About six weeks ago, I flew out from McMurdo in a New Zealand Air Force passenger plane. In a town full of military equipment, unique custom vehicles, and exotic polar retrofits, the passenger plane seemed quite pedestrian. The plane was only distinguishable from a commercial airliner by the exterior paint job (matte gray) and the […]
Over the last weeks, we’ve installed sites along the periphery of the Ross Ice Shelf. At Windless Bight, we drove a Pisten Bully into the spectacular sheltered corner of the ice shelf that lies cupped under the glacial slopes of Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. At Minna Bluff, we were dropped on a rocky peninsula […]
McMurdo Station provides logistical support for operations across the continent. The food, fuel, and humans at the South Pole arrive via LC-130 cargo planes and traverse tractors from McMurdo. Numerous small field camps are staged from McMurdo and reached via helicopter, LC-130, or ski-equipped Twin Otters. The Italian and New Zealand Antarctic programs also depend […]
Coming into the galley alone, I plunked down at a table with another guy who was sitting by himself. A retired schoolteacher from Montezuma, Iowa, my table mate Paul had first come down ten or fifteen years ago in a “teacher experience” program. After his retirement from teaching, he returned to work in the McMurdo […]
Our day began with an epic battery haul. The helicopter landed in a rock-ringed clearing on the beach. Looking out to sea, small waves ran up a dark sandy shore, and open water extended for a mile offshore before reaching a wide band of pack ice. Inland, a steep tan hillside of dusty scree and […]
We had a great instrument installation at Minna Bluff yesterday. The Minna Bluff peninsula is about 15 miles long, a half mile wide, and three thousand feet tall. On one side, rocky cliffs fall thousands of feet to the ice shelf. The steep drop is laid in with snow drifts and would be an epic […]
With the ozone instrument in place at Marble Point, we collected and re-packed our tools, spare equipment and clothes. We assembled our gear into a tidy cargo line about forty feet from the helicopter clearing and radioed for a pickup. We had about forty minutes to appreciate the remarkable area where we’d spent the last […]
Check out this timelapse of our installation at Marble Point. Behind us, the surface of a glacier bends to the ground in a steep curve. The second segment shows the view northward towards open water.Link at: http://youtu.be/1gj11pjqs0M
Today we deployed our first ozone monitoring system. Arriving early at the helicopter terminal to weigh ourselves in (198 lbs, including parka, helmet and pack), we loaded our equipment (1400 lbs, including 12 lead-acid car batteries) into a Bell 212 (Huey) helicopter. Inside the helo, with the whine of the turbines increasing in pitch, and […]
McMurdo Station is located on a slender peninsula extending from the southern side of Ross Island. At this point in the spring, the sea to the west is covered by a thin crust of first-year sea ice, while to the east the sea lies under the Ross Ice Shelf, a thick layer of freshwater ice […]
Trash sorting is a big deal in McMurdo. Napkins get separated from office paper and put in ‘Paper Towels’, unless the napkins are contaminated with food, in which case they go with ‘Food Waste’, which is shipped back to the US under refrigeration. Thick metal is isolated from light metal, but small metal bits go […]
On the sea ice stretching from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, dozens of seals lounge in the 24-hour sun. They just seem to lay motionlessly, digesting their fish and napping. Why don’t we see them moving around? Do they ever move?We get scientific and make a 12-hour time lapse (1 min frames). So… do seals move?
Scientists and support staff who leave McMurdo Station, Antarctica for the field undergo outdoor safety training. The two-day Happy Camper course covered basic skills in outdoor survival, group dynamics, and field skills. While some aspects of the course took place in a classroom, the field component was the most stimulating. On the wide, featureless landscape […]
Link at: http://youtu.be/8hu9xxFqqkI
To be certified to leave the safety of McMurdo base, Pat and I will be going through wilderness survival training, or ‘Happy Camper’. At some points in our deployment, we’ll be dropped off by helicopter in remote locations. If a storm were to come in and prevent the helicopter from returning to pick us up, […]
Most of our working hours will be divided between our laboratory (below) and a Field Staging Area (above), which is an indoor utility room with loading dock access. These rooms are part of Crary Science, an unusual building on a steep hillside. Three long, parallel structures run level along the hillside, while a hallway-like staircase […]
For the last day, eerie sweeps of fog passed over McMurdo. The photo above looks north towards the open ocean across thin sea ice. In the foreground, a curving crack reveals open water. In the photo below, the hundred-year-old Discovery Hut stands with a few modern structures faintly visible behind in the fog.
Lars and I took a walk on the evening of our first full day in town. We headed down to Hut Point, where the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 expedition built Discovery Hut. We peered through the small glass windows and could see shelves still stocked with ancient boxes of “Cabin Biscuits” and baking […]
A couple of flight delays left us with an extra night in Christchurch. I was grateful for the extra time and slept hard. Our aircraft was changed to a LC-130 Hercules, a ski-equipped version of the classic 4-turboprop workhouse of military aviation. We were given the first of many briefings, boarded the LC-130, and like […]
We skidded down the ice sheet runway late Thursday evening on a C-130 cargo plane. The natural landscape is spectacular and town is a amazing, dirty logistical machine. Pipelines and heavy equipment are everywhere. In front of town, a long crack in the sea ice has opened the way for dozens of seals. I will […]
With a long flight across the Pacific, a few days on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand, and a brief logistical stop in Christchurch, Lars, Pat and I began our journey to McMurdo Station, Antarctica.Extending northward from the New Zealand North Island, the Coromandel Peninsula is a humid, lush region of towering fern trees, steep […]
