South Pole Partial Solar Eclipse 11-25-11

When I was in elementary school, my dad found a broken welding mask in our alley and, after carefully removing the glass, taped it neatly into a crisp cardboard box, covering the chipped corner. He brought it to my class one day when we were due to have a solar eclipse, and the whole class got to look at the sun, one at a time, thanks to my dad. I felt famous.

Yesterday we experienced an eclipse here at Pole, with about 75% coverage, and I carried on the tradition.

The sun started to peek out just a few hours before the eclipse was to begin after a full day of icy haze. Excited, I went to the B2 Science Lab and a scientist from South Pole Telescope helped me attach a piece of welding glass to my telephoto lens to take pictures of the sun directly. You should have seen my bag; I looked like a one-woman band getting ready for a performance. A welding mask, blank CDs, hand warmers, aluminized mylar squares, a cup of coffee and a sieve borrowed from the kitchen. We went out to the ceremonial pole, cameras in hand.

The sieve was really neat. A scientist had volunteered to make pinhole cameras in the galley before the eclipse, and the sieve was like a hundred pinhole cameras put together. See how all the pinholes are crescent shaped?

Do Not Freeze

Voltron the Forklift

Today I got to do my first real jobs in machines! First, I moved 900 pounds of resealable plastic bags. Glamorous, I know. Especially in a tracked loader named Sparkles.

After lunch, I moved compressed gas cylinders!

After moving the cage of empty cylinders with Voltron the forklift to the rollers outside of the Logistics Arch, I placed the cage on an airforce pallet, and we pushed the pallet out to the doorway. Elissa picked the cages and set them aside for me.

I used Sundog the loader to pick up the cages one at a time and, after moving the empties to the cargo line to be shipped away, I put the new cages full of shiny green oxygen cylinders into storage on the berm.

While I was on the berms, I found this:

Do Not Freeze. Ha.

Have a nice day!

How to Take a Two Minute Shower

Here at Pole, we are allotted two minute showers, twice a week. Because all of our water is melted from the ice we live on, and because in order to melt that water we burn AN8 jet fuel, and because to get that jet fuel we have to have many, many flights bearing about 3,000 gallons of AN8 at a time or send in an over-ice traverse hundreds of miles from McMurdo, our water is very costly and not so great for the environment. Therefore we limit our water usage in every way possible except for drinking water and handwashing water, and water for making coffee because without coffee there is mutiny.

There are a few different ways to take a two minute shower.

The Classic: A bit of run time to get wet enough, a good lather-up, and short bursts between shampoo, face soap, body soap and feet soap to avoid cross-contamination. Shave using a coffee mug for razor dips as needed.

The Hilton Two Minute: Shave dry standing in the shower. Get wet for 30 seconds, put all of your soaps on in succession by hierarchy of dirtiness (face soap first, then shampoo, then body soap, then second shampoo, then feet soap), and then enjoy a full minute and a half of delicious hot water. Use a lot of lotion after to avoid wicked razorburn.

The Squeegee: A hybrid of the Classic and the Hilton, the showerer gets wet for a full minute, then gets mostly soapy and rinses his or her face if the soap starts to sting in the eyes, but uses short bursts of water to successively get less and less soapy, squeegee-ing with their hands in between until soapless.

The Brazilian: Can be performed on a shower day or on a normal day. Hoist legs up on sink, shave legs, wash body parts as needed. If showering after, wet hair and shampoo. Leave shampoo in until you get in the shower.

The Viper: Use baby wipes. Dispose.

The WinterOver: Just stop showering. It’s really too much effort.

The Extreme Antarctic Explorer a.k.a. The Chinchilla: Get naked outside, rub snow all over yourself, roll around a bit, hoot and holler and shriek as needed. Re-dress. Have a cup of coffee, and perhaps a whiskey. This one is a freebie but discouraged due to the treaty: you’re not allowed to pee or spit chewing tobacco or vomit because you drank too much at the Summer Camp Lounge or leave your dirty snow behind. Leave no trace really means leave no trace.

The Hollywood: Shower as many times a week as you like, for as long as you like. Use makeup and perfume and put on clean clothing. Get assaulted by a gang of dirty, jealous Polies and never shower again. That would actually save water, in the long run.

Just a thought…

One of my favorite things about Sunday afternoons is practicing violin in the conference room overlooking Destination Alpha, the dressy front door of the elevated South Pole Station. With the lights off to save energy and the sun behind the building from this standpoint, it feels a little like evening in the rest of the world, and I can stand looking out the window over the fuel line and down the road to the dark sector. MAPO and South Pole Telescope are out there, peering into the sky to look for information about the cosmos and galaxy clusters and how our universe was born. On weekdays there are sometimes LC-130s landing, bringing and taking away passengers and leaving us fuel for our reserve stock, humming at a high drone and accompanying my practice. It’s one of the things that reminds me, when I get distracted by the sometimes tedious workweek, to be grateful for this job and the simple fact of being here, right now.

Antarctica in the News: AGAP and the Gamburtsev Mountains

Two Sundays ago, we had a Sunday Science Lecture by a scientist who works with AGAP, the Antarctic Gamburtsev Project. She mentioned that they were on the verge of a breakthrough in learning about how the Gambutsevs were formed.

Now AGAP has made international news!

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation, Gamburtsev topography by Abdulhakim Abdi, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, from NSF.gov

 You can read more about this at The National Science Foundation‘s website, on the BBC, or on the website of the US Geological Survey.

Summer Camp: You Sleep Where?

About half of the population of South Pole Station sleeps in tents. They are semi-cylindrical canvas and plywood structures called Jamesways that stand on platforms a bit off the ice and are heated with AN8 jet fuel. Summer camp is about 1/4 mile downwind from the Destination Zulu exit of the main elevated station. There are 13 or so Jamesways in summer camp that have approximately 10 rooms each, and the rooms are divided by plywood walls and/or curtains.

You can smell everyone, dirty and gassy and covered in cologne, and you can smell the history of the last 30 years of shower limitations permeating the canvas walls. Some people are lucky enough to have doors, but many people have only curtains, and you can hear every spoken word, bodily function, and footsteps of a person passing through to their room. You can hear tractors groaning up and beep beep beeping back down snow mountains outside, plowing all night long. You can hear the military planes landing on late missions, sounding like they’re so close that the wing might just clip your canvas wall and take out your pillow. Oh, and the bathrooms are a shared facility that requires going outside to get to, which can be very disconcerting if it’s 3am and the sun is shining like midday, so many people pee into water bottles or salsa jars they get from the galley. I say all of this in the fondest manner possible: I really do like living in summer camp. You can read more about the little details about living at South Pole and in Summer Camp here.

This year we are lucky–we have a double room with a door AND a latch that works, a full bed and a window. Last year when we lived in J8, we had two twin beds side by side, which was okay until you tried to roll over to snuggle and then, with a little swish, the two beds would slide apart and down you would fall into the crack. And once last year we came home to a half inch of snow on our bed(s). Not cozy. Daniel had a coworker in Jamesway 5 (J5) his first year that would get bonked on the head through his curtain every time somebody walked through with a duffel bag. Privacy is a luxury.

Over the winter season the Jamesways are closed (because who wants to sleep in a tent when the ambient temperature is -100F and the windchill is -150?) and the summer camp area drifts over with blowing ice crystals.

(Pictures by Daniel–click to enlarge)

A typical room looks like this and is about this size:

Or this:

They’ve been a part of Pole housing for a long time–decades–and they have a lot of personality. Some of them have really bad personalities, but they are interesting nonetheless.

Some of the rooms are nicely personalized, and often people will request to come back to the same room year after year. 

“Attention South Pole. A Fire Emergency Has Been Reported in the Power Plant.”

A view from inside the South Pole's main power plant.

 

A view from outside the power plant, one of the three arches. The power plant is farthest to the left, with the four generator smokestacks on top and no outside door.

On Saturday night around 7pm, just as people were settling down to their beers and cocktails, finishing dinner and showering to get ready for the summer camp dance party, a fire alarm went off. Now, fire alarms are not something we are unaccustomed to here at South Pole Station. We hold many drills and have many, many false alarms, all of which are treated as a real emergency until proved otherwise, but this was definitely not a drill, and the more we heard, the more we realized it was a genuine emergency.

“Attention South Pole Station,” said the breathless, shaky voice of the comms announcer, “a fire emergency has been reported in the power plant.” Alarms were blaring. The fire response team was suiting up in firefighting gear, donning boots and overalls and jackets and helmets and facemasks and SCBAs (self contained breathing apparatuses). First responders were already running down the stairs to the power plant arch, the trauma team was mustering in Medical, and the logistics team grouped to wait for the next instructions.

Our power plant has a carbon dioxide fire suppression system. A few seconds after the alarm goes off, the enclosed space of the plant can flood with carbon dioxide, displacing oxygen and suffocating the fire but also anyone in the plant, potentially killing them. Even a false alarm could claim a real victim. The power plant mechanic, Rick, was eating dinner in the galley between rounds, so we knew he was okay, but a utilities tech or another power plant worker (there are three—they make rounds reading levels in the plant every 2 hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) could be in danger.

Those of us not on a response team sat in the galley, nervously huddled around our land mobile radios listening to the talk-around channel, hearing smoke reported first in the plant between generators three and four, then widespread. We heard the fire team yelling their next moves (they have to yell because of the facemasks), going in, checking for victims, reporting a massive glycol spill.

Comms all-called again. “Attention South Pole. We are in a power emergency. Please turn off ALL electronics not required for life and safety.”

We needed to get our power consumption down, right now. Everyone got up, trotting the halls, turning off lights and unplugging treadmills, shutting down computers and televisions and any other thing we could find a plug or switch for. The galley turned off all the stoves and refrigerators, the IT staff remotely shut down all the auxiliary servers and all of the labs. The air was quiet.

There had been a massive glycol spill as a result of a mechanical failure (a small elbow joint that had reached the end of its life). The power usage shot up to extreme levels, the peaking generator was activated, and our power plant was flooded with propylene glycol, but not carbon dioxide. The whole area was dark and hazy, like a scene from a movie where something really bad is about to happen to the protagonist. We tracked down empty open-top 55 gallon drums, absorbent pads, and every mop and mop bucket on station. An hour or two later, once the air had been ventilated and the flammable liquids and gasses had been contained and dissipated, the clearance was given and additional volunteers were called for. We suited up with earplugs and disposable latex gloves to protect ourselves from the glycol, and moved around the power plant on absorbent pads, soaking up the extremely slippery chemical on our hands and knees while someone else followed behind with a mop.

One of the best parts of living here is the active community—our emergency response team is made up of firefighters and emergency responders, of network guys and cargo women and dishwashers and mechanics and doctors and station management, all working together, and the non ERT folk were from the same mixed bag. We cleaned glycol from the floor, under nooks and crannies and fuel return pipes, from storage shelving and water tanks and generator parts, and it was awesome to see the whole station working together.

And then it was over, aside from lingering power restrictions. It was close to eleven when everything had calmed down and less than ten people remained in the plant, cleaning up loose ends and trying to determine exactly what happened. The emergency power plant did not need to be activated, and no one was hurt, not even from slipping on the glycol and falling.

And that was Saturday night at the South Pole. Sunday now leaves us happy and safe, full of brunch and coffee and sitting in rooms lit only by the 24-hour sun.

Flying from the Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole

Flying in Antarctica tests your flexibility.

My original flight from McMurdo to South Pole was set for November first at 5 am (New Zealand time), moved forward to the 27th of October, cancelled because of weather delay, and moved to the next day, the 28th.

We took a Delta, a passenger vehicle that looks like a giant red metal ant, out to the ice runway in the morning, optimistic and excited at the weather reports for both takeoff and landing. There are two main types of delay here: weather and mechanical. We had all forgotten about mechanical delay.

Our group sat crammed in the Delta, feet going numb and legs getting stiff, blowing bubble gum bubbles that popped with a little puff of foggy breath, optimism waning with each update on the plane’s sorry status. Six hours later, tired and hungry and wishing we had landed three hours ago, we crunched and groaned and bounced along the sea ice in our Delta, returning to McMurdo for the night and hoping that there would still be beds for us despite the hundred-some people that had landed in a C-17 that day. I was disappointed but spent the evening with some girlfriends from Pole who bought me a birthday beer and told me that tomorrow was another day.

And it was. Now just three days before my scheduled flight and over a week after some other people’s, we skeptically dragged our bags back up the hill to cargo in the morning. We sat in the vehicle, comparing the food we had packed, learning a lesson from the hungry day before. Soggy sandwiches (for those who had been smart enough to pack them the day before our first scheduled flight), flat sat-upon doughnuts, granola, an avocado, or two pieces of french toast. As we progressed, we drove straight out to the runway, arrived directly at the plane (the first good sign) which was already fueled (the second good sign) and took off right on time (the third good sign).

The weather at Pole was flirting with the temperature limit that a C-130 can land in, so we crossed our fingers that our flight wouldn’t boomerang, which means exactly what it sounds like, and tried to not get too excited until we started our descent to Pole.

The flight was amazing. Laden with Emergency Cold Weather gear, boots and overalls and huge jackets and layers, you have to carefully plant each step to move about the plane and not step on or awkwardly straddle another passenger for too long. Through the tiny porthole window, and without any sense of how far up you are or how big the landscape below you is, you can see the terrain evolving below, pressing your head on the cold metal of the plane, the roaring drone of the props vibrating though your skull.

I said goodbye to dirt, watching the mountains melt into flat, blue ice like a lake surface. The face of the earth became flatter, whiter, flatter, whiter. You can see evidence of glacial flow, like seeing time pass, wrinkles and pockmarks and silky snowy spots like aged skin, shiny crusty ice that looks like you could stand on it until you shifted your weight and broke through, some marks like crop circles. Icy blue, as uninspired as that sounds. On we flew, over crevasses that look like dry, split fingertips in the winter, tiny and feathered on one side, gaping and deep and scary on the other side. I wondered if we were flying over any ski-in expeditions or what route they might take, and if they could hear us and whether they were waving at us from so far below.

(The following photos are by Marie McLane, who works cargo here at Pole and is a science tech in Greenland, and whose blog, AntarcticArctic, is pretty neat and has lots of photos and more info about flight Ops than mine so you should probably check it out.)

We landed, the engines getting louder like a volcano about to explode, and without being able to see and because of the rattle of the plane, it sometimes would seem like we had touched down even when we hadn’t. When we finally did land, I felt us turn off the skiway and onto the apron, and we droned along for what seemed like forever. The NY air national guard crew dropped the rear cargo door down, the plane yawning and flushing us with bright, bright fog and snow and steam and sucking the heat and moisture out of the plane all of a sudden. Out slid the cargo, disappearing immediately into the whiteness, and the crew closed up the door and the plane slowly crept forward and stopped.

Even though I knew what to expect this time, disembarking the aircraft was overwhelming. The ambient temperature was close to –60, the windchill nearly –90, the air was dry and the altitude was steep and the roar of the propellers just off to the side was immense and the sun was bright and here I was, returning to the South Pole, a little bit excited and pretty emotional and really really cold. I choked on my first few breaths. A crewmember held a line out from the door, to guide us and prevent passengers from getting thunderstruck and confused and turning left instead of right, walking straight into the props and losing their head, literally. All the way up to the nose of the plane came the ground crew, our friends and coworkers, putting out little guide markers showing where to walk to exit the apron.

There were cold but happy reunions with winterovers, jumps for joy and breathless hugs and frozen tears. There were new people as well as returnees with cameras and cold shutterfingers and a holy shit, I’m at the bottom of the planet stance, and, I would imagine, wide eyes behind their goggles and gaiters and balaclavas. Having arrived about a week before us, Daniel came to carry my bag for me, which seemed much heavier than it had been at sea level, and gave me a cold, wet, polarfleece little kiss.

It feels really good to be back.

More soon on the new job and life at the pole. If you’re missing blog posts and want to get more Kiell and Daniel right to your inbox, you can subscribe for free to email or rss!