The much-anticipated date, marked on the calendar and discussed for weeks, passes without event. January 28: a sunrise to break the spell of the polar night. I awake under overcast skies, spend a distracted Saturday scanning the southern horizon, and spot only low cloud banks. The 29th: more clouds. In the long midday stretch, a radio call breaks the silence. It’s Marissa, a kilometer […]
At a remote boundary, three-hundred miles distant, the broad expanse of the Greenland Ice Sheet comes to an end. There, on mountainous coastal margins, in steep-walled fjords, and in tremendous glacial valleys, ice cedes to ocean and rock. The powerful dynamism of this ice landscape is apparent in the rugged interface of calving fronts, crevasse zones, ice falls and steep termini. Yet the ice in […]
The sun rose today, cold and low. Far to the south, it broke the horizon, revealing just its upper edge, and within an hour it had set again. As I write, it’s the thirteen of November, and the sun won’t be back until the twenty-eighth of January.In some ways, the sun had already abandoned this part […]
And then there were thirty-one. Last week brought the arrival of the first LC-130 of the season: replacement parts and science gear, fresh vegetables and dairy, and the big summer crew. We’d prepared for this flight for weeks: grooming the skiway, erecting tents and positioning the mobile bunkhouse, digging buried equipment out from the winter storage berm, […]
In every direction, it’s ice and sky. Save for the camp itself–a few buildings, a loose scatter of science towers and bamboo flags–there’s not a landmark around. Instead, we look out on the ever-changing horizon. The interplay of weather, snow texture, and sunlight recasts the horizon with infinite variations. A crisp line, a subtle gradient, a broad sweep […]
With a ceaseless rustle, tiny snow grains tumble across the ice sheet. Dunes reach towards the building eves, footprints are obliterated, spindrift curls around corners and floods inside the moment a door is cracked. In the turbulent approach to the buildings, the wind-blown snow is chaotic and fierce, its energy concentrated, and the first steps into a […]
Far out along a flag line, movement. If it’s a bird, it’d be the first of the spring. Couldn’t be our crew–all inside except me. The arrival of a polar bear is highly unlikely, however disturbing. Then what? I squat down, eyes still on the flag line, and watch in disbelief as the flag line itself warps […]
My fellow Summit science techs, Jason and Marci, have a basic grounding in my duties. And I have a few days experience with their tasks. This cross-training allows us some flexibility, in case one of us got sick or needed a hand during a busy period. On our cross-training days, instead of heading out to the TAWO lab as […]
With a few shorthand scratches, I logged the height of the last of 121 bamboo poles, then tucked away my clipboard and headed back towards my stash of gear. There had been no accumulation or scouring since last I’d measured–no change in the reach of these poles above the snow surface–and I’d skied out along perfectly crisp ski tracks from the […]
Socks, underwear, radiosonde. After getting dressed, my first task is the morning weather sounding. Always before breakfast, often before exchanging a single word for the day, I’m in the balloon lab, preparing a small atmospheric instrument. Then waiting in the shop, leaning against a snowmobile and listening to the loud rush of helium. Performing a sequence of knots, […]
We awoke earlier this month to find camp scattered with yukimarimo. These delicate, wind-blown balls of snow occur in perfect conditions of surface frost, static electricity, and breeze. Scattering before the wind like tiny creatures, they’re the closest thing to wildlife we’ve seen this season. Moving equipment out of the Big House, Grey and I headed […]
I loosen my belt, and lean across the aircraft to look down on the sea ice below. Cold air hisses through the leaking seals in the rear hatch just behind me, but we’re in our arctic garb–heavy bibs, thick flannel shirts, absurdly bulky boots–and the temperature feels fine. For hours, we’ve kept a strange, silent […]
On the eastern outskirt of the station rises a big aluminum lattice: the 50-meter tower. Always at the corner of your vision, it draws attention, catching the light on its reflective surface, or shedding brilliant rime crystals in a gust of wind. In the continuous daylight of the summer months, a long shadow extends from […]
In the running for my proudest achievements during the spring months at Summit Station: shoveling out a buried cargo pallet with sixteen Jet-Assisted Take Off units: JATO rockets. In the long weeks of April flight delays, when the possibility was raised at dinnertime that we’d never get a flight, and so be stranded on the […]
I work at the Mobile Science Facility–the MSF. It’s a tan building, which sits about 400 meters to the east of station. It’s full of science equipment, which makes it loud with fans, and it’s warm inside. There is a wooden roof deck, accessed by a fixed ladder, with even more science equipment on top: […]
Since the first flight of the spring, there’s been a constant arrival and exodus of folks from station. Carpenters, camp staff, and the blur of science groups. But the small core of the winter crew has remained stable.That changed at the last flight. About two weeks ago, my four winter cohorts departed. We’d been a […]
After weeks of flight delays, the situation at camp began to feel a bit absurd. We had sat down to our final Saturday dinner as a 6-man crew: steak and lobster, the fanciest thing we could find in the freezer trench. But that had been three weeks ago, and we’d been repeating the last-Saturday ritual […]
The construction crew and new camp staff arrived on station almost two weeks ago, and we’ve been in a relentless push to make the most of the summer season. The freshie shack is once again replete with fruits and vegetables, and we’ve been eating delicious fresh greens and fruit salads: food now prepared by a […]
The last sunset was four days ago, and the sun climbs yet higher each day. Gone are the long hours of polychromatic twilight and the spectacular auroral displays in the darkness. These phenomena of the winter and spring seasons have been replaced by the phenomena of the full sun and the nearly daily appearance of […]
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 […]
From the fine frost of the surface, a small, soft ball takes shape. A cluster of neighboring crystals is drawn together by static attraction, and begins to coalesce in a light wind. Then like a tiny frost tumbleweed, the cluster breaks free from the surface and begins a wind-impelled odyssey. In its brief peripatetic existence, […]
A geomagnetic storm has lit the night skies with aurora. Two nights ago, a spectacular tall curtain of light hung to the south of camp, with parallel bands running across the sky. In person, one could just discern some coloration in the bands–a bright green stripe, then a faint, reddish glow that faded upwards, then […]
The wind is blowing. All the loose snow for three hundred miles is up in the air, and you can barely see a thing. The whole station is just a network of flag lines stretching into the opaque distance. When the visibility is like this, we follow these flag lines–bamboo pole after bamboo pole, flags […]
The ice sheet wants to consume this research station. Amid the swirls on a windy night, tendrils of snow seek across the surface, reaching for imperfections in the flat expanse. Some of our buildings have been found, captured by the drifts, and are being swallowed by the ice sheet. With time, they will be drawn […]
