Well, I'm about midway through my first season in Antarctica, so I've decided to take a little time to review some of the highlights of my season thus far:
Sea Ice Training: For sea ice training we went out in a hagglund, a tracked amphibious vehicle, although the one we were in probably hasn't been able to keep water out for about ten years. The purpose of the training was to teach us how to profile cracks in the ice so that we could tell if they were safe to cross with a vehilce. Using kovack drills, we measured the thickness of the ice, and how wide the crack was. Most of the ice where we were was about six feet deep. At the end of the day we had the treat of being able to go inside an ice cave inside the Eurubus glacier toungh. The ice formations inside were incredibly beutifull.
Happy Camper: Another training. For this one we learned how to construct snow shelters and some basic Antarctic survival skills, then spent the night in tents or snow shelters. I chose to spend the night in a tent, and for the most part had a pretty warm night. Around one a.m. the wind picked up and started shaking the walls of my tent, which we covered in ice from the frozen condensation of my breath, so I got woken up with a nice shower of ice. When I got up in the morning, there was about a -40 degree windchill outside of my tent. We then did radio and whiteout training as I tried to retain feeling in my hands. I had the pleasure of completing my happy camper with two members of the BBC team down here filming a new series, Frozen Planet. The two that I met were Jeff Wilson and Mark Smith. If you watch the special fetures on the "Mountains" episode of Planet Earth, you'll see that they were the ones that filmed the famous snow leppord scene. Overall, it was a great experience.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
STOP..... Tanker Time!
Today our crew went to a fuels briefing for Tanker Offload. I capitalized the event because vessel season (for a couple three weeks starting in mid- to late-January, where various ships come into Winter Quarters Bay and remind us that McMurdo is, indeed, an oceanfront town) is the most exciting time of the season. It's probably the most stressful time, and it's at the end of the season, so everyone's chomping at the bit to go home.
Tanker Offload is the name we give to the 4 or 5 days of setting up hoses, pipelines, and valves to offload a BUNCH (5 million gallons) of fuel from the fuel tanker ship into our bulk tanks on station. People are working on offload 24 hours a day from before the boat gets here until after it leaves. The GA's are, like always, the temp workers, and Alex Morris (the station Fuels Supervisor) will be taking 3 of us for the dayshift and 3 for nights. They are 12-hr days, beginning at 0545 (that's 5:45am for you civilians) and ending at 1745 (5:45pm). Read = time of massive exhaustion. It looks like if I'm here for tanker (and there's a chance that I won't be because I'm going to WAIS divide next week), I may end up on the night shift, which means I get two days off to "transition to nights" and some time to transition back. We'll see.
The GA's will have 3 jobs during tanker offload: walking the line, dipping tanks, and manning the pier valves. Walking the line is exactly what it sounds like - we walk alongside the hard fuel lines for about 1.2 miles (each way) from the tanker at the ice pier to the bulk tanks at the top of the hill overlooking town. And then we walk down again. FOR 12 HOURS. My iPod will be getting charged a lot if I end up being a linewalker.
Dipping the tank is how we measure how much fuel is in a fuel tank; we use a special tape measure with a weighted bar and thermometer at the bottom, drop it to exactly the bottom of the tank, then read the tape like you'd read an oil dipstick in a car. This seems simple, but does take some finesse. Firstly, the tape is flexible, so if you don't pay attention to exactly when the weight just kisses the bottom of the tank (and for a Madagascar 2 reference, "just a little kiss, like you're kissing your sister"), it will fold down and ruin your reading. And, a fuel-soaked tape and a dry tape look very similar, and if you don't have a guess within a few inches of where the transition from shiny black tape to slightly less shiny black tape is, and you don't have a very clear, sunny day but not too sunny and no wind, it's easy to miss. We are in Antarctica, so you can imagine the chances of a perfect day.
The last task is manning the pier valves. There are 6 valves (if I remember correctly) on hard metal fuel lines at the pier. During tanker, we'll run soft hose from those valves onto the boat. If you're lucky, you will watch the valves for 12 hours and nothing will happen. If you're unlucky, something will happen and you will have a spill or leak on your hands. It's one of those low-probability but high-consequence situations where it really is worth having someone there if something goes awry, because there's about 800 gallons of fuel per minute going through those lines.
Fuel tanker will be exciting, I think, despite the horrendous hours, monotonous tasks, and immense responsibility. Plus we get to carry radios and say things like "Roger that" and "over." Isn't that enough?
Tanker Offload is the name we give to the 4 or 5 days of setting up hoses, pipelines, and valves to offload a BUNCH (5 million gallons) of fuel from the fuel tanker ship into our bulk tanks on station. People are working on offload 24 hours a day from before the boat gets here until after it leaves. The GA's are, like always, the temp workers, and Alex Morris (the station Fuels Supervisor) will be taking 3 of us for the dayshift and 3 for nights. They are 12-hr days, beginning at 0545 (that's 5:45am for you civilians) and ending at 1745 (5:45pm). Read = time of massive exhaustion. It looks like if I'm here for tanker (and there's a chance that I won't be because I'm going to WAIS divide next week), I may end up on the night shift, which means I get two days off to "transition to nights" and some time to transition back. We'll see.
The GA's will have 3 jobs during tanker offload: walking the line, dipping tanks, and manning the pier valves. Walking the line is exactly what it sounds like - we walk alongside the hard fuel lines for about 1.2 miles (each way) from the tanker at the ice pier to the bulk tanks at the top of the hill overlooking town. And then we walk down again. FOR 12 HOURS. My iPod will be getting charged a lot if I end up being a linewalker.
Dipping the tank is how we measure how much fuel is in a fuel tank; we use a special tape measure with a weighted bar and thermometer at the bottom, drop it to exactly the bottom of the tank, then read the tape like you'd read an oil dipstick in a car. This seems simple, but does take some finesse. Firstly, the tape is flexible, so if you don't pay attention to exactly when the weight just kisses the bottom of the tank (and for a Madagascar 2 reference, "just a little kiss, like you're kissing your sister"), it will fold down and ruin your reading. And, a fuel-soaked tape and a dry tape look very similar, and if you don't have a guess within a few inches of where the transition from shiny black tape to slightly less shiny black tape is, and you don't have a very clear, sunny day but not too sunny and no wind, it's easy to miss. We are in Antarctica, so you can imagine the chances of a perfect day.
The last task is manning the pier valves. There are 6 valves (if I remember correctly) on hard metal fuel lines at the pier. During tanker, we'll run soft hose from those valves onto the boat. If you're lucky, you will watch the valves for 12 hours and nothing will happen. If you're unlucky, something will happen and you will have a spill or leak on your hands. It's one of those low-probability but high-consequence situations where it really is worth having someone there if something goes awry, because there's about 800 gallons of fuel per minute going through those lines.
Fuel tanker will be exciting, I think, despite the horrendous hours, monotonous tasks, and immense responsibility. Plus we get to carry radios and say things like "Roger that" and "over." Isn't that enough?
Sunday, December 20, 2009
More ridiculous Antarctic acronyms
For some reason, Antarcticans (or maybe scientists in general?) will go to extreme lengths to make their project into an acronym. Some are such a stretch that I'm beginning to think they choose the acronym and design the description of their project around it. For example, the project that I was working on at Lake Bonney was called ENDURANCE, which stood for "Environmentally Non-Disturbing Underwater Robot in ANtarCtica's Environment." It was a super sweet project and I loved it, the acronyms around here just make me laugh.
Other beeker project acronyms:
CREAM - The Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM) experiment was designed and constructed to measure cosmic ray elemental spectra using a series of ultra long duration balloon (ULDB) flights.
AMANDA - Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (the forerunner of the IceCube neutrino telescope project at the South Pole)
SuperDARN - Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), a consortium of 9 nations operating 16 identical radars over the Arctic and Antarctica.
NICL - National Ice Core Laboratory
ANSMET - Antarctic Search for Meteorites
Other beeker project acronyms:
CREAM - The Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM) experiment was designed and constructed to measure cosmic ray elemental spectra using a series of ultra long duration balloon (ULDB) flights.
AMANDA - Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (the forerunner of the IceCube neutrino telescope project at the South Pole)
SuperDARN - Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), a consortium of 9 nations operating 16 identical radars over the Arctic and Antarctica.
NICL - National Ice Core Laboratory
ANSMET - Antarctic Search for Meteorites
Ja-ja-ja-ja-jaded
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Josh is jaded
Well, I've reached the mid-season, and McMurdo charm is ebbing away like the snowpack in town. It's great to know my way around the town, but it's really frustrating sometimes to not be in control of your own time whatsoever. The work weeks is really getting to me... we work 10 hour days, 6 days a week. By the time Sunday rolls around, I have so much stuff to do that I feel rushed on my day off. It's not truly a day of rest as I feel like it should be. Maybe my self-righteousness is due to the fact that this is my first real-world job and have had the luxury of college for the last 4 years, but it's how I feel nonetheless. (I think this picture of Josh pretty accurately represents how I can feel on some days).
I'm certainly doing fine here and am not desperate to come home or anything, but being in one spot without the freedom to go anywhere, with VERY little free time is taking its toll. I miss my mom, my dog, trees and friends. I think two months might be enough for me at a time - it would be nice to come down for 6 or 8 weeks as a scientist, live at a remote field camp and go back home. It's not like "Antarctica" (the concept, the exoticism, the vastness) has itself become stifiling: I don't think that could ever happen on this white block of ice - it's that being a labor worker in McMurdo has become stifiling. And I'm one of the lucky ones; my job takes me around the continent more than any other first-year job. I feel very fortunate, comparatively. If I could come down in an ideal capacity, it would be as a scientist. I would be down here in a project in which I was emotionally invested, I would see the project through and leave when it was done (as opposed to seeing little bits of projects, working with them in a way that a mercenary fights in a war- not caring about the true meaning or cause, just down to make a buck. I don't like feeling that way about my job, but it's set up to be that way. Sorry for the long metaphor.)
There are still fun things that I'm getting to do, though, like working at the BFC (basically a huge Outdoor Program) and possibly (nothing's for sure yet) going to the South Pole for a few weeks. And the fuel tanker ship and supply vessel offload sound pretty exciting - I love a "final push" mentality about organizations. Maybe that's why I was so good about procrastinating in college. My boss is a good and fair boss, but I don't like not being able to budget and allocate my time, or keep my own schedule. If I could work 10 hours a day on projects, but have a little freedom to push and pull things around in my schedule, I could still get my work done and not feel as much like a piece of equipment and more like a responsible person.
Josh is jadedI'm certainly doing fine here and am not desperate to come home or anything, but being in one spot without the freedom to go anywhere, with VERY little free time is taking its toll. I miss my mom, my dog, trees and friends. I think two months might be enough for me at a time - it would be nice to come down for 6 or 8 weeks as a scientist, live at a remote field camp and go back home. It's not like "Antarctica" (the concept, the exoticism, the vastness) has itself become stifiling: I don't think that could ever happen on this white block of ice - it's that being a labor worker in McMurdo has become stifiling. And I'm one of the lucky ones; my job takes me around the continent more than any other first-year job. I feel very fortunate, comparatively. If I could come down in an ideal capacity, it would be as a scientist. I would be down here in a project in which I was emotionally invested, I would see the project through and leave when it was done (as opposed to seeing little bits of projects, working with them in a way that a mercenary fights in a war- not caring about the true meaning or cause, just down to make a buck. I don't like feeling that way about my job, but it's set up to be that way. Sorry for the long metaphor.)
There are still fun things that I'm getting to do, though, like working at the BFC (basically a huge Outdoor Program) and possibly (nothing's for sure yet) going to the South Pole for a few weeks. And the fuel tanker ship and supply vessel offload sound pretty exciting - I love a "final push" mentality about organizations. Maybe that's why I was so good about procrastinating in college. My boss is a good and fair boss, but I don't like not being able to budget and allocate my time, or keep my own schedule. If I could work 10 hours a day on projects, but have a little freedom to push and pull things around in my schedule, I could still get my work done and not feel as much like a piece of equipment and more like a responsible person.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
the Ob Hill Uphill
Josh probably won't write about this, so I'm going to do it for him. Today was the Ob Hill Uphill, a 1-mile scramble of a race to the top of Observation Hill, the highest point around McMurdo Station. So instead of sleeping in this Sunday, Josh got up and ran straight uphill. I admire runners....
Just like the Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving, he got 4th place! Way to go Josh. Pictures to come.
Just like the Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving, he got 4th place! Way to go Josh. Pictures to come.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The Stream Team
Rosa does have extremely cool equipment used for stream profiling. Her super hi-tech profiling device consists of a wire frame with thin wooden poles that drop down to the bottom of various points in the stream, forming a mirror image of the streambed on the bottom. We hiked all around the town looking for drainage patterns and mapping them out, and hiked way above the town to the snowfields at the beginning of the drainage basin, in order to identify the source of the streams. To the left is me holding the stream profiler, which we took pictures of its pattern while in the stream. The adjacent picture is Rosa looking out over the town.
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