Some pics from the last two posts!

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...

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.

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

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?

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

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!

(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!)