to cram a bunch of cookies n cream ice cream into my thermos mug to bring to Elisha. The flight was super crowded b/c of all the delays so we were zippered in and not able to walk about to look out the few windos.
I arrived to McM just in time for dinner. McMurdo felt so tropical! Compared to Pole, McMurdo is quite warm and humid and full of dense oxygen and air!
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| I wrote the "waste of time" anon and the "he's an embarrassment to our good name" Travis Groh and I are Travis G buddies |
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| ice cream at the south pole |
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| flight into the Pole |
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| Santa's helper at the pole |
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| view out my room window |
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| my room |
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| my room |
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| my room in dark mode |
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| at the bottom of the world |
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| sastrugi on my ski |
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| out skiing |
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| south pole telescope |
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| ARO |
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| berming man shrine in the tunnels |
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| buzz aldrin shrine in the tunnels |
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| ice tunnels |
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| our warming hut |
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| the SPRI berm project I'm working on |
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| Margee with a cargo strap |
j
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| Graphic of when we have satellites over the Pole, and thus internet. The blue satellite is pretty fast and gives us good internet, the green one is terrible is at most lets you send email through USAP outlook email. The yellow is good enough to usually open gmail, but that's it. |
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| usual temperature during our time at Pole |
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