Old Stuff

Carol and Pat are leaving in early October to work four and a half months at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, about 600 miles from the South Pole. It took 2 years to get these jobs. Carol will be working as a boiler mechanic on the building heat systems burning arctic-grade jet fuel. Pat will be a galley slave in the dining room, but it is the second time around. He was an engineer there in 1991-1992. All the pictures in this post are from that earlier trip.

Above is a New Zealand Air Force cargo plane landing on the ice at McMurdo on the first of December, 1991. We'll be there for the Antarctic Summer, so much of the ice will melt, including this the plane has landed on. Temperatures in January will be similar to those in Denver at the same time, but the Sun will not set for more than four months.

Photos above and below are McMurdo. Check out the lack of snow on the ground. Carol may be working in any of the forty buildings, or maybe all of them at one time or another. We expect to live in a two-person room in a dorm known as the Hotel California. We requested an ocean-side room, as if we are going to Club Med. In the photo below, the brown building at the lower left is the hut of Robert Falcon Scott, the famous explorer of the early 1900's. New Zealand maintains it as a National Historic Site.
In the picture above, the large dark square between hut and ship is the harbor pier. It is a floating slab of ice about twenty feet thick, and is anchored to shore by huge steel chains. The dark top is volcanic ash used to protect and insulate the ice itself.
These are icicles formed on a rock near shore as the ocean tides rise and fall.
This is a dormant cinder-cone volcano right on the edge of Mc Murdo. The bare ground all around the Station is chunky volcanic ash.
The mountain in the distance is the active volcano Mt. Erebus, the core of Ross Island. McMurdo is on Ross Island about 25 miles from the summit of Erebus, not the mainland. However, it is connected to the mainland by the perpetual Ross Ice Shelf. A little plume of steam attached to the summit shows its activity. The broken ice forms in the foreground are pressure ridges formed as tides push softening Spring ice against the shore. Earlier in the season, this area was flat.
The Icebreaker Polar Star, over 300 feet long, comes into harbor after breaking up the ice in McMurdo sound in January '92. Note the round-bottomed bow, designed to ride up onto the ice, and break it by pushing down with the weight of the ship.
This is Pat standing by the Russian research ship which was his ride back north at the end of the season. The big red down-stuffed parka is part of the standard-issue cold weather gear. The beard is optional equipment from three months of not shaving.
A view of Mc Murdo Station from the ship as it leaves for a five-day passage across the Southern Ocean to New Zealand at the end of February '92. The ship is at approximately the location of the cargo plane landing shown in the first picture in this post. Remembering earlier pictures showing completely bare ground, notice the first snow of the fash-approaching winter of '92.
On the way out, still within the Ross Sea, this is a formation known as "pancake ice".
This tabular iceberg close on the right broke off from a much larger floating ice sheet seen further away on the left.
These are some of the high seas encountered halfway through the 2500 miles to New Zealand.