Overhead and Out of Sight

2010-11-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

On the road, In the air

McMurdo Helo Ops - Best ride in town.

This is what their patches claim and I have yet to argue. I have been very fortunate this season to get a chance to travel out to several field camps in the surrounds of McMurdo. Antarctica from the air is quite an experience whether out the window of a C-17, C-130, or from the great hovering and spinning magic carpet ride that helo ops offers. I had never ridden in a helicopter before working in McMurdo, and now that I have ridden in them quite a few times, the magic never wears off. A lot of human inginuity and combustible fuel allow us to travel in the realm of storybook imagination, what was once merely creative vision is now (and has been for some time) a reality of transportation, often taken for granted from afar, but somehow endlessly captivating to be involved in.

Some of the nooks and crannies of Ross Island from high in the sky.
Lots of marine and seal grantees call these smaller islands home.

For science in Antarctica, transportation is the name of the game, and as much as any of us are carpenters, divers, dining attendants, or physicists we are dominated by the logistics of how we can do what we do while we are here. In old times expeditions were measured in years instead of months or weeks, travel by ski or dog was the norm, and the samples collected along the way literally weighed heavy on the backs of some who didn't even make it out alive.

These three folks made it out alive, but not without persisting through
enough bad weather to play 22 games of checkers.

Today we zip down here in commercial jets, with air-force support, fly around the continent in dependable (fairly) planes, and explore the nooks and crannies in a moment's notice from the helicopter.

Two trips I have taken this season brought me farther into the dry valleys than I had ever been before, and to the highest heights of the volcanic island we reside on. These trips are all taken at the beginning of the season to "Open" these sights. This involves ensuring life support (stoves, buildings) is functional, fixing problems we find with the structures, and sometimes, Lots and Lots of shoveling

Two views from the same spot on Mt. Newell. On the left the Wright Valley and Lake Vanda - fed by the Onyx Stream. On the right, a very different reality of pure glacier on the way to the antarctic plateau.

My trip to open the huts at Bull Pass and Mt. Newell took me over some beautiful areas and to the top of a mountain with a view spanning mountain ranges, the ice plateau, the Ross Ice Shelf, the open water of the southern ocean, and of course our little town down on the tip of Ross Island, in the shadow of the great Mt Erebus.

CTBT site in the foreground

Bull Pass consists of two small huts. One is for small bands of Geologists to utilize and the other is one of several CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) sites on the continent. It is a self-supporting monitoring station with it's finger to the seismic wind deep in the granite below. Along with over 100 counterparts, it helps sense possible nuclear bomb tests all over the world. Amazing! I found this website interesting when I looked to learn more about this:

www.ctbto.org

Lake Vanda and the sand dunes of the Victoria Valley which border the lake.

A fly over of lake Vida to photograph conditions for a future camp brought us into the next valley, and to the conclusion of our work for the day.

Mt Erebus puffs away silently above New Zealand's Scott Base.

At 12,500 Ft. Mt Erebus makes Ross Island the 6th tallest island in the world. That's right, we sit on a hot spot! (who would have guessed?)

With a relative altitude of 13,600 at the Lower Erebus Hut, and ~14,000 at the rim it makes for qutie an adventure to open from sea level. Around here, things are not always how they appear on your topo map, and the cold cold air in the atmosphere lowers our air pressure to the degree that it ususally adds over 1000 feet to our physiological altitude.

A blind camera shot from the back seat!; Looking down, the landscape opens up quite literally. Crevasses like this one cover the island, but many are invisible.

The first to arrive at the hut after a winter of scouring winds, sulfurous air, and the ever-present drifting snow is an adventure worth bringing a shovel for. Luckily after the helo drops you and your equiptment off, and you catch your breath from unloading all of it, you get a chance to warm up digging steps into the snow berm to allow safe passage down to door level in the -30 degree warming October weather.

The huts are drifted up to their roofs on one side, and are slowly deteriorating from the scouring wind on the other. It speaks well to the impermanence of human impact.

Ok, ok it is only COMPLETELY buried on one side.
The wind scours the other side so much we can barely keep a coat of paint on it!

The only other sign of humanity in the area is a downed ship just a bit off to one side of the area around the huts. A coast guard Helicopter that got into some trouble up here decades ago.

Opening the huts involved lots of shoveling, firing stoves, shoveling, uncovering windows, shoveling, hanging weather insturments, shoveling, getting the solar panels out of the garage, shoveling, and a healthy dose of removing drifts from inside the buildings. It is really amazing how much snow accumulates blowing through the tiniest crack you can imagine.

The area around the hut is covered in rock outcrops thick with crystals
which solidify in the rocks that spew from the cone on occasion.

Fumurols dot the landscape as well as heat from the volcano melts away at the cold desert snow. Antarctica's humidifiers!

Mt Erebus is a quite unusual volcano. Check it out here!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus

2010-10-07T00:26:00.000-07:00

Antarctia III!

My third season this year began early, and will be my longest season to date. By February, when I leave, I will have spent six months on the ice.

Winfly, as it is commonly referred to, is a series of flights arriving at McMurdo as the winter darkness is first breached by light. The flights bring folks in early to get a head start on the regular season. For the Carp Shop this means preparing buildings for scientists who work the pre-season, building the season's supply of deep field camp furnishings, and preparing for the opening of the many field camps near McMurdo.

Deploying during Winfly comes along with the amazing opportunity to watch the world go from dark to light a matter of weeks. Every day is different. The sky glows different colors for hours at midday, the sun plays off the mountains a little different every day, and the crowds are still summering at home in the Norther Hemisphere.

The French Balloon project Concordiasi, deploying a new balloon.
They were our #1 priority at Winfly this year.

I have also gotten to witness a few more Antarctic firsts since I arrived in mid August. The two most impressed upon me have been the Souther Lights and Nacreous clouds.

I got a little story to tell with the Auroras, because a lot of folks did not get to see them this winfly for one reason or another. It begins on flight day. We were postponed once the day before, but on this particular day the Air Force was chomping at the bit to get us down there. They had been weather delayed and so were on a tight schedule to their next mission. We took off and flew down to Antarctica.

The ice was beautiful as we cruised slowly into the dimming light.

As we neared McMurdo, the C-17 banked hard to the left and we were informed that we were to boomerang. This means fly all the way back to Christchurch and try again another time. This happens periodically down here as the weather is very unpredictable and there is simply no where else to land. A long trip, but just something you have to live with working down here. We got back to the airport and instead of being escorted onto busses and back to our hotels, we switched crews, got a quick bite to eat, and got right back on the plane once it was refueled. Now this is exceptional. No one had ever heard of the double turn-around and it turned a long day into a really long day of flying. In the end we were on the plane for about 14-15 hours... I think...

Landing in McMurdo, we were all glad to be anywhere we could sleep comfortably. After the 40 minute bus ride into Mactown, we were told when to report to our briefing and set loose to find our rooms and get some sleep. Our bags would be there in an hour or so, but feel free to retrieve them in the morning. My bed was already made by my excellent roommate Storm, but I ventured out to grab a quick bite to eat at the midnight rations and then figured I might as well get my bags since I was still awake.

I wandered out into the familiar cold in the direction of the terminal, and low and behold a green ribbon of light was dancing around the sky. Only faint at first, as I walked around trying to find a dark spot, the Aurora really came to life. It is hard to describe what they look like outside of a dancing green ribbon of light. Like the night is waving it's long magic green scarf in slow but strong wind. Pretty cool. I am quite fortunate to have stayed up late, because I haven't seen another since.

What I did get to see for many days consecutively were the Nacreous clouds. Rainbow colored and high in the sky these clouds occur only in high latitudes and are typically seen as the sun is quite low to the horizon. They add quite a bit of magic to a day in the shop covered in sawdust. Everyone will pause their work and wander to the windows or outside with cameras to enjoy the view.

A good description of how these clouds occur:
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/nacr1.htm

Getting late on a school night, so I will have to leave you with two photos: The first is my first HDR shot. (High Dynamic Range). The second is the first balloon launched this season. Take care!

From New Zealand to Nebraska!

2010-09-25T16:56:00.001-07:00

Sand Hill Cranes cruising to their night-time haven on the Platte River, NE

I suppose it has been a minute or two since I've written here. Write back! It encourages me to write more when I get to read too! So, here is an attempted FF catching up with my journal here... Hang on tight! Half a dozen entries all at once!

From New Zealand to Nebraska!

Angie and I left NZ together for the wide open sunsets of her home town Lincoln. Tickets in hand (expressively speaking), we realized I was leaving a day earlier - to meet Ang's parents for the first time, in a state I've never even been to before! Luckily, they are some wonderful folks and I got on with them immediately. I even ended up moving a couple hundred bails of hay before Angie even got back in the country! My first time in Nebraska – my first Runza (sandwich), my first Old Time (beer), and my first time to see the great migration of Sand Hill Cranes on the Platte River. This is an amazing migration that recurs every year in farmer's fields and river flats. Millions of birds. Everywhere. The book end of my Midwest visit included dozing with my new Nephew and running on and around a bunch of big Trains at the Transportation Museum with his big brother!

Big Boy, always a crowd pleaser, but the highlight as ever is the lady!; My nephew - clearly following in a long lineage of engineers.

Following NE, I made the pilgrimage home to family, friends and familiar places along the mid-atlantic (PA, VA, and NC). Farming, swimming, building, bicycling, and cooking and sharing food is always the highlight of my time and sharing this with the people I have known and loved the longest is the best. Keep warm and healthy this winter! I'm thinking of you!

Roadtrip!

Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming. The ten states I had not been to got whittled down to six this year. Partly through necessity, and partly for the sights, Angie and I made our way back to the summer hunting grounds of Lummi Island this year by automobile. We made stops at the world's largest hot spring, my first real live moose and buffalo, and a dinosaur my father slept under in his youth!

OK..., my father isn't that old. The dinosaur is a model; Sand Hills Beautiful

Yellowstone

On Island

Angie, Stew, and Loren keep Pig company on the beach before a day of fishing.

Ahhh. Yummi Lummi Island. Time moves so much slower on the island. 1 store, 1 speed limit (25), 1 restaurant, 1 Inn, and of course the last surviving culture of reef-net fisher-people.

Flying in the face of the Lummi pace, Angie and I began the season, with loads of help from the older fellas, setting up a gear start to finish. We hung most of a new net (a once in 25 years activity) , got the boats in the water, winches working, built the reef, and managed to do some Major repairs to a new cabin in order to move out of our tent! Craziest week in recent memory!

Here I help the Pacific Salmon Commission measure, tag, and sample a sockeye. They take readings on where each fish goes and how far upstream they make it; Another day on the fishing boat waiting... But waiting with my new wide angle lens! One of our several Bobs watches the fish TV under the sun protection of Umbrella. This is the latest and greatest Reef-net Technology!

The Sockeye Salmon run was amazing this year. The nets were heavy. The Pacific Salmon Commission increased the run estimate over and again, and some fishermen went home rich (for fishermen). In our spare time during this busy season... Angie and I bought an Airstream!

With a little love and some pruning equipment, we removed the coating of blackberry brambles and did a preliminary gutting. Next - the real deal of renovating a 1961 Airstream Camper! ()

Roger Granger gives a filleting lesson on the beach to a newbe; Angie wielding her pruners.

There she is! 28 ft long and tires still up to pressure!

All in all it was a great summer on Lummi again, although a short season for yours truly – this year I signed up for the winter flight to Antarctica – and though I pushed myself back onto the last flight, I still had to leave a couple of weeks before the season was through. Se la vie. I got to cheer on my reef-netting companions from afar as I made my way to the southern continent yet again, this time for the changing of seasons from dark to light.

Antarctic Ends / Kiwi Friends

2010-04-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

Antarctic parting
Caves, fjords, sweet corn, paua, beach camp
Sought after home coming

Rewinding the memory a couple of months brings me back to Antarctica. At this point I've written and perhaps you may have read quite a bit here on the topic of great southern continent, but come the end of the season I'm left with heaps of untold stories and events. As it should be I suppose. Thought I now find myself two months off the ice and in the landscape of Raymond Nebraska, I still can't part with at least a couple of these events here.

the view from the Lake Bonney helipad; a stroll on Lake Hoare

The dry valleys. One last trip to this amazing place yielded exactly what I was desiring - a chance to explore. The dry valleys are an amazing landscape of mountains, glaciers, ice-covered lakes and just plain dirt. Not too many places down here supply accessible dirt. Tasked with removing some temporary buildings from the quickly melting lake ice, we planned for one night camping at Lake Hoare.

beautiful though it is, the melting lake ice top can make for some treacherous trekking

Due to difficulties resulting from the unstable lake ice on lake Fryxall, we garnered an extra night out of town, some wet overalls (mostly mine) , and a chance to take a stroll up the Taylor valley with some of our down time.

The hike was amazing and something I'll never forget. Across a frozen lake, up over a defile (the terminal end of a glacier butting into a mountain) and then up a steep track to a huge bench full of some of the most interesting rocks I've ever seen.

at the edge of life and along the way: native lichen and moss

beyond the edge: an 800 year cured mummified seal in it's final resting place; atop a wind hewn sculpture

rock imitates wind

As a finale to the season, I couldn't have asked for a better trip. Back to mactown for the busy season when the ice breaks up. Combine this with the annual visit from Oden - a Swedish icebreaker - and a channel is open all the way to McMurdo, allowing for our single resupply vessel and an oil tanker to make their deliveries.

helicopter's eye view of the sea ice breaking up, soon after these several foot thick chunks will blow out to sea and either melt or refreeze into the next round of annual sea ice; oil tanker in port delivering the jet fuel that most vehicles run on.

farewell! icy continent! from the flight deck of the Australian Antarctic Airbus

hello sunset in the NZ bush!

The end of the season is long awaited and we are all glad to find sunset and decent drinks on tap waiting for us in Christchurch. This year I also found a very special woman named Angie waiting at the airport for me! All the way from Lummi Island and Nebraska, for many months we kept in close touch and decided to meet in NZ and have a holiday here together.

We bought a car and hit the road, touring the south island, first beach hopping all the way down the east coast with a surfing finale in the Catlins. An amazing time relaxing and learning to surf. I rode waves more often than i went into the drink (Maytag-ed), and narrowly escaped the killer surfing sea lions (best surfers I've ever seen) at curio bay.

castle hill - a great place to walk hang your jaw out at some amazing rocks and maybe even scramble around climbing them!; trees imitate wind

Myself, Angie, and Phil. We were a traveling trio. Phil, a great friend and my roommate in McMurdo, provided and enabled all surfing activity. thanks Phil! ; Parakanui bay, where the surfing began for me under huge cliffs, surrounded by bush, kelp and even a few endangered yellow-eyed penguins.

Paua - a great New-Zealand native shellfish, traditionally shredded and fried, we sauteed them gently over our camp stove at Parakanui bay

The beach party ended with a rash of Sea Lion interruptions and friends headed homeward. Angie and I decided to head up to Fiordland National Park and then on to central Otago to visit another friend on the way to the west coast.

West Coast beach art - thousands of kirin and loads of driftwood sculpture - a truly amazing scene by the side of the road, easily an entire kilometer packed to the gills; the Hokitika Wild Foods Festival, and the answer is yes with ample imbibables

Hayden and myself just after he tried to kill me by letting ride his "custom" motorbike.

Finally in our story of traveling New Zealand, there is the Mapp family. My friend Hayden worked down on the ice with me as a deep field mechanic. In our time in New Zealand we managed to meet his entire extended family. In addition to his wife Jane and two boys, Angie and I stayed with his folks Lloyd and Val on their sheep farm in Marlbourough, visited with his brother on his 5000 acre high-country station, and spent a couple of days getting back in touch with urban living with his sister in Wellington. All in all the family really imprinted in me a sense of some real kiwis making their country what it is everyday. Reaching back only three generations, they have as close a connection with the settling of the young country as anyone. Together they are involved in sheep, cattle, and deer farming; eco-tourism; back country guiding; and the art and housing markets. From the hippest city to far off and rough valleys, they were able and excited to show us a great deal of what New Zealand has to offer in culture, place, and politics. Thank you Mapps!

Lloyd and myself on Mt Patriarch; family lorakeet who occasionally came inside for breakfast on a shoulder!

the bird really loved Angie's hair; on top of Mt. Patricarch

Sunday drives are a bit different in in the hill country. Try as he might, Lloyd only just missed getting the truck's clinometer up to 40 degrees incline - this is just how they drive in the back country here: don't wear your seatbelt because it might get in the way if you need to eject quickly!

Aukland - a city comprising an entire quarter of the population of NZ. And home for one night before the longest flight I hope to ever subject myself to. Atop a volcano in the middle of the city, a wonderful way to end a trip arm in arm with an amazing traveler and my love, Angie.

Back in Mactown

2010-01-18T00:43:00.000-08:00

Ok, ok this is wishful thinking. I took this shot back in October when the sun wasn't in such a high horizon all the time. Re-entering the world that is McMurdo was an amazing experience just the same. Landing at the permanent runway (the sea ice had gotten too thin to land on), again we get to greet the amazing view that is Ross Island with it's two large volcanoes, Mt. Discovery, an old inactive volcano and the range of mountains that no picture I have ever taken does justice to: The Royal Societies.

Back in the Carp shop, warm greetings make the experience come close to family. We've all been out at various camps and slowly we all trickle back in, and then back out again to close said camps. Morning meeting includes updates on our folks in the field and their trials and tribulations getting airplanes to land and bring them home.

Being in Mactown means a lot of different things for me. It means I will miss the wonderful cooks and other folks out at Byrd, as well as the space and the quiet that can be had few if any other places. It also means I can go to yoga class, go on hikes with friends, meet and greet the resident wildlife,

Adelie penguins and their footprints!

attend the annual art show, make my way back to other closer camps, and when inspired work in what is probably the nicest shop i've ever worked in. We have a very well set up shop full of all the necessary tools and plenty of scrap material laying around to satisfy the creative bug in all of us. Lately we've been using not only some hardwood, but also a great deal of old Jamesway tent arches and the ever present plywood. You would be amazed at what some folks make with plywood. Here are a few projects I've been working on.

It all started with a piece of graph paper and some scraps...

A little glue, patience, chisels, mineral oil and a lathe, and it's done!

Cherry pestle with maple/cherry/walnut mortar.

Some interesting ideas about how to stack scraps...

Turned out way cooler than I could have guessed! It's a bit on the small side, but I think this pin will roll well just the same!.

One of my longest standing projects. It has looked like a hundred different things, but finally I think this table is in it's final shape at the very least. Half sculpture on the wall, folding down to a small table. Detail still being worked out! This is made of old Jamesway arch.

Plywood bowl! Cut, built, and turned. Awaiting some finishing touches.

Coffee Table I am also working on. Also Jamesway arches.

I seem to have more inspiration than time, so unfortunately I am currently working on seven projects! Here's hoping they all make it out! I gotta go!

Byrd and beyond!

2010-01-07T23:45:00.000-08:00

Time to write!
But no time to write!

It's amazing how chock full your schedule can get anywhere, even in Antarctica. When I'm not working - I work 54 hours a week - I seem to busy myself with a million things, which means I'm not as punctual with writing about them here... I've been out to Byrd and back since I last wrote and I want to tell all about it. So here it is.

A sign left over from the 1997 "final" closeout!

Byrd is the word! This is a "new" camp in the deep field this year. New because it has been funded by the current US administration as a stimulating force in the world. Is it ever! New is a loose term the way I am using it however.

Arriving at the site just 6 weeks ago, at a point roughly between Mcmurdo and the Antarctic Penninsula, the camp managers are greeted with a little white spot on a gigantic white canvas. Guided by only satellites talking to their GPS devices, they find themselves next to a large mound. A hill really. But not too big.

This is an anomaly on the Western Antarctic Plateau, where grade is more of a sense you get if you look at the horizon really carefully and for extended lengths of time. Like one of those magic eye puzzles! next to the hill there were hundreds of little bamboo posts holding flags a scant couple of inches off the ground in the shape of an airstrip.

Coming to Byrd a couple of weeks into occupation, this is the view from the C-130's flight deck. See the smear? that's the airstrip. Light and dark spots to the right? Byrd Surface camp.

So Byrd has been occupied on and off for the past 60 years. It was one of the first stations on the continent, and for some time one of the biggest. From it's military beginnings in the 1950s the original station quickly found itself buried in snow from massive amounts of accumulation. Unperturbed, the military decided to build an underground station that could not be buried, because it already was. Quite a brilliant tactic, until the walls cave in! Through the the years and many incarnations of Byrd, more and more artifacts have been buried, abandoned, dug out, chutes and ladders galore, and now the main large station that once was is 6o feet deep. (Though we would all dig it out at the drop of a hat, entrance is forbidden for safety reasons.)

There are two parts of camp that stick out. Literally. A gigantic communications antennae and what was once a 70-80 foot ice drilling rig, now a scant 35 feet above the surface. The hill mentioned earlier, is not a hill of course, but a relic from some of the most recent stations in the past two decades. Byrd has been opened and permanently closed more times than some of the old timers around here can even remember.

Some of the coolest Ice Crystals I have ever seen, formed in our absence.

Why are we going back? Science of course! A great place to start. Two groups, CRESIS and POLENET are the main investigators. The main goals of these two groups lie in the movements of the ice sheet our camp is build on. Using seismic sensors, GPS locators, and GPR or Ground Penetrating Radar, these groups are able to map sub-glacial bodies of water, waterways, topography and keep tabs on where the ice sheet is going, and how fast it is getting there. From all this information and surely some other details that I missed, they will begin to formulate some glaciological hypothesis on ice movements, and possibly some hypothesis on the future of the climate change the earth is currently undergoing. These groups are operating all over the continent as well as in Greenland. Lots of info is online if anyone is interested in geeking out a bit.

https://www.cresis.ku.edu/

Two science support planes on a day of flat light. The smaller of the two is outfitted with radar devices running up and down it's wings.
The two fellas on the right were in charge of weather ops, but somehow could never seem to keep up with the current temperature. They had too many toys I think.

So the carpenters shop is charged with creating these camps, or at least setting up the buildings, outhouses, food storage, heat, and many other amenities for both camp staff and ultimately all for the science. We've learned a lot from those who came before us and we will now take all the buildings apart and winter them on a berm every year. Oi.

When we arrive there is usually little more than a couple of people living in small tents with big radios. When we leave, a small town has been erected where one can have warm (and quite good!) meals prepared three times a day, heated structures to work in, power (the sparkys, linemen, and diesel mechanics head this one up), internet connections, and sometimes even showers!

A temporary carp shop (used for science once we rid it of dirty socks) and the carp crew -1! We are standing in the longest Rac-Tent we believe to have been built. Ever. 112 feet long.
We got this far in one morning! Amazing the wonders we can work when cargo finally arrives!

Four steps in building a freezer cave. (To keep your frozen food extra frozen!)

1.Ya gotta start somewhere! How about... Here!

2. Two days later... How'm I gonna get outta this here hole?

3. Two more days later... Shelving and a staircase. Those carps really are something!

4. Wait for the right light to illuminate the largest sculpture you unintentionally made.

Standing, looking North. South. East. West? The landscape is at once desolate and stunning. Obstructions do not exist.

At times the light is so flat, one can not see a hole or small ridge right beneath them. Sky and ice are one. Shadow does not exist, nor texture.

Other times the sky is as big and blue as the world could imagine. Crystals flying by twinkle like the billions of stars overhead and out of sight. Snow all around sparkles white and blue, textures changing with light. Blown crystals form dunes more picturesque than National Geographic could capture. Freezing hard and solid as the crystals meld to one another, the dunes erode away by high wind, carving them to a perfect harsh. Over and over, buried deeper and deeper this place could disappear a continent. But your soul accumulates... space, silence. True silence. Thinking...

I could lay in this field and stare at these stars forever.

Don't forget to have fun and learn something!
1. It's always a good time for croquet! Especially if you paint the white widgets green!
2. Lessons on the hand drill - bamboo flag post and cedar shim. Sweat, but no coal.

On solid continent.

2009-11-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Glacier flowing in to the mouth of the Taylor Valley

It happened. I finally made it. I've got dirt in the treads of my keds from the mainland of Antarctica. So close but so far away, I had only ever been either on an island or atop an ice sheet, miles from the continent.

If only my nefew could see me now! Hi Sam!

The Taylor Valley is the most researched area in the dry valleys, across the Ross Sea from Mactown, it is a quick hop in a helicopter-about 30 minutes. Having never ridden in a 'helo' before my two trips out there, getting there is half the fun! We have some great pilots down here and they aren't afraid to use their skills! (some of the other folks on the trip didn't have as good of a stomach for that kind of thing though...) The dry valleys are thus named because they get very little precipitation, and, though surrounded by intruding glaciers, the valley leaves exposed the bare dirt of the continent, a rare occurance. Though the glaciers are flowing into the valleys, they don't make it far before seasonally melting back to the previous summer's location.

Lake Bonney and the view from Lake Hoare.
Recent snowfall! It must be getting warm around here!

So this brings me to the most dominant feature of the dry valleys. With all this melting of course there run seasonal streams which flow into... lakes! The dry valleys really are not that dry after all! Under fairly permanent layer of ice, these ultra saline lakes contain life! Only really small things of course, but bacteria, fungi, plankton and others make for a primitive but promising model. The ice atop the lakes is an amazing sight to see, but be damn careful! It's like walking on a table cloth that someone is in process of pulling out from under the dishes! I've never walked on such a slippery surface. Our helo pilot warned us - be careful. It's more slippery than Owl shit out there. It's also the coolest ice I've ever seen, and at this point I'm starting to feel like an expert on ice. I could tell you about how clear and amazing it is, but here are pictures instead. I will say that I picked up one loose piece of ice off the lake top, about the size of a rolling pin, and I think it was clearer than the clearest glass I've ever seen.

I'll worry aobut this here. You all back in the states keep your eyes peeled for owl feces!

Ice from the edge! The edges of the lakes melt every year, and refreze flat and crystal clear. Come spring they crack in some of the most amazing ways. These cracks are from the surface to several feet deep, thought the pics are pretty flat.

Some bubbles bubbling up? somehow? I'm pretty sure I would like to enroll in a week long class about the lake ice formations.

Rumpley top, cut by the wind and the sun? Stalagmites/hoodoos left when lake ice melted around them.

Scientists in the valleys study the life going on here, the glaciers, the rocks, and the whole idea that this is pretty much Mars. Or at least Europa, Jupiter's ice covered moon. Endurance, the project that is geared toward this similarity has a nifty robot that they are exploring the lake Bonney with that is a prototype of sorts for one headed out to Europa maybe in the next decade?? Pretty wild stuff. Around here they still get to pull it out and fix it when it breaks, and have thus learned alot about what might work all the way out there.

This is where the Endurance Robot lives (This is the kind of tent we build for all sorts of science related shelters.) and this is the robot being fixed (you have to get out the kinks before you go all the way to Jupiter!)

Now... for the quick-quick-I'm deploying to the deep field in 24 hours and have to pack version...
(story to come in three weeks when I return)

Various ventifacts, or wind carved rocks at Lake Bonney.

Lake Bonney, Canada Glacier at Lake Hoare Camp

Getting picked up on Lake Fryxall, Blood Falls.

Oh yes, and what in the world was I doing there? Fixing outhouses and drilling new ice anchors for and maintaining various shelters! Definetally a great job! Look at that smile!

Sea Ice!

2009-11-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

Out on the Ross Sea; Sea ice converging with a glacier.

Hustle bustle, hustle bustle, military planes flying in, dropping huge amounts of cargo and people at a little village we call the runway. Roads stretch this way and that as far as the eye can see, Mountains raise up all around you, one bellowing smoke, all covered in glaciers. The biggest bus you've seen and caterpillar bulldozers populate the surroundings like so many ants. It's hard to imagine; but here we are on the Ross Sea, fathoms of some of the coldest water on earth right beneath your feet. A body of water that looks to me to be the size of a great lake! Surely were it not ringed by mountains, it would be lost to the curvature of the earth, off in the distance. Come February this little village, the roads the people and equipment everywhere will be restricted to more permanent ice shelf or land, as the 84 inches of sea ice we are standing on will dissapear, revealing the depths of the Ross Sea, and it's summer populations of seals and Orcas.

As a result of it's size perhaps, theremal inertia, or maybe purely of climatic causes, Antarctica puts on it's winter coat of ice for seven months of the year, only for the sun to melt it back away with every passing day of summer. This yearly cycle effectively doubles the size of the continent, freezing a ceiling over the diverse and bustling communities of sea life including sponges, sea-stars, urchins, spiders, fish, jellys and krill. This amazing freezing and thawing is of course a dynamic event, and does not simply come and go, but it shrinks, expands, flows, flexes, pushes into islands and glaciers, cracks, heaves and dives; interacting with it's surroundings and demonstrating the forces of plate tectonics right before your eyes.

A glacier heaves upward as it approaches the frozen sea; Little Razorback Island, flanked with pressure ridges and cracks heaving sea ice in all directions.

An amazing sight, this also means that around every crevice, crack or ridge lies perilous danger to the common human mammal, certainly not designed for the sub-freezing waters beneath. Hence we receive as part or our training here, a specific sea-ice safety course, during which we take an entire day to drive around the sights and use really cool ice drills and tape measures to profile interesting cracks and crevices. Power tools meets sightseeing, and for the geeks in the audience, a physics lesson is offered in small helping from the instructor and in earth shattering reality by the ice beneath your feet.

Hagglund - a Norwegian vehicle that carried the 12 of us; a glacier descending Mt. Erebus, and flowing into the Ross Sea.

Two drills. One, a brace and bit; the other, essentially a weed eater with an auger attachment!

With a few extra minutes we decided to swing by the snow cave and have a peek inside.

While I had a great time in the class, my most thrilling experience came a couple of weeks later while on sea-ice patrol. This is a duty of the carpenter's shop, to check the heaters and propane tanks in all the dive sheds in the area. 20 miles out (this takes a long time on sea-ice) in a pisten bully and once again surrounded by ice and mountains we come to a group of islands where a large majority of the dive sheds are located.

Our truck - around here we call them Pisten Bully; The first dive shed, at the foot of a cliff holding back the glacier.

Mt. Erebus and the edge of one of the glaceirs cariving it.

Stepping out of the rig at big razorback island, sounds abound. Moans carry on the wind and echo around the islands and pressure ridges drawing your attention to the dark slug looking calico lumps laying all around the island. The pressure ridges that form around these islands open up sea access allowing Weddell seals to flop out onto the ice where they began giving birth about a week prior to our visit! Small seals abound! Researchers were busy trying to weigh the 800 pound mamas, and lord knows they could be the more testy of the two animals. We kept our distance! (Also, we are required to)

Researchers weighing seals, and one mama hanging out, preparing to give birth.

Our day rounded out with a last dive shed in desperate need of some more propane, and an active BBC dive crew inside probobly not in desperate need of some company, but we decided to poke our heads in and say hello anyway. Filming sea life for "Freezing Planet", the next big BBC nature documentary series, four divers were taking turns plunging into the 28 degree water wearing tons of gear and swimming around cameras in huge boxes for 30 minutes at a time. We chatted about some of their footage we had seen at a sneak preview and in previous films, as well as what they were filming that week. They are doing some very interesting time-lapse photgraphy that is really bringing McMurdo Sound to life!

sedimentary ice?

Antarctic Moose - Part Deaux!

2009-10-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

The longest commute on earth! (save for astronauts!)

Ok, I'm sure this is not true, but in reality it has got to be close! My trip this year began on Lummi Island, WA. one ferry, one car, five shuttles, six airplanes, six airports, three countries, three continents, more than 120 degrees of latitude, 6 time zones, and one international date line later, I'm on the ice.

The trans-antarctic mountains from my porthole on the C-17

Step free of the loud C-17, and around the nice Air Force fellas; behold the view - The Royal Society mountains, Mt. Dicovery, Mt. Erebus and Ross Island, not to mention miles and miles of sea ice that I stand upon.

As all things usually are, my current season in Antarctica is going to be a little different. Not only did the NSF recieve a pile of stimulus money, here being poured into deep field research, but I remembered to bring some maple syrup! This provides the carp shop with more work (we construct and maintain all field camps), and tastier toppings for my Sunday Waffles!

McMurdo is the largest base on the continent, and the main base of operations for most NSF Grantees and projects. Here I am working in the carpenter's shop which serves both the base and most of the field camps on the continent. This chance to travel is the reason I sought work in McMurdo, and I will be thrilled to have the chance to see (and photograph!) some parts of the continent that are the most telling (speaking of the future of our climate) and least seen parts of earth! Here we go! tune in here if you like and I will try for an update every couple of weeks as my season unfolds!

Travis

So what is reefnetting?

2009-10-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

Reefnet gears in Legoe Bay

You have probably heard of gill-netting, purse-seining, trawling, and maybe even long-lining; all of which are common commercially practiced ways of catching fish. They all have their positive and negative aspects for the fisherman, communities, the fish, and the ecology of the seas. Information about them is everywhere if you are looking.

Originally using materials such as nettles and sea grass to create the gear, reefnetting has gone through incredible changes in the past 100 years. Here lies an old disused gear from the 60's? Stowed near the bay in a reefnet gear graveyard, it is slowly succumbing.

Reefnetting is different. It is a way to catch fish, essentially only practiced on Lummi Island in Washington State, but has been practiced for generations and generations by communities, both native, and now for the past 100 years, primarily white Lummi Islanders. I will try to explain the process, but for diagrams and other pics and video see: Lummiislandwild.com

Gears set in Legoe bay. The reef lifted during a strong tide to prevent damage.

A natural fish trap of sorts, Reefnetting uses the migratory path of Salmon through Legoe Bay to produce an effective, though sustainable operation to catch small commercial quantities of Salmon. With two head buoys anchored 100 feet apart at the mouth trailing two floating platforms suspending a 20 foot wide net 100 feet back, the gear creates a funnel with lines and streamers imitating a reef covered in kelp. Some fish swim up this 'reef' and as the fisherman on the head stand sees them and calls on it, solar-powered winches go reeling in the net and deckhands jump to action pulling in the net and the fish. The fish are dumped into a live well, where they continue to swim with the current until they are identified and subsequently either released into the sound, or have their gills slit and are bled out in another tank. From here they are packed in slush ice and sent off to a local processor.

Solar panels now installed make this a wholly solar powered fishery.

The benefits of this system abound. Being an inexact science, and requiring a tide to fish, hordes of fish are never caught, either spooking their way out of the reef, swimming right past the net, swimming low enough that we don't see them, Passing by when no one is there or just plain swimming around us.

'The sea was so thick with salmon you could walk from island to island'

I guess fisherman have always told tall tales! But who knows? Salmon have been one of the most important species in the North Western region of North America, and still remain as such. It is theorized and generally accepted that their practice of swimming up rivers to spawn and then die allowed ecosystems to develop and fill the barren land left by glaciers during the last ice age. So many different species have evolved to depend on the Salmon, that it is difficult to imagine what the Northwest would look like if the Salmon had never existed.

There certainly are not enough salmon these days to traipse across the straight walking on their backs, or even across Legoe Bay for that matter. The returning Sockeye population this year was unexpectedly very small. Four years ago, more smolts (young fish) were counted leaving the streams than had been counted in a long time. Based on previous rates of return, the Salmon commission predicted 12 million to return to the area, of which only about 2 actually showed. This is horrible news for Sockeye, and of course the fishery was shut down for the season, to preserve those that made it and give them the best chance at a recovering population.

Some believe climate change could be having a role in their disappearance, but what makes the most sense to me has everything to do with why I won't buy farmed Salmon. Some folks think that the parasites the smolts are picking up when they migrate past commercial salmon farms are killing a huge chunk of the salmon before they have any time to develop natural defenses (scales, body mass) to these parasites. Factory farming has taken a toll in so many other ways, it seems completelly plausible that it could be threatening the native salmon populations here. In Norway, where all the salmon farms are owned, their native salmon have long since disappeared. Still some insist that it is not the case, but whatever the cause, it is of utmost concern.

Ready... ready... Plop! A Sockeye is realeased after an extremely brief photo op.

Enter Reefnetting. Since reefnetting allows for the identification and sucessful release of 100% of non-targeted species, it is a particularly useful tool in the conservation of any species that is at risk. In this case, we were used as a test fishery to monitor the Sockeye and obtain genetic information for study of their various populations. Since we were able to successfully throw back any sockeye caught, we were still able to fish and continue to provide information to the Salmon commission. Some of the most memorable moments involved shuttling Sockeye back into the water unharmed, wishing them well on their way up the Frasier River. Make lots of babies!

Fish! A school is spotted from the Head stand.

This year was, however, a huge year for pink salmon. At one point during the season I heard the words "the biggest haul since 1954" in reference to net full of 300-400 pink salmon. One Reefnetter referenced the largest school they had ever seen, maybe 1000 fish in the net, way too many to attempt catching for fear of breaking equiptment or even scuttling one's own boat.

One fairly large bunch of pink salmon being pulled aboard.

While these numbers were promising, what was even more promising was an evening I spent with Angela watching the sun set over Vancouver Island to a symphony of jumping fish. I counted well over 100 jump out of the water and splash around the rocks we sat upon. Over that week and the next, after all fishing had already been halted by the Salmon Commission the bay and shallows of the island were alive with millions of pinks on their way to the Frasier River to spawn. Sitting on the beaches you could feel the world alive all around you.

the sound breathing with every crashing wave, Bull Kelp drifting in the kickback of the tide.
seaweed decomposing on the beaches, feeding back into the sea the elements it composed.
clouds beginning to drift over the land like a blanket for protection from the cold winter ahead.
winds pushing throught the tops of the trees and toppling seed rich fruit onto fertile ground.
salmon splashing in the shallows all around pausing on their long journey upstream to home.

The feeling of my place in the world was so clear and fit so well into the context of Lummi's beaches at the end of summer. Like crunching the colorful leaves underfoot in full autumn walking on trails hunting 'chicken of the woods' or pawpaws, or just plain walking enjoying the seasonal change and the feelings that come with it.

On Lummi Island

2009-10-12T01:52:00.000-07:00

Lummi Island from Clark Island.
Mt Baker and North Cascades National Park in the distance.

Lummi Island, WA Population ~1000

Consisting of the second tallest peak in the San Juans, and a rich culture of fishing, farming, and fruit trees, Lummi Island is north-eastern most and, as far as I can tell, the most forgotten of the San Juan Islands.

I happened upon this islan while visiting my friend Becky, who took a job managing a farm for the only Inn on the island. While there, I was invited to come out and fish in the local traditional style of Reefnetting - practiced here on Lummi, and essentially no where else on earth.

Another beautiful sunset.
And since Becky is sneaky when it comes to my camera,
a pic of me playing in the dirt at the farm.

How could I have said no? Of course I will come live on your beautiful island in the middle of it's beautiful summer to fish for some of the most beautiful fish in the world! The bleeder (the job) lead (boss) Angie called me a few weeks later and it was a deal.

The Reefnets on Lummi Island make up an amazing fishery, unlike any in the world. It is important enough to make another post, following this one to tell you all about them.

So what on earth does one do on an island all summer? Of course there are the beaches, the west coast sunsets, and of course the berries, but all places have their own version of these wonderful things about them! What nearly always makes a place special to me is the people. And in this case the Puget Sound.

Reefnet Gears on Legoe Bay, and Bladder Rack, tasty and delicious for breakfast!

I've never really gotten to live near a large body of water in my whole life, never run a boat with a motor, haven't fished since I was a kid, haven't ever gone crabbing, had a ready supply of seaweed to eat at my disposal, or lived in a place where I had to get on a boat to go anywhere else. (a long swim!) So here I am, totally green and trying to be a good choice to take along commercial fishing for the season! It worked! I only fell in with ALL of my gear on once! (Early morning+rough water-coffee=very wet)

So here i was, plunging into a culture built around the sound, with only an idea of what I would be doing. Luckily I caught on fairly fast, and by the end of my summer I was cleaning crab, tying monkey fist knots, and falling in love with the Reefnetters.

One Roger and two Bobs. Various senior (in achievement not condition) Reefnetters in their natural habitats. A bunt, inside and head stand respectively, all on Legoe Bay. All three have been doing this for much of their combined 220 plus years!

The older men who are the Banks of knowledge for a nearly forgotten fishery perch in their head stands, talking, but never letting their gaze off the water, should they miss a fish. They joke about the fish school-size setting on their fancy polarized glasses, talk a little bit of politics, talk about people they have all known their entire lives, and best of all remember old times spent on and around Legoe Bay. When they are out there on their perches, an old tradition flows strong around them. They are as familiar with this trade as anyone ever has been. Their 70-82 year old eyes can pick fish out of the depths that to me might have looked like a shadow or a reflection off the surface, if I saw it at all. They speak of old rivalries on the bay - tricky fish counting; taking on water, to appear 1000 fish richer on the day; 5 gallon water bucket wars; and my personal favorite - one that lives on today, getting tricky with each others lunch pail while they aren't looking!

It is a combination of improv comedy, an adventure book you loved when you were young (and should probobly re-read right now!), and the movie grumpy old men.

Angie and I from a paddle trip to Clark Island with Pig (the dog),
Clamming shovels strapped to kayak.

So here I am in the Puget Sound, living a decidedly of-the-sea life. I was lucky to find not only a great boss, but also a great friend in Angie. We adventured all season: clamming, crabbing, kayaking, hiking, running, bouldering, traveling, chasing after Pig, eating delicious food, laughing with porpoises, smiling with the shooting stars. Oh yeah, and Smoking TONS of fish.

A smoker: genuine Puget Sound hewn handles!

So what else is there to tell? Except I'm leaving for Antarctica right when Silver and Chum season is starting!

Some pics from the last two posts!

2009-03-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

Negative 75 the day I left, just so I could remember how it was when I first arrived
- our wonderful Kricket to send me off!

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy, and internet is expensive in NZ. But here are some pics - the last from the ice, as I left and re-entered this "real" world? Strange it feels to be in what seems to be one of the most touristy places I've ever experienced just after the pole. odd. Don't get me wrong, NZ is also an amazing place. The juxtaposition is odd. Kind of makes me miss the cold desert. (Maybe because I had to make so few decisions for the past few months?)

Without further adieu,

The flight crew was excellent, and let me sit on the flight deck! The intense sun makes for a tough picture - the map they had stuffed in one window improved the situation!

They were excellent on descent, they even had the book open to the right page as we dove down to do some Killer whale watching in an open channel made by the ice breaker. We probably saw about 50 of them!

McMurdo in mid-February - the sun beginning to dip in the sky. Not setting yet, but creeping in that direction. They have about one month of sunsets and sunrises in every direction. Pole only has one which lasts 30 hours. The sun sets next week - the last full week in March.

From Mactown to New Zealand, again on the giant C-17. This time we rode with a helicopter in the next seat! Here they prepare the hour-long process of loading the thing. This is a permanent ocean ice airfield. After we travelled the 20 miles from McMurdo, we had to wait several hours till the Air Guard was fully ready. In order to lift off with the chopper, they mounted JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) Rockets to the outside of the plane. These solid-fuel, one time use rockets help get the load off the ground. We didn't notice the difference.

That's all for now folks! Next - New Zealand mountain tops and Kiwi oddities!

Now the trip gets really tough...

2009-02-21T14:51:00.001-08:00

greeting from the Southern Alps!

So all my airplanes did what they were supposed to do and got me back to the real world without too much event. I even got to ride with a helicopter - sitting beside me. That was definitely a new experience in an airplane.

Christchurch was a great re-introduction to the world, it's botanical gardens in full swing with a rose garden you could smell from over a wall and several meters away. Ducks and dogs, other birds, and the hostel cat were all something of novelty as was something they call beer that isn't 7 years old... We tried to remain restrained but that is an awful lot of wonderful stimuli and it was easy enough to get carried away! We helped one of the local pubs achieve their best day ever!

So out of CHC and into the wonderful wilds or semi-wilds of New Zealand. I write from Wanaka, but have also been spending time on the Banks Peninsula. Sheep. Sheep Sheep. everywhere. It's not an exaggeration. But also lots of cows! A pebble beach which aside from being too dangerous to enter (rips) is quite possibly my favorite to date. It's light outisde still , so I will end this blog entry there and with a few pictures as I must go hike around and up a peak and possibly throw a fly line in the water with my buddy I'm traveling with... Till then - (An update on why American kids are so unruly coming soon.) Travis

On my way back into rotation.

2009-02-10T14:04:00.000-08:00

Here I go again - landed in McMurdo yesterday and am heading out of here in a matter of hours for Christchurch. My plane is allready in the air on it's way here. I stopped here for the night to... interview for next year! I guess this place is kind of addicting.

My flight in was a thrilling ride with a great crew of guardsmen in a LC-130, the skiing transport. We did a little whale watching on the way, as we could see the space where the ice had been broken up by the ships brining supplies to Mactown. They also let me ride on the flight deck all the way through landing! A pretty great way to say goodbye for the year.

Now I will be met by hordes of polies making there way in today, only to be whisked off again all the way to NZ without a break. Oi. Glad I opted out of that plan! I also got to run into a few friends I was surprised to see were still here, and do some country and swing dancing with them in the first bar I've been to in months.

It's been a great experience, and I'm ready to get out of here for the time being. Leaving a pile of great folks behind to winter in isolation is a really interesting feeling. I hope to keep up with them, though currently am not in envy of their position. I'm in for forests, beaches and the night sky, but only in so much as the sun comes up every day still.

I'll try to keep up with some of my travels from here, but will not have a computer or regular access. See you east coasters in a few months - West coasters a bit sooner I think!

OOps - McMurdo won't let me put pics on - coming soon!

Count-down

2009-01-27T03:50:00.000-08:00

Kiwi Mark and I finished our snow sculpture a couple of weeks ago. We think the judging was rigged! Our fiddle-head fern emerging from a casket, dedicated to a recently past family member, and symbolizing rebirth, we thought was quite the sculpture. Maybe they didn't get it.

The siding is all but finished, the sun is sinking toward the horizon (only two months to go to the 30 hour sunset!), and the crew begins to leave in three days. I have two weeks left. It's time. Everyone knows it. The beaches, forests, and bugs of New Zealand are singing to us from afar, telling us it's time to come home to the world.

As we finish up our projects and button up the station, we await countless tanker planes that are struggling to make it, welcome the incoming winter-over crew (about 40 of them) and begin to make plans with and plot trips with our new friends. (And plans to visit all of them, all over the country, many of which surely will fall victum to our limited time here on earth.)

The internet and I have been on the outs. It likes to appear at 11 PM these days and shut off around 9 AM. During all of these hours I should either be asleep or I am at work. Hence the slow-down of this blog, and our new creative hours that many folks have figured out how to keep!

On that note. I will now be running off to my tent-home and leaving you with a vision from our most recent bingo game. It ended with me and a good friend winning the grand prize simutaneously. We were willing to share the money, but clearly in the spirit of this spirited game soaked in spirits here at pole, we decided to do the only sensible thing and arm-wrestle for it! The computer is mis-behaving or else there would be a video or picture... to come.

Take care and enjoy the rounding corner into springtime up there!

Why are any of us here?

2009-01-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

It's a pertinent question and one that comes up often. The meaning of life is not one that escapes us here either, but more directly I'm talking about "Why are we at the South Pole?" The easy answer is science. The other answer deals with politics, governments, and world domination, which bring on heated debate and that would just ruin an otherwise perfectly interseting post.

Obviously someone has to hold up the world!

Pushing the boundaries of what we think we know and what we think we could know. Looking back in time, studying dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos, looking for new systems of stars, particles, planets, trying to determine what happened at .00000000001 seconds after the big bang, current weather phenomena, water systems under the largest ice sheet in the world, world-wide seismic research, air sampling, space particulate weather, and surely a large variety of other projects I am neglecting. All of these projects are here for one or a variety of reasons that make pole an ideal research station. The dry, cold air, the altitude, the two miles of ice, the affects Earth's rotation has on the polar regions, etc...

So somehow I've left out a lot of science from this blog. I've been enjoying it all along, so here's a quick bit of 3 projects I have witnessed...

SPT - South Pole Telescope

I haven't managed to get a tour of this place yet, but I think I'll be finding one soon. They are currently getting up and running for the winter season of observation. They are looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB, which is left over radiation from the big bang. This isn't being observed directly, but rather is used as a baseline to find other objects in the cosmos. The CMB is extremely consistent, so where there is a hole or a modification of the microwaves, galaxies, stars, and other masses of particles are present. This is helping to bring information from the far reaches of the cosmos to "light". The CMB does not speak to distance, but mass and exsistence, so other forms of observing are used in concert, optical, or cosmic rays...

This giant 10 meter dish is used to focus the information. It is a perfect parabola to within microns. LOTS of adjustments keep it this way. To capture the information a series of cones further focus the radiation onto tiny little spider-web looking sensors that are maintained at a ridiculously cold temperature of .15 Kelvin (or near there) by the evaporative cooling of helium. As these webs are bombarded with radiation they heat up slightly, and the energy used to maintain the cold temperature of the web is measured. This differnce in energy is the reading. Pretty wild eh?

Pieces of BICEP - decommissioned this year in waiting for BICEP 2!

BICEP 1 which is housed in the same structure also uses the CMB, but for a different purpose. They are looking back in time to the "event horizon" or back into the beginnings of the universe. Got it? This is kind of difficult to explain, and I'm not sure I'm the one to do it. But, they use very similar equipment to detect the CMB, and it is possible to look back in time because of the sheer size of the universe. If you think of it in the way that the light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach the earth, then we only ever see the sun where it was 8 minutes previously. So consider the universe. Much bigger, and expanding at a speed greater than the speed of light now. (It's been speeding up). So as things get further away, it takes longer and longer for their light, or in this case particles to reach us here on earth. So, we can see further back in time at any moment than the moment preceding. At some point in the universe the light, or particles will never catch up with earth. This is the event horizon, that we cannot see beyond. Wow... a purely me post next!

Lastly for today, the largest project going here right now called ICE CUBE. Heard of neutrinos? These are very high energy, very small particles that are everywhere and pass through nearly everything. They are passing through you right now, and the entire earth, and for the most part anything else in their way. Every now and then they hit a water molecule, which is key, that then produces something called a muon, which when passing through the antarctic ice makes a visual wake not unlike the wake created by an airplane traveling beyond the speed of sound. ICE CUBE is a project that is convinced they can use these muons to map the cosmos according to neutrinos. Their detector takes up 1 square K in the ice, about a kilometer and a half down. As they are still under construction, they have yet to make too many observations just yet, but they can tell us there is a moon! It is quite the experimental project down here. They directly employ nearly 1/5 of the personnel on base.

The construction phase is fairly exciting right now. These are some pics from Drill Camp. (They are drilling two mile deep holes with hot water drills, and then deploying DOMs - Data Optical Modules which detect muons - 60 per hole, 5000 thousand total) They then take this data and send it through...

a couple of wires... (the ones on the left are about the size of my arm, on the right numbering in the thousands)

which feed...

one or two (dozen racks of) computers!

That's the science tour for the day! Hope I've caught you all up, and as a disclaimer, I'm going purely off of memory, no notes or reference, so NSF is likely the best place to find more information for the science-hungry reader!

A series of long trips

2008-12-25T07:46:00.001-08:00

Just under 100 years ago, explorers first attempted land traverses of this continent: Today it is still quite difficult: And this guy only went one way! (albeit by himself!)

So the fella in this picture is Todd Carmichael. He arrived at pole last week walking. Going for the world record in speed of cross country ski traverse, he achieved it by about an hour, and nearly completely on foot, without skis. He went through two sets of bindings, fell into three crevasses, broke a pole, lost one of his GPS machines, and that was just the first two of 10 degrees of latitude.

In a talk and conversation he presented to us, he told of his mental regimen and physical regimen to deal with the harsh and essentially boring, featureless landscape, and now with no skis, on foot (too determined to turn around). Two days out of pole, one satellite phone broke, his fuel spilled into his remaining food, and then his other phone and GPS broke. Luckily it was a clear day when he finally saw the station. Had it been poor visibility due to wind and snow drift, he would have been unlikely to find us. It's a pretty crazy story in it's entirety, which I won't rehash here now.

There are of course others traversing to the pole, but few solo on foot and make it here. We have had two large vehicle traverses come in. One is a cooperative Norwegian/US science-based traverse, the other a heavy traverse to transport fuel to pole at a better rate than the herc's can. (1 gallon burned to 2 delivered instead of 2 burned to 1 delivered).

Some of the science traverse' vehicles. All named for famous sled dogs from the continent's history. Lasse on the right was one of Amundsen's dogs and Chinook on the left was Shackeltons. Four vehicles in all, with the one out front running a radar looking for crevasse.

The science traverse was very interesting. In European style they had small, practical vehicles, and everything tidy and well designed for the purpose. Radar mapping the deep ice of East Antarctica, coring samples for density and odd-snow-isotope frequency, and an exploration of some sub-glacial lakes are the main objectives of the traverse. Their web addy is: http://traverse.npolar.no

What great use of our dry weather! Of cousre, every now and then you have to beat the clothes on the ground to break up the ice! These are their living quarters.

They had an open house and came to our FEMC holiday party. One of the Norwegians was a farmer in a past occupation, and they all seemed to now live in one arctic area or another most of the time. We talked for quite some time, and the suggestion that i go work on an arctic island north of Norway was proposed... Then they invited me over to have the best cup of coffee I've had since I arrived. It reminded me of home in that incredibly strong percolated coffee kind of way... mmm

And speaking of our Christmas BBQ - Here for your enjoyment are some only semi-terrifying pics!

Hmm... (Moose in orange hood) the left looks quite successful, but doesn't it look like the couch on the right needs some steering?...

Hmm...

Yes, yes! that's better!

This is a piece of ice that was made from melted ice many many thousands of years old, and roughly two miles below the surface here. Pumped out of the ICE CUBE science construction camp, it was estimated between 10-100,000 years since deposition. Melted and refrozen in a special way to produce a nearly totally clear (air bubble free) cylinder. ...some hoodlums... took a drill to it and made an "ice luge" to be used with potent liquors.

Of cousre, all partook (when was the last time you got to take a drink through ice frozen for a hundred thousand years?) and no one quite got frostbite on their noses! And in general it was an evening we all escaped from unscathed!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

(Our undercover team - hence the gear - found that santa drives a big red truck down here instead of a sleigh - though if you note the flags - he probably could have para-sleighed today!)

Another day in paradise!

2008-12-19T09:20:00.000-08:00

Is a commonly vocalized saying around these parts. It might be surpassed by only "It's a Harsh Continent" used only at ironic times or as a reminder that our problems are not so bad - (here, have a cookie, a sauna and a hot shower!).

Today feels quite like paradise in many ways. Surrounded by good folks all day long, it began waking to an alarm at 6:30 AM, a jaunt to the internet while still in bed from my wireless-equipped tent, followed by the warm bathroom (often something I live without) and then off to a breakfast of home-made granola that I helped with. Stretching begins at 7:30, a practice that is really not-so-craftily disguised Yoga. One of our materials hunters, who is a masseuss and pilaties instructor in her real life; leads the class, puts up with the groans of the older crowd (the occupy "crumudgeon corner" as posted on the wall!), and smiles when everyone starts joking around halfway through... It's a requirement and the best way to warm up in the morning before heading out in the cold and the wind. (The joking and the yoga)

(the next guy to the left is actually on the floor :), and our shop is of course organized just as well as we organize all of our things at home, though perhaps labeled better!)

Reporting to the "Naked Lady Shack" so named by a female carpenter for the puzzle attached to the cieling, My crew hangs out to talk about the day, tell jokes, fill out safety papers and get dressed to a sound track of good ol' american hip-hop, or classic country. Our poor Kiwi co-worker has not yet learned to appreciate a good country song unfortunatelly, but we keep singing along as best we can hoping he'll come around. (He has a wonderful sense of humor!) After applying 30-50 lbs of gear, we head back out into the great outdoors!

OK, so here is where the irony of "Another day in paradise comes in." Maybe my blood is getting thick, but lately it has often been quite nice outside. -11 this week, the warmest we've seen since getting here, and at times we find ourselves stripping layers to avoid the sweat! Of course, this is only without wind. -20 with 20 knot winds, amplified probobly 2 fold since we are under the station, and out of the sun, equates to the coldest any of us have ever been since being here. (this also happened this week!) Int the end though, I've spent the past two days working myself down to a hoodie, long sleeve shirt, thermal bottoms and insulated carharrtt overalls... and 10 pounds of head gear of course! A couple folks think i'm a little bonkers, but others on my crew wear less! It must be that Scandi blood coming out of us.

So work. What have I been doing with 60 hours of every week since I got here eh? I'm a carp on the siding crew is the answer that suffices around here. That means we work in the coldest place on station (underneath), outside for most of the day; climbing up and down scaffoding, cutting, screwing, stapling, banging; on the ground, the roof, and if you work night shift right outside your bedroom window every second of the day apparently! We have a lot of fun and work as a pretty tight-knit constantly sarcastic, and at times somewhat crude construction crew... really it's not that different from a crew in the states, except for the goggles!

Shoveling is a prerequisite to all work all the time.

My specific duties are often as the cut-man, and so far I've cut every piece of siding we've attached to the side of the building! By the end that will be about half of the sides of the entire station! So I cut for about a day, then help on the roof for a half a day or so, install or cut some trim on the scaffold, and then...

Every two days or so we have to move our scaffold. This entails all 14 of us running around bolting, unbolting, checking, spotting, maning the tag lines, tightening, measuring, but mostly praying nothing goes wrong as we lift the scaffold with a crane and move it! Ok, so apparently this might not be THAT uncommon at home, but I don't usually work on big corporate construction projects! It's pretty wild!

Every now and then we manage to stir up some tr0uble too of course! (This plane broke and hung around for a couple of weeks. We considered listing it on Ebay, but figured the shipping would kill the deal!)

So work runs in two hour increments with at least a half hour break in between. This means we start at 7:30 and go till 5:30 when we all go plop our gear in the shack and the evening begins.

It's hard to believe how many activities there are to do down here, and how little time it seems we either have to do them, or if we choose... sleep! Lots of sports and lots of dance classes mostly fill up my evenings, that and my favorite pastime of sitting in the galley and talking to new different, or familiar and wonderful people. Tonight, and every friday, I did Circuit Training. We set up 15 stations and rotate every minute for 45 minutes. weights, pushups, sprints, jumping rope, etc... it's pretty much completelly exhausting, but I figure when I drop 10,000 feet I'll be a pro. I am definetally acclimating pretty well to the altitude.

Afterword, dinner awaits in the galley and conversation with friends or folks passing through, and tonight a quick departure to the sauna downstairs. An hour in and out and a run out into the snow complete a physically altering day. Somehow my exhausted body manages to plan for a future pub trivia I hope to host with a friend and then finally retires back to my room for writing and reading myself to sleep... With that friends good night, and in case I don't call you this week, Happy Holidays!

Our Local 7 KM antenna!

2008-12-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

3 KM from base, past an area called the "dark sector", where lots of cosmological research takes place, a group of scientists are making a quite a racket. A very low racket that lasts one minute for every fourteen that they are peaceably charging batteries with which to make such a large racket. You thought that those car's amplifiers were too big? How about a 7 km antenna producing a low, droning bass, that would surely drive you nuts if only you could here it! Bouncing between the ionosphere and earth's surface, the 15 km waves produced traverse the continent with ease. Aided by the two miles of ice the antenna is suspended upon (the ice appears transparent to these waves), these scientists are able to keep an eye on the weather in space.

One of the most beautiful and cherished events down this way and across the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere is Aurora Australis.

These "Southern Lights", actually high energy particles colliding with the ionosphere are the most raw visual evidence of some of the events these scientists are measuring. They are really beautiful I'm sure. If the sun were to ever go down I might be able to enjoy them!

As their waves are routed with the curvature of the earth, disturbances along that path, mostly in the ionosphere, speak to our constantly changing upper atmosphere. As these high energy particles, normally suspended around the earth in microwave radiation belts, come crashing into the atmosphere, they disrupt the ionosphere. This in turn disrupts the waves, which are then measured by receivers all around the coast. These measurements are used to study the weather of space (electrical and particle "storms" mostly I believe), just outside the earth's atmosphere. This fancy antenna and it's many receivers also detect particle barrages inflicted on our atmosphere from the sun. Now, If you followed all that, then I must have learned something in the past hour! I still have questions about space weather, but surely that is a topic for an entirely different lecture! I love this stuff. Maybe I should be a science teacher...

For you science buffs, here is a link:

http://www-star.stanford.edu/~vlf/south_pole/south%20pole.htm

Where Was I?

2008-12-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Oh yes, here i am. So, contrary to how you may be keeping track of me on this blog, I have been here at the geographic south pole of Earth for one month now. I won't mention too many times how cold it is down here. It just is. It matters, but the finer points of the difference between -70 windchill and -50 windchill I will spare you here. Maybe. I should remind you that it is the summer, and our palm trees prove that the spirit is in the air!

Yes, palm trees can't grow here yet, and our only ever-green is made of dead pine, but the latitude is changing in our favor every second. The ice is always moving, accumulating here and elsewhere on the plateau and drifting off to the coast where eventually it falls off creating massive icebergs. The ice i live on here will be ripe for the ice-burg stage of it's life in about 10,000 years. And of course by then this will not be the south pole, but just water, ice, and archeological pollution. For that matter, every January, someone gets out a shovel and surely a pile of surveying equipment to move the pole 33 feet directly south.

So, how about a tour? I'll do a bit now, and surely a pile more will come as it does.

(Note - the new station is actually elevated 14ft or so from the current snow level beneath. This ~14 Foot berm of snow appeared over one, count them, one winter season. It has been left in place with the thought that it might partially shield us carps working below. I am dubious)

Life here is dramatically different than it was 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago. The new elevated South Pole station now casts a shadow on the old geodesic dome that has served for the past 30 years or so as the main station's shell. Now it is used for storage. Of course since everything ends up buried in a few years, nearly everything casts not only it's proverbial shadow, but its literal shadow on what has come before.

There was talk the other day about this dome, and it is pretty well agreed that it should be an ice-skating rink. We figure the only things standing in our way are thousands of pounds of canned, dehydrated, frozen (all of it), and otherwise fossilized food, insurance issues and the military's possible whim of turning it into a museum in Florida. Clearly they serve this food, lots of things work better when asking forgiveness for lack of permission, and this would make quite the expensive museum. The shipping costs alone would make it quite the tax drain.

On the other hand, we just need some water to freeze the snow hard and some skates, a fairly affordable option, though nothing down here is cheap, even liquid water. there is a skylight already built-in and we could surely take one of the many disco balls from around station, hook up some popular jams, and it would be just like rinks at home, except cooler because it's in a geodesic dome at the south pole with a disco ball. We are plotting our non-proposal to NSF.

So the new station is very clean and big. It sports checkerboard walls of different colors and photos of all the various folks who decided it would be a good idea to winter over for the past 50 or so years. The top floor is rich with offices, labs, the game room where I play all of my foosball, club med (my friend had a root canal the other day! - ouch...), and the galley - an open kitchen, seating for 100 or so, and containing within its walls - frosty boy, our ice cream machine who is often on strike. All science lectures and large events tend to happen here as well as our constant battle against weight-loss, pub trivia night, and movies.

Downstairs we have the gym, craftroom, the library, tons of life-support and back-up generators, etc. Oh, and I almost forgot the sauna! We're working on re-enginerring the thermostat with a shelf and a tub of cool water, so far we've hit 190 but no higher. In the winter-time one has the chance to enter the 300 club. The sauna is cranked up to 200 on a -100 day and brave souls make a mad-ice covered dash (naked) to the pole and back. You would be amazed at how truly sane, if a little quirky, most of the folks are down here.

So the new station is nice, don't get me wrong, but I like summer camp better. It's got more grit to it, and hasn't changed a lot for years. i couldn't imagine being inside the big building much more than I am, but some folks barely ever leave! (not too many though). Speaking of grit, for all you who thought I might have left the outhouse behind me? Well, they only got nicer, and solar powered!

Our jamesway tents came here from the Korean war. Manufactured in 1951 I believe, they are insulated arch tents made of wood and canvas primarily. They are heated, but depending on where you are in your room or what time of day it is you can either freeze yesterday's socks to the ground or find you kicked all the blankets off in your sleep. Each of the 12 J-ways are split into 14 rooms. The rooms are individual and have been customized over time. Residents build walls or dressers or lofts. At times of questionable construction, these modifications make for a huge amount of charachter. With some thought, a screwdriver, sledge hammer and a few wood blocks, I have managed to transform my room into home. I'm in the decoration phase, which will surely be an ongoing adventure! Currently two national geographic maps occupy the space. One of Anrarctica, and another of the US. They seem like two great homes to me! (Allready considering next season!)

There is another J-way we use for a lounge / movie house. It comes complete with disco ball, stage lights, cardboard blockaded windows, and the "other" south pole. Summer camp also sports two large bathrooms that we clean in shifts, a small climbing wall, a weight room, smokers lounge and Skua!

Just another building dotting the plateau? Or treasure chest?

Named after the famed sea-gull like bird theif that lives in McMurdo, This wonderful institution is a kickback to the free box in many of the the houses I've lived in all over. If you have stuff you don't want it gets put here, and if you want things, you just say a prayer to the Skua gods and, {Poof!} - just like a skua stealing that sandwich out of your hand as you walk from the galley, the treasures are yours. Mostly it is filled with clothes, but I found an alarm clock, a bendy desk lamp, and even a full box of drinking chocolate to go with my new favorite hoodie and knit wool hat!

Before you get carried away with ideas of non-human life down here, it is said that only one skua ever made it to the south pole. It was actually the cargo of a pilot playing a mean and dirty trick on it involving a sandwich and an uncertain end. Animals can be so cruel to one another. Of course others have hitched a ride down as well. Stories of a spider, a lady bug, and a couple of exectutives have all found my ears.

The tour continued... So the constant problem of snow accumulation never seems to stop. The only real precipitation here seems to be ice-crystals, but the wind keeps a blowin and bringing in the snow. Every season the General Assistants, with a little help from most everyone, get to dig out "The Berms"

These are long rows where stuff is stored. What type of stuff? Who knows! It's always a bit of a surprise. One day last week the crew unearthed a long forgotten pallet of "freshies" - the precious fresh vegetables that we rush inside to keep from freezing. When did that get put there? Which year? And can we still make soup? Often you will find things such as... a pallet of battery drills! or... a pallet of gloves someone knew was out there somewhere - they saw it a couple of years ago!. It smacks every bit of government work, but on such a small scale in the scheme of things. Some folks are convinced that parts of the berms have been there for 50 years. I figure if they've been there that long they must be 12 feet deep by now.

Spoolhenge. What else is there to say? or see?

Somewhere out there is also deemed "the end of the world". In addition to being rumored as one of the hottest sledding hills around, this is where we found all of our long-lost fall protection harnesses, and where snow is eventually dropped off of base. Dropped. All around the area snow blows in and accumulates about 8 inches a year. This is unless there is something there to stop it... like, for example a piece of bamboo used to hold a flag... Now if there was a whole building in the way, you could expect drifts of say even 10-15 feet per year. apparently the entire station is raising it's own plateau on top of the one that already exists here. I expect the new station we are currently siding will be completely buried in my lifetime.

by the way... it's time to send me mail!!! if you would like it to show up by the holidays!!!

Travis Moose RPSC
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400
APO AP 96598

Thanksgiving...

2008-11-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving.

All dressed up and ping ponging with friends...

Including my long-time email contact friend of a friend -
Laura, who helped me while applying to come down here

Indeed. The festivities began quite in advance of our Saturday evening meal. First we received a large amount of fresh vegetables. Then we had volunteer prepping time all week in the evenings, culminating to the quintessential home-cooked thanksgiving dinner, that we were are all unable to make for one reason or another (crazy enough to be working here is the most popular excuse). As goes with any good day off in these parts the after(anythinig)-party will be present.

So I signed up for the potato peeling party. This is pretty darn exciting because it means our mashed potatoes won't come out of a box! Teems of polies (those who work at pole) signed up for this task, which with many hands and the guidance or our own James Brown (Pole Chef Extraordinaire) only took an hour. Of course I didn't get to touch the potatoes. I got the Beets! One of my favorite vegetables and still with bits of soil attached. Euphoria. Tom Robbins said it best:

"THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious... The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies" And here they are, at the pole!

I also managed to chop up some cucumber, carrot, and pepper to round out the euphoria. Pub trivia, happening in the same room gave a thrilling distraction to the spaces between prep work. Amongst other polar topics, the oddities of the people around us was the evening's theme! Who grew up with such and such diva rock star? Who modeled hats in Las Vegas for four years?

The next night: pie night. Pumpkin, Apple, and Pecan the stars of the evening, my emergency logistics team leader busied himself with the bread for the stuffing. We had to have the best logistics team at pole to handle this ultra-important ingredient!

The finale: Three candle-lit seatings with all our friends and neighbors dressed in their best; ordeurves in the hallway kept company by live music;

Wine stewards who we all knew perhaps too well, armed with a plethora of wines; mod lighting;

and of course excellent food. Swing dancing, an 80's dance and a bucket full of sangria that we all dove into and then backed far far away from finished off this start to the holiday season. Our two-day weekend treated us well giving us all the opportunity to explore the best sledding mounds, finish that book we've been reading (mine was "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" - excellent), play some sports and write some letters to you lovely folk on the dirt side.

Hope you all had a great holiday as well!

All Points north

2008-11-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

So where to go from here? Well the pole of course! Good bye Mt. Erebus, good bye moon, good bye dirt, good bye Hotel California...

Loose that jets and the wheels; those things don't work down here. It's props and skis from here on out. Our LC-130 and the lovely folks from the NY Air National Guard who brought it to us. They just arrived down here the same week, and have begun their tireless shuttling of people and things (LOTS of fuel) to and from the Pole. They arrived from similar activities they were pursuing in Greenland, at another US research base there. (Many workers and one carp i work with also make this seasonal trip). So here it is, Hercules equipped with skis and little jets on the back, for that extra push getting off the ice with a heavy load.

All packed in and ready for an exciting ride, we contemplated the 50s era seat belts and helped each other pull with all our might to tighten them; we were off. Our flight took about 5 hours, for most of which the only thing to see out the window was the two-mile thick ice sheet covering the continent. We were only a little disappointed when the landing was smoother than a commercial jet. Maybe it was the skis? or the snow? or both? The thrill seekers in us were not sated, but we were all happy to land safely in the hands of our excellent pilots.

So what now? We get off the plane. We're home. Enjoy the view. You know, you can see the curvature of the earth down here.

Oh, yes, and enjoy the weather!

This is a screen that scrolls constatntly all day long showing temp, wind chill, wind speed and virtual altitude (here just a bit over 11000 feet.) Of course this is just an example. When we arrived it was about -50 F with a windchill below -70 F. The weather above, however, was probobly more uncomfortable due to the windspeed. I think you may be able to get current weather at southpole.usap.gov.

McMurdo

2008-11-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

Climbing off the plane, we all finally realized what we had just done. But it took days for this to sink in. Not unlike the Grand Canyon, the landscape was all but imperceptible. The idea that we had just landed a gigantic airplane on an ocean, albeit a frozen one, was a little bizarre. And then there were the funny machines... A world quite alien. So many had been here before us, but not 100 years ago Shackleton got stuck here trying to traverse the continent for the first time, not 50 years ago was the first permanent base established.

Mt. Erebus, the local active volcano, steams or smokes most of the time. It is a rare type of volcano because it has a constant lake of molten lava present. Only two in the world like this one. this is actually on Ross Island, just off the coast but connected by the Ross ice shelf

A Delta from the 80's used for carrying people here and there. There are other containers attached to the back for carrying fuel, water, etc... I Can't remember this one's name, but it surely has one, just like every piece of equipment or building around here.

McMurdo, our destination for a couple of days, is the biggest base of human habitation on the Continent. It sports one of the only existing manual-set bowling alleys, the worlds southern-most pottery studio, the Hotel California (where I slept), the most amazing views of anything I have seen in my life, and... oh yes, lots of fascinating science.

Climbing atop Observation Hill for a great view in all directions, I met a guy who is driving with a team of scientists across the continent collecting data on stable isotopes of H2o. My iterest has only amplified as I've learned of the sea life in this all but uninhabitable place. In the lab there is a "touch tank" where you can pick up and hold all sorts of familiar but somehow very strange animals. The spindly under-water spider the size of the hand I held it in was particularly thrilling. There are science lectures and periodic tours of labs at both McMurdo and South Pole.

The lecture I attended last evening was on the form of the universe by a fellow who is looking back in time to light and sound waves produced during the "big bang". The basic idea is that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, and therefore we can see all the way back in time to the big bang, and then darkness beyond (The light from stars far yonder has not had a chance, nor will it ever reach earth) It all came home with a firey analogy to ping-pong, which I would love to tell you more about, but perhaps over a game of foosball (I have lots of international friends, and partial isolation helping to hone my skills - so watch out 2012 Olympics!), and coffee with instant hot chocolate mixed in (my new favorite break-time beverage, especially with the home-made peanut butter cookies).

Check out some pics of the Ice Caves trip I managed to squeeze into in my two days at McMurdo!

Highlights also included a stop at Scott's hut (an early 20th century antarctic explorer),

and a penguin! (This is a somewhat rare and priveledged sighting as many work here for years without seeing one)

As an aside we managed to get incredibly nice weather while here, to the point at which the sun melded enough snow to make puddles of muddy water on the ground, hence McMurdo's nickname: MuckMurdo. It gets very muddy here in the summertime, apparently a constant challenge to the maintenance crews. In short, I know the weather is unpredictable and sometimes worse here than at pole, but it kind of felt like cheating! On to Pole!

2008-11-18T08:07:00.000-08:00

So I'm a little behind on starting this blog. Only two weeks really, but so much has happened, and continues to happen, that I can hardly imagine conveying it all to this place. If you aren't in the mood to read lots of words, perhaps you shouldn't and just check out the pictures! But here it goes!

In a place far far away (from me currently), and for the past couple of years, two friends of mine have told many a tale of their years as snow birds. Of course, they strayed off the typical course and found themselves so far south, that there was no more south to be had, and stayed there for several months. Someone gave them shovels, and though it was a punishing -70 degree windchill at times, they merrily went about the work of unburying a world that succumbs to the nature of wind and subsequent accumulation of huge amounts of snow each and every winter. They said the sun never went down and the dance parties were unmatched, a phenomenon apparently attributable to intense solar radiation and canned peaches. Of course I was blown away by all these extremes and excesses, and found out that there is a whole community of seasonal work in this mystical place called the south pole, and jobs are at the whim of your fingertips, and a simple 30 minute phone interview with a guy named Dog. Fast forward nine months or so, and here we find a moose in an unexpected hemisphere. In fact, in three hemispheres all at once. But this is jumping ahead. My hope is to tell you a little bit about the adventure of getting here in the first place.

Leaving home is something I do a lot of, and since I have lived many places, I get to come back home quite often and have a load of different experiences. Most recently, and in rare form, I have found myself quite attatched to a home in the Northern most reaches of VA, in a community of farms and farmers. Leaving home felt a little strange for a second, and at the airport, while being dropped by two dear friends, I had a moment of home-sickness. Since then I have been through a hurricane of air travel, new faces, corporate jargon, and timeless beauty.

After a slough of domestic flights and days of (b)orientation in Denver, I found myself at the LAX Quantas terminal. This was exciting because it reminded me of Rainman, the only reference I have for Quantas in my life, and that they have never crashed a plane. (A comforting detail when one is about to fly over the abyss of the largest body of water on earth). I got to see (and thought until the last minute) I would be riding on their giant new airbus plane. This thing is huge. How do we humans do it? In conclusion, Quantas is a much nicer airline than I am used to, and all things considered, it was a tolerable 14 hour flight to Oceania.

New Zealand found me gasping for breath, first at the fairyland beauty, and second every time my shuttle driver made a left. I got such a brief though breathtaking view of such a small and urban part of the country that I will have to reserve my praise for future adventure stories. 'nuf said. I landed here in time for election news, and some interesting election celebration posters. A very important topic all over the world. This was the main topic of conversation (aside from the irish dancing) at the Pub.

So on the morning of my departure, myself and a pile of what I would guess to be 100 folks, woke up at 4 AM, and piled onto a retired military cargo plane wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing. Probably the warmest, though certainly not the hipest clothes i will ever possess, they are currently keeping me alive! We had a ball trying everything on and requesting different kinds of Extreme Cold Weather Gear, or ECW's. I know it's out there and as soon as i find it I'll post an ECW Calendar-boy photo. I promise.

We came from places such as farms, offices, fire crews, construction sites, laboratories, Italy, France, NY, and even one friend from Martha's Vinyard. I think I am the only one from the mid-Atlantic. So they were taking us to Antarctica of course. Where else would such an odd assortment of uniformly overdressed strangers be headed to? (Yes, of course a Civil War re-enactment was a good guess)

My companions and I affectionately compared riding aboard the C-17 to Space Mountain. There are very few windows, so your experience is largely transmitted through surprise feelings of the world falling away and gravity shifting in that way that makes your parents sick to their stomachs. We loved it. That and the nice National Guard folks (who seem to all wear giant ears just like that trillion dollar disney icon) even let us into their private chamber where they controlled the ride.

The first views of the sea-ice and mountains were euphoric. It must have been a similar feeling to seeing the earth from space, an image we are all familiar with, but have no realistic reference for. The whole plane was giddy. And I don't think it was the Liquid O2 (They forgot any mention of this in the safety talk).

Why?

2008-11-14T09:04:00.001-08:00

A question that has been all-too familiar to me over the past 6 months of Antarctic planning. Why? Why would you want to do that? I've given a plethora of answers, none of which satisfied me. Is it interesting? Is it the science? How about the challenge? Someone even suggested it was just something interesting to tell the girls!

Well, it is definitely interesting, there is no lack of science or the sharing of it, and there is a challenge in every move you make, but really I can't say in words what caught my eye about coming down here. I can simply say I'm glad I did and I'm glad to share my experience here. So here it is, my journey into public blogs and to 90 degrees south, all at once.

So put on your dancing shoes, get out your giant red parka, and curl up with your favorite mug full of hot cocoa for me. It's all ice from here!