Back from the Edge

I'm writing this from Auckland on my way back home!

I spent my last day at the Pole helping haul UPS batteries up and down the stairs of the building housing all the IceCube computers, including the servers which run my software. The power plant at the South Pole isn't perfect so we have Uninterruptible Power Supplies to get us through those few bad times. Those UPSes use batteries which must be replaced every 3 years and this is one of those years. 5-7 of us worked for over an hour to carry the new batteries upstairs and the old batteries downstairs. It was good to get out there since the only other time I'd been outside was when I walked from the plane into the station two days before.

The plane ride back to McMurdo was uneventful. We landed at about 8PM, bag-dragged at 10PM, then had to report for transport at 7:15AM.

The 7.5 hour flight from McMurdo to Christchurch was more cramped than I'm used to. I made sure to stand up every hour or so, just to keep the blood flowing to my legs :-)

I spent an extra day in Christchurch to try and catch up on sleep before the 27 hour journey back home. Only 24 hours to go before I'm back in Madison!

South Pole Selfie!

I've done the usual Hero Shot many times now but this is the first time I've had a smart phone at the Pole so I figured it was time for a Hero Selfie!

Starting back tomorrow

After a couple of VERY busy days, I'll start the journey back home tomorrow. I got a few small tasks done and helped the winter-overs with a couple of other things, but there's only so much you can do in 60 hours.

I've got a few more pictures to post and I'll take a few more tomorrow (including a "hero selfie" at the Pole) but barring weather or mechanical difficulties I'll be sleeping in a McMurdo dorm tomorrow, a Christchurch hotel room the next night, and then the 30-40 hour flights back home.

Even with all the difficulties and delays, it was good to come back to this place. I'm currently enjoying one of the little pleasures of life here, a room filled with wet laundry! As I've mentioned before, the South Pole is literally one of the driest places on Earth because it literally freezes the moisture out of the air. I washed some clothes for the 3-4 days of travel, hung up the pair of jeans and the socks in my room, and now it's wonderfully humid!

I'll let you know how the journey went (and maybe I'll manage to squeeze in another post from Christchurch)

Made it!

I'm at the South Pole station! We flew in a VERY packed plane and arrived after 11PM. We all sat through another orientation then got our room assignments. I dropped off my gear and backpack in my room and made up my bed, headed to the galley for a glass of lemonade (but no cookie!), then picked up my suitcase (which I hadn't seen in over a week) and went back to my room. It's almost 12:30AM now and I've got a VERY busy few days ahead of me before I turn around and head back home!

The next update may have to wait until I make it back to McMurdo, but I might squeeze in one more blog post before then.

Scott Base

Last Thursday was America Night at Scott Base, the New Zealand base that's located just over the hill from McMurdo Base. Americans are only allowed to visit a couple of times a week because there are less that 100 Kiwis and nearly 1000 people at McMurdo.

There are shuttles which run between the two bases on America Night, but a bunch of us decided to make the 15-20 minute walk there. It was snowing, and instead of the normal ice crystals I've seen here in the past, there were nice, fluffy snowflakes! Most of the hike is on the service road, but once you get near the base, there's a walking path which saves 5-10 minutes of walking.

All the buildings at Scott Base are painted light green, and most of them are connected to one another with walkways. It looks *much* nicer than McMurdo which, as I've written before, has an isolated mining camp look and feel.

One of the big attractions of Scott Base is their store, which has Kiwi-themed clothing and souvenirs. It's cozy and very busy on America Night! There's also a bar which Americans can visit only on Thursdays.

Fun weather effect

Walking over to Crary this morning, I saw something I'd never seen before.

There were these little flickers of light, maybe a couple of dozen per second, spread across my visual field. It was like old-time TV static, but in real life.

I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing at first but when I turned my head it was obvious what was going on. The wind was blowing toward me and (unbeknownst to me) there were extremely tiny ice crystals blowing in the wind. They were too small to see and invisible head-on except when they'd occasionally reflect the sunlight for an instant. When I turned my head, I was looking away from the sun so the crystals were all catching the light and I could see them streaming past. When I looked straight ahead, only a tiny fraction were reflecting light toward me so I'd only see momentary flashes of light.

It was nice to have a freaky optical illusion to liven up the 3 minute walk to "work".

The weather forecast tomorrow for both McMurdo and the Pole looks good. I'm hoping that this will be the last day I spend in Crary this year! That's the exterior of Crary with the usual vehicles you'd see parked in front of any normal office building :-)

Advanced calculus

It's Thanksgiving Day on the U.S. Antarctic bases, and of course that means people running a 5K Turkey Trot, even in Antarctica. Everyone normally works a 6-day week, then has Sunday off. For holidays we also get Saturday off and the galley prepares a special evening meal. This means there's no hot lunch service, but that just means being able to eat more food at dinner :-)

Since everyone has Saturday and Sunday off, that means no flights in or out of McMurdo. The IceCube winter-overs were supposed to leave the continent 20 days ago, but the weather here has been bad so they're still stranded. After a year of planning what they'll do after they leave the ice, it's got to be EXTREMELY frustrating to be here 3 weeks later.

I'm doing my own sort of "travel math". I was scheduled to be at Pole for 17 days. We were delayed in Christchurch for a full week and I've been in McMurdo for a week. I'm scheduled to start my journey back from Pole on Thursday, 5 days from now.

If we fly on Monday I'll still be able to do a few useful administrative things which are dangerous to perform over a satellite link. Those links can die unexpectedly, and my changes might leave the detector in an unusable state until the satellite link came back so I've been saving a few tasks until I had a direct connection to the machines there.

If we fly on Tuesday or Wednesday, my main purpose will be package delivery. My checked bag contains an instrument that a co-worker needs at Pole, and that bag has been sitting at the bottom of a shrink-wrapped pallet somewhere a the cargo warehouse.

If we don't fly on Tuesday, I'll have to go up to Cargo and warn them that if the Wednesday flight is canceled, I'll need my bag pulled so I can hand the package to someone else. If that happens, I'll just hang around McMurdo until Friday, when I'm scheduled to fly back to "Cheech" (the common nickname for Christchurch). Of course, given the weather this season I'm also mentally preparing myself to spend next weekend stuck here in "paradise" :-(

Entering the Forbidden Zone

Yesterday I ticked off another McMurdo tourist spot, Discovery Hut. This was the first hut used by Scott on his expeditions to Antarctica, and it still holds supplies from those original missions!

When you enter the hut, you're greeted by the slightly stale straw scent that I associate with my grandparents' barn. This was fodder for the ill-fated ponies that accompanied Scott. The guide mentioned that some of the building's outer corners have teeth marks from where the ponies tried nibbling on the wooden posts.

Further in you'll find seal and penguin carcasses along with lots of boxes and tins in surprisingly good condition for having been left here over a century ago.

I've posted pictures before of the seal carcass outside the hut, but I learned a bit more of its story during the tour. This poor seal crawled up and took shelter next to the hut before it died. It's been here so long that it's now considered a protected Antarctic Heritage artifact!

Arrivals (and departures?)

While I was at last night's safety lecture, a plane from Christchurch arrived with a few more people I knew. Afterward, I discovered that all the people headed for Pole (including the new people) were scheduled to fly the next day! ("Scheduled" doesn't mean we *will* fly, but it was more than I expected after the past couple of weeks.)

For an introvert like me, McMurdo is a little grueling for long stays because there aren't many quiet, comfortable places to get away from everyone. I sleep in a dorm room with 3 other beds and the Crary library is actually a large open room with areas which act like a conference room, break room, and presentation space, so it can be pretty noisy. I can handle it for a few days, but I've been in transit for a couple of weeks and I'm starting to feel the psychic stress of being constantly surrounded by people.

It had been a long day so I decided to treat myself to a quiet night in my room, watching video. I'd previously had a single roommate in my 4-person room but two bags of bedding had shown up in our room, a sign that we'd soon have interlopers! I'd barely started an episode of Doctor Who (because I'm that kind of nerd) when Perry showed up. He's another long-time IceCube person so we chatted while he made up his bed and unpacked. Once he'd set up his area of the room, he left to get some food and I turned back to my video.

I barely made it to the 5 minute mark when the other new roommate came in. He's a scientist/computer geek from New Jersey, so we talked tech and Antarctic life while he went through the same routine as Perry. He mentioned that he hoped to use the Wifi in Crary, but I knew the authentication process has changed this year so I volunteered to go over and help him get online. It only took a few minutes to get him online so I was back in the room 15 minutes after we'd left.

A few more minutes into my video, my roommate Neil (who is also headed for Pole) came in and while he gathered his things and prepared for the next morning, we talked about the likelihood that we'd actually be flying the next day. While that was going on, Perry came back and started getting ready for bed, because he'd had a long day, it was already 10:30PM and we had to be at the Cargo building by 7:30AM the next morning.

My quiet evening turned into a pretty social one, but I'm hopeful that I'll soon be back to the comforting solitude of the South Pole :-)

Another day

I did a full day's work today, the first in two weeks! I spent the day in Crary library and made some good progress on my current project, which feels satisfying.

There have been three successful LC-130 flights to the Pole this season. Some of my co-workers were supposed to be on the fourth flight but have been delayed for a couple of weeks, and their flight today was cancelled again. Ours will be the fifth flight, but it won't leave until the day after the fourth flight successfully lands at Pole. The people on the sixth Pole flight are en route to McMurdo right now, so they're stacking up!

If you're reading this via Facebook and posting questions or comments for me, I apologize but I probably won't be able to read them. I've tried to check both Facebook and Twitter but both sites time out before anything loads :-(

I'm cutting this post short because I'm about to go to *another* safety lecture. This one is the outdoor safety lecture which is required before we're allowed to venture off-station. If I'm stuck here for too much longer, I may try one of the long hikes!

Another night in paradise

They cancelled our bag drag last night less than an hour before we were expected at Cargo, but I didn't check the flight schedule so I (and a few other people) hauled our stuff up the hill then hauled it back down again. The weather's turned bad again so they'll probably cancel again.

The bad news is that it looks like the weather will continue to be bad for at least a couple of days and the math is looking increasingly bad for me. My return flight from Christchurch is scheduled for Dec 2, so I'd need to leave Pole by Nov 30 at the latest. My time is slipping away!

The good news is that I've now got everything I need to live in McMurdo for the next few days. I spent the morning getting my computer set up to access the Wifi network in Crary Labs library, a quiet place with decent tables and chairs. I also got a keycard so I can get into Crary after 5PM because it looks like I'll be spending at least a few days here.

In order to get the keycard, I was required to take a safety tour. The building is home to most of the scientists who work out of McMurdo and it has working chemistry and biology labs, some which use hazardous chemicals. The safety tour was mainly aimed at pointing out the various hazards in the building and the locations of first aid kits, emergency showers, etc. I'd never gone on the tour before so it was (surprisingly) interesting!

The tour ended on the lowest floor in the marine biology room which has several active experiments. The most interesting one involved rock cod (I think?) which make up 90% of the ocean biomass down here. These fish thrive in the polar waters because they have a compound in their blood that acts like antifreeze. Due to global warming, other species are starting to invade their territory, so scientists are studying how the fish are affected. They've also got several smaller (bathtub-sized) tanks with successively warmer water to study how the fish will react to the warming ocean water.

There's also a "touch tank" filled with small creatures from the nearby bay. The tank's water is continuously refreshed with water pumped directly from the bay, so it's near freezing, but if you're willing to brave the frigid water, you can reach in and touch the sea spiders, sea lice, and other small harmless creatures. The sea spiders and sea lice are found in other parts of the world, but they grow HUGE down here, and scientists are trying to figure out why. One hypothesis is that their metabolism is slowed down in the freezing water so they live much longer than normal.

One of the most fun features of Antartica is that you can't even get a safety lecture without hearing about really cool science!!!

Mactown Blues

After a week of trying, we finally made it to the coast of Antarctica! We landed at the snow runway outside McMurdo base last night at around 6PM, loaded onto the transport vehicle (which looks roughly like a shipping container with windows, wheels, and seats) and settled in for the 45 minute trip. After a 40 minute introductory briefing we got our room keys and network login information. By the time I'd helped a couple of newbies find their rooms, dumped all my stuff in my corner of the 4-person dorm room and made my bed, it was already 9:30PM. I went down to the galley, had a cookie and some juice, and was asleep before 10:30PM.

Today I was up before 8AM and went to the galley to do some work. I was surprised to find one of the people from my group there, because I knew they'd planned on meeting at 10:30PM to have some beers and didn't think they'd be awake until brunch started at 10AM! More of our group streamed in throughout the morning so I spent the morning eating and chatting instead of working :-)

Due to various problems I couldn't get online, which meant I couldn't do my work, so at about 1:30PM I gave up and took a nap.

When I woke up, I headed up the hill to the Cargo building to find my checked bags. It was bright and sunny when I went into the building, but when I left 15 minutes later a storm was blowing in. The forecast says we'll have bad weather for the next couple of days, but we're still scheduled for "bag drag" at 7PM, when they'll weigh us and our luggage. They'll take our checked luggage and we won't get it back until we arrive at Pole, so I've made sure to pull out everything I need to survive for another 4-5 days here in Mactown.

I have to go eat now so I'm done before the 7PM bag drag. Hope your November is going better than mine :-)

Less pessimistic

Quick entry today. My bags are checked in and in about 15 minutes they'll show us the orientation films, then if all goes well we'll board the plane to McMurdo!

I didn't post anything yesterday because I was totally exhausted. When we all met for supper last night, virtually everyone else reported the same thing. Spirits are much higher today :-)

Rumors say that there's a flight scheduled for Pole tomorrow, so there's a chance that we'll only spend one night in McMurdo. That would be a nice change of pace for this trip :-)

Boeing?

Today's rumor is that we're flying out tomorrow, that there are ~140 people stacked up in Christchurch, and that they're borrowing a Boeing commercial aircraft from the Australians to fly everyone to McMurdo.

Unfortunately, the *other* rumor is that weather at Pole looks bad for the next several days so if we fly tomorrow we'll be stuck again for several days. The fun never stops!

Since I may be going to the land of lower bandwidth, I'll dump some more Christchurch pictures. There's *LOTS* of fun street art around town, alongside all the destroyed buildings.

This was taken from my hotel window but there are loads of examples around town :-(

Best of a bad situation

We're still in limbo in Christchurch. I really can't complain since there are winter-overs at Pole who have been looking forward to seeing something other than snow for over a year, but they're still trapped at Pole. The guys stuck at McMurdo can't do any remote work and can't stray too far from the station because of the bad weather. If you want to check out the current weather at McMurdo, there's a live webcam feed!

I'm mostly doing work today. This morning I pampered myself a bit and had a less than healthy breakfast from a coffee shop appropriately named The Void.

Keeping with that theme, for lunch we're going to Hell (a pizza-by-the-slice place a few blocks away).

Hanging in CHC

I woke up at 4:30AM as usual and at 4:40AM got the call that we'd been delayed for 3 hours. At 7AM I grabbed all my stuff and checked out, then went to wait for the 7:15 shuttle. Someone there told the flight had been cancelled but the hotel had already booked our rooms for the night (it's Trotting Cup Day) so we'd have to move. Luckily a co-worker hadn't checked out yet so I stashed my bag in her room and we went to a coffee shop to eat and kill time until 10AM, when we found out we'd be moving to the Crowne Plaza in the City Center. It's a new hotel in a better location so quite an improvement over the Pavilions.

The group of WIPAC people I'm travelling with are going to another venerable institution this evening, Dux Central! This is the new version of Dux DeLux (pictured here -->), a casualty of the 2011 earthquake. The old Dux was a much-loved gathering place for people travelling to and from the Pole featuring great beer and great vegetarian food so I'm looking forward to seeing if the new version measures up to the original.

Unfortunately there was some bad news on the rumor mill. People here and co-workers in McMurdo have both heard that a 3-day storm is moving in, and that there probably won't be any more flights until Friday or Saturday -- it's Tuesday here since we're on the other side of the International Date Line from the U.S. I'm sure we'll still need to get up every morning at an ungodly hour just in case the weather clears, but it's much better than staying in McMurdo!

Hurry up and wait

I woke up at 4:30AM to get ready but 10 minutes later the hotel called to let me know that the flight was delayed for 3 hours. At 7:40 they called again to say the day's flight had been cancelled. This is not unusual early in the season, but it would have been nice to reach the next point in the trip. On the positive side, being in Christchurch means I've got my own private hotel room with WiFi. In McMurdo I'll be sharing a room with at least 5 other people and Internet connections are only available via Ethernet -- there are too many experiments which would be disrupted by wireless signals.

A couple of my co-workers were supposed to be at the Pole a week ago, but their flights have been cancelled every day so they've been trapped in McMurdo. These guys have hardware-related tasks at Pole so losing a week puts them behind schedule. I'm going there mainly to provide support for the new winter-overs and to do a few tasks that would be difficult or cause us to lose data if I lost the satellite connection while things were only partially completed.

I'll probably stay close to my room today, trying to get some work done. While I was in transit some scientists tried to do some unusual operations with the detector which caused problems with my software so I'm hoping to dig into the log files and figure out what went wrong.

The picture above is a statue honoring Robert Scott, the British explorer who lost the race to the South Pole and died on the return trip. It was carved by his widow in the early 1900s. During the 2011 earthquake it was knocked off its pedestal and broke in half. They're still working on restoring it but it looks like they're getting close to finishing!

Some people never learn

I'm on my way back to the Pole!

I left Madison Thursday morning and 38 hours later I was in my hotel in Christchurch. There was a bit of confusion on the last leg on my flight from Auckland to Christchurch but the trip was otherwise as uneventful as any globe-spanning can be.




I made the pilgrimage to Christchurch's City Center which was almost completely destroyed by the 2011 earthquake. Much of the area is still fenced off and/or propped up but there are finally signs of progress which weren't there during my last trip in 2013.

I'm off to dinner now, then I need to repack and get ready for my 4:30AM wake-up call. If all goes well, our 6AM flight will land at McMurdo base in Antarctica!