The six of us on station have been putting in long days, as we prepare for the influx of cargo and crew. Pretty beat at the end of a punishing Saturday, I was bound for my bunk. But even in an exhausted state–or maybe especially so–the spectacle of spindrift moving into the evening sun was […]
A second, yet-fiercer wind storm battered camp over the past two days. Our Green House berthing was completely captured by the dunes, and we climbed in and out of the building through a roof hatch. Our living quarters started to seem like a rabbit warren: we live in an underground network of once-separate buildings, now […]
Heavy winds pour across the ice sheet, engulfing the research station in a dense haze of wind-blown particles. In the observatory, an instrument fails–its bleak messages appear on my computer. Jason and Yuki volunteer to accompany me for the half-kilometer walk, and we strike out along the flag line, raising our faces into the wind […]
About once a month, the other two techs head out to a grid of bamboo poles, carrying a box of brightly colored twine and a pair of scissors. Right down at the snow surface, they tie off one of the strings, and run it onward, girdling each set of four poles. Clip it off, and […]
Nothing spoils a good day of snow sampling like looking upwind to see a bulldozer lumbering by, broadcasting diesel-reeking soot all over the sample site. To maintain Summit’s utility as a clean sampling area, the vast region to southeast of the TAWO observatory building is off-limits to human travel or to equipment operations. Under the […]
