The Emperor's New Clothes

I saw this Emperor penguin hanging out by the lights of the runway at the airfield. Apparently it hung out there because there was some heat coming off the lights. The Emperors start hanging around McMurdo (mostly on the road to the airfield) because it is their molting season and they cannot go in the water when they are molting. So I had heard that this penguin was there a few days before I went out, but I knew that it would still be there. It didn't seem to mind all the planes landing all around it.
As you can see, Emperor penguins, though the largest of all penguins, are still quite small. This one was less than two feet tall.

LDB

LDB stands for Long Duration Balloon. It is one of the main scientific projects that occur around McMurdo that involves looking for Neutrinos cast off by the sun by launching a huge particle detector high into the atmosphere using a giant balloon. The balloon will circle around the Antarctic continent twice before they bring it down. They chose Antarctica for the launch site because it is mostly uninhabited and has a regular circular winds so its path is predictable and it won't come down accidentally on top of anybody. The LDB facility is about five miles from McMurdo on the permanent ice shelf, but you could see the launch from McMurdo, which is what these pictures are from. To give a hint of scale, the buildings seen there at LDB are the largest buildings on skis and are about three stories tall.

Castle Rock and Penguins (finally!)

I saw a group of Adelie penguins out at Hut Point along a sea ice crack. They were sleeping on their bellies most of the time, but one stood up for a little while and a few of them shook out their wings. (I couldn't figure out why the text is a hyperlink, but they don't actually lead to anything so don't bother clicking on them)

Castle Rock is a huge, Southwestern seeming rock formation on Ross Island. There is a great three mile hike across a snowy expanse to get there. I got to hike out there on an absolutely gorgeous day and got some great pictures of Mt. Erebus, Mt. Discovery and the whole expanse of ice shelf. You could even see glaciers sliding down into the sea ice and open ocean in the distance as the sea ice breaks up. You can also climb Castle Rock to the top, from which there are even better views. Here are some of the highlights from the day:

Castle Rock with Mt. Erebus behind

These "apples" are emergency/ break shelters set up along the trail.

Climbing Castle Rock along the rope

The Royal Society range of mountains (very thin sea ice in front about to break up)

Open ocean in the distance with large ice burgs

Christmas at McMurdo

Despite the fact that we only have one extra day off for the Christmas holiday and working in the galley, we actually work on Christmas day, McMurdo did a great job of making the holiday seem special. Similar to Thanksgiving, we had special sit down meals banquet style with all the typical holiday foods and a schmorgus borg of desserts.

People also made gingerbread creations of various McMurdo mainstays like Ivan the Terra bus and Scott Hut/ Observation Hill.

Each of the holidays here is usually paired with a big party (for example, they had Freezing Man - a play on Burning Man - after Thanksgiving)...Christmas has two big parties. One party was a pretty standard Christmas party held at the Vehicle Maintenance Facility (VMF). It still cracks me up that all these events have to be held at various warehouse/work facilities around station.

They try their hardest to glamourize the buildings, but the tools still lying around along with the cold, openness of the rooms reminds you that you are still in a work space. The VMF party had carrolling, dancing and even pictures with Santa.

Santa of course was on the back of a Hagland (a tracked motor vehicle around town), but they put some festive snowflakes on the wheels.

The other big event held around the Christmas holiday is MAAG (which stands for McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery). Basically they turn the carpentry shop into a large art gallery/ carnival. They build all their amusements themselves and often get quite creative.

They had a giant hamster wheel, a giant see saw, a rocking dinosaur, a mini-submarine, etc. They also had a lot of games/ art inside submitted from various community members throughout the month of December.

I enjoyed the giant light bright board they created using clear, green, and brown tinted beer bottles.

What is great about this time of year, is New Years is just a week away. So I look forward to the next big holiday event which is Ice Stock, a huge outdoor concert/ festival parodying Woodstock to celebrate the New Year.

Pressure Ridges

So I recently signed up to be a Pressure Ridge tour guide. Pressure Ridges are upwellings in ice created when sea ice meets ice shelf or ice shelf meets land (much in the way mountains are formed when two plates come together). There is a set of impressive pressure ridges right behind the Kiwi base created by the sea ice running into Ross Island. Tour guides are required because there tend to be a lot of cracks and melt pools around pressure ridges and when people were left to their own devices in the past to explore them, they tended to abuse the privilege (by for example climbing the ice or harassing seals) and then post the evidence of their behavior on the public I drive. So tour guides make sure people don't hurt themselves and makes sure they stay on the path. So I don't actually have to know a thing about pressure ridges to be a tour guide which is good...because I know very little about them.
I took all these pictures while someone else was a guide (it would probably look bad if instead of watching out for the people on my tour, I instead choose to take hundreds of pictures...it would also make for a very slow tour given that I was often lagging behind on both of my introductory tours). I also don't know how good of a tour guide I will be given on one of my tours, within the first hundred yards of the tour, I stepped right in a melt pool and went shin deep in ridiculously cold water and had to walk around with wet boots for an hour and a half. Luckily it was warm so not miserable with wet boots.
To get good pictures of the pressure ridges, you have to have a nice day because if it is gray and cloudy, you pretty much end up with grey on grey...luckily I had some blue skies.
We had had some warm weather so a lot of the pressure ridges melted and refroze forming giant icicles like these. As I turned back to the trail after this picture was taken, the ear of my raccoon hat hit and broke off one of the icicles...probably some sort of violation of the Antarctic treaty.
With melt pools like these, you could often get classic "Antarctica shots" where it looks like you are surrounded by iceburgs.
Seals love the pressure ridges because there are plenty of holes in the ice around for them to come up/ dive in again. This one was really cute and put his flipper up to cover his mouth when he yawned.

Happy Camper

Well I found out at the beginning of this week that I would have the amazing opportunity to complete the Happy Camper Snow School course the next day. This course is required for people to go into the field/ work at field camps, but not everyone gets the chance to do it if you work on station so it was definitely an exciting piece of news to receive (it also means that I will most likely get to go to a field camp on the continent for a few weeks in the upcoming months). Here is what went down for Happy Camper:

Classroom discussion of what risks are, what dangers exist on the ice, what sorts of activities are considered risky behavior, etc

A drive followed by a short hike (while our instructors insensitively sped past us on snowmobiles) out to a "remote" (still in view of the station, but out on the ice sheet) area where our "outdoor" classroom was.

A debriefing on local landmarks/ where repeater stations for the radios were (so we would know how to set them up/ what directions to point them in for best reception).

A lesson on how to use the field stoves without burning anything down.

Getting all our camping gear (two insulated sleeping pads, a sleeping bag and a fleece liner for the sleeping bag)

Another short hike to collect more camping gear before another short hike (this time pulling sleds full of gear) to where we would actually be camping for the night.

Then we got lessons on how to construct a snow quarry, snow wall, snow shelter, building tents etc. Apparently we had pristine conditions so the instructors kept having to say "well this would be much harder when wind and snow are pounding on all your gear and you can't see more than five feet in front of you" (but I certainly appreciated the good, sunny, warm weather).

Then the instructors left us to our own devices for the rest of the night (they left us radios for emergencies of course).

I started work on my snow trench to sleep in for the night. Only six or seven of us attempted this feat out of the twenty of us that were there. We all had to have a place in a tent to sleep in in case your shelter had a cave in in the middle of the night. It pretty much consisted of digging a narrow, long hole about to waist deep then carving out the bottom (while keeping the top narrow) until it was wide enough to comfortably fit you with all your sleeping stuff without touching the walls. I lost motivation and interest in digging really fast and I was very seriously considering quitting when I took a break to rehydrate my dinner and eat, but I figured the weather was in my favor and when else would I have an opportunity to do something like that again.

So I finished my trench (though I must say, I could/should have put way more effort into the construction as if it hadn't been very warm that night, it probably would not have sufficed) and I did actually sleep in it the whole night. As I was getting in though, I get bumping the sides (since it was quite small) and spilling snow on all my gear so when I woke up everything was frozen. I slept decently (about as well as I normally do in a tent) and my main complaint about the shelter was that it let in a ton of light and I didn't even out the floor so it was quite lumpy.

We got up in the morning and had to break down the whole camp as if it never existed since everywhere on Antarctica is essentially "Leave no Trace."

Then we got more lessons in radio use (we even got to talk to the South Pole for a little while over the radio), the best/ most efficient way to use a rescue bag (big bags you take with you for if you get stranded at a remote field site), and rescue scenarios (which is why we had to wear the bucket heads to mimic complete white out conditions and when I was wearing it I completely failed at finding my lost partner).

We came back to station, unpacked everything and did a brief video lesson on getting into/ out of a helicopter (which was a horrible idea given that everyone was exhausted and we were put in a warm dark room for the video).

When I got back, I was torn between competing needs of sleep, real food and a shower and slept really well for the night. I don't know that I see direct applications for all we learned those two days, but I'm definitely ready to head out to those field camps and sleep in tents for several weeks in the snow!

Boondoggle #1

Hey y'all,

So last week my normal routine of a schedule was interrupted by a boondoggle (which is the nickname for fun, morale boosting trips we get to go on sometimes). I started my normal workday and as I was about to sit down and eat breakfast during my 8:00 break, my supervisor rushed up to me and said, "have you been dive tending before?" Me: "no" Her: "Do you want to?" Me: "Uh, duh!"

So she gave me a sack lunch and said I had ten minutes to get all my stuff together and hustle down to the dive shop to meet the divers I would be working with. So I ran upstairs and threw on my ECW gear (refresher, ECW = extreme cold weather) and found the dive shop. I and a person from the Janitor team (also on a boondoggle) piled into the back of a Piston Bully (toaster on track wheels...see photo) with all the dive gear. We would be going to Turtle Rock, a really cool dive site at the base of Mt. Erebus (the huge volcano that is the main landmark in the area...also in the photos) which was about an hour Piston Bully ride away. Now Piston Bullies are pretty much little mobile sleep machines...which the gentle rocking, loud white noise and toasty warm environment (much like the womb

I imagine) and I fell asleep for most of the hour ride out and back to the dive site. We got out to the site, which pretty much consists of a tiny dive hut over a hole drilled in the ice. Apparently the hole that was there had frozen up a little too much, so we had to wait around for a heavy equipment operator to come out and drill a new hole (they also have to drill new holes when seals start to use the dive holes and end up barfing up all their fish bones in the hole making the whole hut stink). Luckily that gave us time to wander around since right around the dive hut was a huge Weddell seal colony that had just pupped...basically there were dozens of adorable baby seals lounging around with their moms and we got to walk around and take pictures of them. We did have to be careful because there were tons of cracks in the ice (which is why the seals hang out there in the first place) that were hidden by the snow so we had to test out the ice with each step we took before we put all our weight on it...this would be quite important later when my Jano (what people call Janitors around here) companion stepped without testing and ended up waist deep in snow with her feet dangling over a deep crevasse. Could have been a really dangerous situation but luckily the crevasse was thin so she couldn't have fallen down past where she was. The drill showed up and they drilled a good size hole in the ice and then just dragged the dive hut (which was on skis) over the new hole. Then the divers got all geared up in their dry suits (wearing about three fleece layers underneath the dry suit).

The divers I was with turned out to be underwater filmographers...in fact, if you have seen the Werner Herzog documentary about Antarctica, the underwater footage in that was taken by the guy I dive tended for. It was really cool because that guy, Henry Kaiser was doing the science lecture that night so I was able to see some of the footage he took while we were out there later that night. While the divers were in the water, a team of seal researchers happened to stop by while doing their census on the seal colony there. They let us come out with them for a little while to get a closer look at the seal pups and ask some questions. We got to hang around one seal pup in particular that was sooooo cute, rolling around trying to get a better look at us since they are super curious. Apparently the brown splotching in its fur was its poop though...they tend to roll around in their own feces...not quite so cute. It was also interesting to see all the old umbilical cords and placenta lying around the ice from the seal births. One of the girls I was with wanted a picture of her poking the placenta with a "stick" that she picked up

...but then she realized that we are in Antarctica and thus there are not sticks lying around on the ground and that the "stick" she picked up was in fact a dried piece of umbilical cord...she needless to say had a little gross out moment.

Anyway, that was my adventure for the week and it was so nice to go into a day thinking I would be working and then

have something exciting like that to do instead...here's hoping for more adventures to come....oh ya, and I got to do some fishing