Christmas in Antarctica

In Antarctica Christmas comes a day earlier than in the US. In the lower left of this pictures are carolers. The background is frozen sea ice.

Penguins are just about the favorite animal, and these are in the dining room.

The theme of the day was food, of course. Here we are at brunch. Stockings are in the background. There is a tree, but it missed the picture.

This is a a display of gingerbread houses. Below is a spread of exotic cheeses and lots of other delicacies.

We ate the huge Christmas dinner in "family groups." These are new and wonderful friends. We had prime rib, roast, duck, crab legs, shrimp, all the trimmings, and more desserts than could be counted.

Science Camp

One of the extremely cool things we were hoping to do! get close to a science team, and go out with them. This is Pat's ride out to Heald Island, in the Koettlitz glacier to help launch an under-ice rover camera.
The passengers had to wear the same sharp helmets as the pilots.
The rover is launched through a simple, small, hand-drilled hole. Other rovers being tested down here need huge support equipment, and an eight foot wide hole.
Most of the ice we are working in is pure crystalline blue, but some parts of it have sponge-like formations of air bubbles. These are about a foot down into the ice. You are looking at an area two feet wide.
The equipment is being assembled and tested. The rover is the small cylinder with holes all over it. Pat machined the holes to reduce its weight, and help to make it neutral bouyancy. He also designed and built the cradle it sets on for testing.
Launching the rover.
An edge of the Koettlitz glacier, and beyond it, the mountains forming the Antarctic Dry Valleys.
Some of hundreds of blue melt pools, now frozen, within a rift in the glacier. Mt Discovery beyond, about 14 miles away.
Looking across the quarter-mile wide rift, and the melt pools to the camp tent.
The ride home is landing.

Ice Dive

We have become acquainted with a dive team that looks at what's in the ocean here under the ice. The have two dive huts off the shore on the ice here.

Inside the hut on the left is the hole for the divers to descend. Inside the hut on the right is the hole where they lower the self-propelled camera that is steered by a person who stays above. They can see on a screen in the hut what the camera sees below.

Here's the hole that the divers use. Looks chilly, doesn't it. The ice here is 20 feet thick. The water below it is 28 degrees.

These divers are Stacy, the head of the team, and Francois.

Stacy is putting on her flippers.

They get ready to descend.

Holly is a "dive tender," a volunteer who helps the diver get dressed.

Stacy jumps into the hole.

From the other hut we can look at what the camera is seeing. The divers say there is plenty of life down there. They like diving here because the water is very clear and there's no algae. The box in the picture is a wire frame on the front of the camera--a crash bar so it doesn't get hurt when it hits bottom. The camera is steered by a person above the ice. Carol got to "drive" it. It's like playing a video game.

Here the camera is looking up the hole that the divers went down. Again, the box is the camera's protective frame.

The dive tenders above were mighty surprised when something--which turned out to be the camera--came UP the hole!

Stunning Ice Formations

This week Carol got to go on a special trip to the New Zealand base here to see special ice formations made by layers of sea ice pushing against each other.
The result is that huge chunks of ice get pushed up. You can see how big they care compared to people. We're standing on the ocean here. It's many, many feet frozen beneath us.

This is the favorite formation--looks like a sitting frog.

Some of the formations were blocks.

Some of the newer ones are a gorgeous color of blue.

This is beautiful with the sun shining through.

Some formations were pointy.

And sometimes the points were in a row.

Sometimes the ice was split.

The place made me think of a white, shiny version of the rock formations at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

Scavenging in Antarctica

All of the trash from McMurdo Station has to be shipped back to California. That's because they found that the garbage they used to put in the ocean or bury doesn't disintegrate because of the cold. Back in 1991-91, Pat was here as an engineer building an incinerator, but that was abandoned because burning was frowned upon. This picture is taken from the Waste Department, where they sort every piece of trash and prepare it for shipment back to the US. Some of it for obvious reasons gets frozen for the trip. In the background is the spectacular ocean and mountains.

There is a wonderful tradition of recycling useable clothes and goods here called Skua. It's named after a scavenger bird, called the Skua. There are two nesting pairs here, and the story is that the same birds come back year after year. They know where people come out of the dining room with plates of food. I met my first one flying right in front of my face as it was checking out what was in my hands. It turned out to be my mittens, so it didn't stick around. Notice that the bird is about the same color as the soil, which is volcanic rock.

There are "skua bins" in every building. Everyone is expected to sort their trash into food, recyclable paper, non-recyclyable paper (papertowels), plastic, glass, aluminum cans, other metal, etc. In our dorm there are 14 different bins. The janitors empty the bins and take everything to the Waste Dept or to "Skua Central," the building where all reusable items are available for anyone to take.

Skua Central is like a free Goodwill store. You just take anything you like. Most people here dress in Skua clothes, because the work here can be hard on personal clothes. I have several pairs of Skua jeans, and some shirts.

Finding parts for work can be a scavenging operation as well. Some parts locations are very well documented. Others, such as nuts and bolts, tend to be just thrown together. This makes me miss having a local hardware. It also makes me think of a hardware store employee who was listening to an old guy complain about the price of a screw. "Why, that's robbery. I have 20 of those at home," grumbled the old man.

"Yes," replied the employee very nicely,"but you can't find them, can you?" Here we find them eventually. When I get frustrated about how long it takes to find a part, I add up how long it would take me to drive to the hardware store at home and back, and decided that it's probably faster rummagine through the misc parts drawers in three buildings here! And there's no traffic congestion. In fact, no traffic!

Antarctica Inside

A friend commented, "National Geographic has already shown us what Antarctica is like outside. What's it like inside the buildings?"

This is the tiny little 8 x 13' dorm room that we share. To get more space, we took the doors off the 2 huge wardrobes and laid them on their sides. Then we made a platform with the doors. On that we put the mattresses. Bunk bed frames are wedged along the walls. Below is storage--accessible on hands and knees. Note the black-out curtain. That's how we turn on the night at 10 p.m. and turn on the day at 6 a.m.

Over 1000 people eat 3 meals a day in the dining room. The food is excellent, plentiful, and there's always something available to eat. Just yesterday we had fresh strawberries with the stems on. Imagine! Sunday brunch is like Club Med. Huge amounts of everything wonderful. The cold here has everyone eating more than normal.

The computer room is always a busy place. We have full email and internet access. Phone calls are local to Denver. Other LD calls are billed as if they're from Denver.

There are 3 bars, each in its own little building. This is our favorite because it's quieter than the others, though the Sat night card game gets pretty lively. Saturday is the only eve that most of us don't have work the next day.

This is the lecture hall in the Crary Science Center--where all the science projects are headquartered. On Sun and Wed evenings different scientists give presentations about the work they're doing here. It varies from penguin research to studying the composition (very slow) of the garbage that this place used to dump into the ocean. This last week the researcher that Pat's been working with showed slides of the creatures she finds below the many feet of ice. They're colorful like the tropics! Amazing.

IceHoles

This is a tractor-mounted rig setting up to drill just offshore from McMurdo Station. A large hole would normally not be drilled so close to a line of snowmobiles, but the drill location approval came first, and the machines were parked without checking the map. Principal Investigator, Stacy Kim, kept hoping one of them would fall in, so she would have a chance to photograph it on the bottom during her dive.





This is Pat scooping ice chips off the water after the rig is through. The ice here is eighteen feet thick, but the water comes up to within a foot of the top of the ice. Two feet of snow have been piled on top of the blue ice in the process of making the nearby main ice road going out from McMurdo, so the slush is three feet down, and devilishly hard to reach. It is necessary to clear the slush to keep the hole from freezing shut too quickly. This large hole will be used for diving in dry suits to investigate populations of critters on the bottom, and compare them to locations further away to gage whether any are being affected by activities at the station.

This is a ski-mounted hut parked above a slightly smaller hole about three miles away from McMurdo at a location known as Cape Armitage. this hole is being used to test a miniaturized remotely operated vehicle being built at a shop in McMurdo. The same Investigator, Stacy Kim, is in charge of this project because it will support her studies of sea-bottom life under the ice. The vehicle is known as SCINI. Check out the web site to learn what that stands for. http://scini.mlml.calstate.edu
Nice ride known as a Pisten Bully.


This is Pat removing the cover from a solar panel on the side of the hut. There is another one already open on the roof. These supply power for computers, fans, and radios. The hut is well heated by propane.

Ice Caves & Boots

This week we got to go on a special tour "out of town" to an ice cave which is inside a glacier. We slid on our butts to get into it. Then we could stand up. It was perfectly quiet in there except for a few ice crackles.
The cave had a cathedral-like feel.

Some of the formations were swirls.

To get to the cave we rode in a special vehicle for carrying 18 people across the sea ice. It has huge tires, and the ride is bouncy.

To go an excursion we have to have our extreme cold weather gear. Besides the red parka, there are huge white boots, called "bunny boots." They're bigger than Carol's steel-toed insulated work boots, but not as heavy. As a pair the work boots weigh 5 pounds. Last week I did my aerobic stepping workout wearing them. That's stepping up and down 100 times on each leg. A month ago I could barely get through a work day walking in them! For comparison, on the far right are regular ole Colorado hiking boots. Those used to seem mighty big and heavy, but now they're our day-off casual shoes.