More WAIS for Ben

So they sent the green foreman (me) to put up the big camp out at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Fact is, they had no one else. So out I went with a crew of 13 total. We had decent enough weather to work so we worked . . . . and worked . . . . . and worked. This is what it looked like when we started:

This is what it looked like 7 days of work and 1 storm day later:

These structures are the galley, washroom, recreation area, offices, medical, and berthing tents. Its enough for about 50-60 scientists, drillers, and camp staff.

The Purpose? Science! In particular there is a drilling operation that is housed in this arch. It doesn't get taken down and so the drifts looks like this from the outside:

Inside this fine 200 foot-long snow-buried arch is a drill rig that will provide a more sensitive look at climate data from the last 100,000 years. Carbon dioxide levels, temperature, dust and pollen samples are some of items to be studied. And here's the ironic factoid of the day. They have to cool the inside of the arch below its natural -20 degrees farenheight to about -50 degrees. This is because the drill cores come out of the glacier much colder and will pop and split themselves if they warm up too fast and the gases inside expand too quickly. Chilling the Antartic continent--its a wacky funny world.

If you remember last year's blog, you might be asking why we are putting up the camp again after it was just put and then taken down last year. Well, the reason is the 8 feet of snow this area gets. Camp would be buried if we didn't take it down at the end of summer, and bring it to the top of the new surface at the beginning of the next summer.

All right loved ones, this is all for now. It was good to build the camp, it was good to come back to McMurdo, and it was good to have a couple days off afterwards. Good to sleep in a warm bed.

That's all for WAIS. That's all for the flat white polar plateau.

Cheers,

Ben

Store Life

My day to day life is a fair bit structured & routine. I no longer have to stock the bars in the afternoons, which is great. The only benefit doing that was that I could play music really, really loud because I was in a building no one else was in all by myself! So, now I am in the store full time.
I get to work at 0630 to open the doors at 0700. There are usually people lined up at the door so it's pretty busy until about 0730 when everyone has to be at work. It's fun working in the morning because I can see the night shift workers & chat with them.
We've been working on designing apparel for the 2010 vessel. Things need to be ordered now to make the vessel which will arrive in February 2010,. Things will be offloaded at the end of the summer season, then the winterovers go through everything & put on the shelves for the summer season 2010-11.

In the afternoons I stock the floor. It's crazy how quickly we run out of things. There are over 1000 people on station so things can go quickly.

Tuesdays is our warehouse day. We go down to another building called 157 cold storage & hunt through the huge boxes of things to re-stock the store room in the store. It is cold in there, often colder than outside. We usually grab at least 30 boxes of chips. The fun part is throwing them down 2 flights of stairs!

Thursday is booze delivery day. 5-6 pallets of beer, wine, & soda show up on our dock to be unloaded & stocked in the store. It's a good workout & I actually look forward to it.

Here's me in a tri-wall of soda. You can see the other 2 pallets of wine next to me.

This is what the store looks like partially stocked with beer. mmmm, beer...

So, things are good in the store. It's actually pretty busy trying to keep up with demand & being social all the time. I do cherish my day off & tend to stay away from 155 just to have some quiet time!

Hope you all are well.

Gretchen

Dive Tending Boondoggle!

My first true boondoggle happened yesterday. Dan, the retail manager, called the store at 8am and asked if I wanted to go on a boondoggle (do you have to ask?) and could I be ready in 15 minutes (of course). I raced out of the store, took a taxi to my room for warm clothes, then down to the dive shack. Once there I was introduced to Neil Lucas whom I later found out is a producer for the BBC currently working on a new show called “Life”. It’s a follow up to his other shows, “Blue Planet” and “Planet Earth”. Also along were Rob Robbins, famed Antarctic diver who has been diving here for over 30 years. Ben went out with him last year & blogged about it. John, a grantee with a $22,000 underwater camera seeking amazing underwater photos, primarily of seals. Steve, also an Antarctic diver, and Andrew, a cargo handler and fellow dive tender.
We drove out in a piston bully and arrived by Little Razorback to find 4 fat seals and 1 baby. The baby was born the day before, weighed 55 pounds and is every bit as cute as the pictures. Near Big Razorback there is an 1100 pound seal with an 80 pound baby! We chatted up the seals researches, that’s how I have these facts & figures.

After watching the baby for a while, the divers were ready to suit up. Our job, as dive tenders, is to help them with their gear and once in the water put the kettle on. 2 of them were down for 50 minutes, and the other 2 for 30 for their first dives. We used this time to take some pictures & hang out in the warm hut. The inside of the fish hut

The view out one of the windows.

We help the divers get ready & we also help them when they surface by grabbing their tanks, weight belts, and fins, just as you do in every other dive situation. The difference here is that we have to stand on the 1 foot wide ice with the hole one step down and the wooden floor 1 step above. The goal is to grab their gear & not fall in the hole. Also of note is that their weight belts are up to 50 pounds. I wont go into the details of their gear as Ben did that last year, instead I can focus on the projects these folks were working on and the scenery.

This is the fish hut & piston bully we rode out on.
After the first dive Doug Allen and Hugh Miller, both from the BBC, drove up on their snowmachines. As you can tell from the shots of the interior of the fish hut, they are not that large, so now we were 8 in the hut. Doug has been diving since 1968, has worked with polar bears, and is featured in the BBC programs mentioned above. Doug & Hugh were there setting up a time lapse camera focusing on a rock with star fish. The camera takes one picture every 10 seconds and they were leaving it down there for 3 hours in hopes of getting about 30 seconds of decent footage.
It was a busy day at the hut. The seal researches were in the area, Doug & Hugh came out unexpectedly, then 2 carps came out to check on the propane tanks. I came outside to see who it was and there stood Jesus – aka Michael McCracken fresh back from a winter at Pole. It was our first time seeing each other since February and it was great to meet again outside of town & really rather randomly!

After the 4 divers were back from the second dive (I want to mention here that the water was about 45’ deep at the hole and so clear we could see a star fish from the hut). We loaded the gear and headed home. But our adventure was not over! we had a....

Boondoggle within a boondoggle! We stopped off at the ice caves! They haven’t been able to open any ice caves in years and this was a special treat. It was a little like being underwater with respect to lighting because according to John the ice looks more like cumulus clouds underwater.

All in all it was an amazing day. It is really easy to get wrapped up in town life & our jobs and to be able to get out of town and see Antarctica not only helps lift the spirits, but reminds us all why we’re here.

Snow

During winfly, while still working at the BFC, a few of us went out with one of the field instructors to organize the I hut where the instructors stay during the Happy Camper School. You may recall from last year that Happy Camper is where people who will be in the field, or potentially stranded outside of town limits, go to learn winter camping & survival skills. We arrived in fairly decent weather, windy, cloudy, pretty cold, but manageable. Our first stop was a small connex where the sleds, tents, shovels, etc… are kept. We opened the doors and this is what we found

We thought it may just be a front layer of snow. Solomon (pictured above) started shoveling, then I took a turn, then the group left us to work on another project after we realized the snow penetrated more than just a front layer. A couple of hours later with 2 of us shoveling this is the end result:

Because the doors were not properly sealed a teeny gap was left and the result was a connex completely compacted with snow.

After shoveling we went to the I hut and helped arrange things for classes. Meanwhile the winds picked up and the visibility turned so that when we were ready to leave we couldn’t even see a flag. The condition was about to change to a 1, but luckily for us Karen, the FSTP instructor whom we were assisting, was able to make out a flag and we drove flag to flag all the way back to town. Had they called a condition 1 we would have been spending some quality time either in the piston bully, or the I hut.

Happy Anniversary October 6, 2007

One year ago today I stepped off the plane onto the frozen sea ice of the Ross Sea. That day I realized a life goal of 17 years of coming to Antarctica. You've seen this picture before, but I wanted to post it again because I don't think I've ever smiled this big, or been this happy, before.

As you all know, I've come to love this place. The lifestyle is simple, the people are like minded, the scenery is incredible, and the opportunities are great.

This year is different, I've not taken as many photos, I know more people, and I know the routines. I am anxiously waiting for my friends from last year to arrive & am looking forward to new memories. Sometimes I feel like I am walking along memory lane with occasional stops at "crime scenes" where especially interesting events took place. The first week or two were filled with these thoughts and now I am beginning to add to those memories. Not erase or replace them, but enhance them with new events and feelings.

I came back to McMurdo because I wasn't done making changes to my life. I want to be a positive person, a relaxed person who is confident everything will turn out just fine no matter the pressure. I made steps in the right direction last year and I want to use this season to cement those changes so when faced with "real world" situations & life in general I will be capable of being the person I want to be in whatever situation arises.

I hope you are all well and if I could say anything to you all it would be, go after your dreams. Don't wait.

Much love to you all, Gretchen

Life back on the Ice

I’ve been waiting to write until I had some news about a full season contract. I have a job! Hurray! I’ll be working in the store which should be a lot of fun. Our little general store is full of souvenir gifts, food/snacky items, toiletries, movies for rent, alcohol, etc… It's a pretty social place with great people and despite not being outside, except for moving inventory about town, I’m looking forward to it. Not much time to spare before this offer came through and honestly my standards started getting lower. I adjusted after the first week & decided I really did want to stay for another full season.



Working in the BFC was awesome. Most of the time we pulled gear for the science groups, as Ben already explained. The other part of that was "tetrisizing" it all into the smallest space possible, and going vertical. There was a lot of climbing shelves stuffing sleeping bags into the little spaces between tents and 5 gallon buckets used for human waste. I definitely got my workout over the last few weeks. Here's a shot of the BFC springfly army.



In my short time here I've trained at the store, before I knew I had a job there I signed up to work part time, trained people on driving the airporters, and had a Delta refresher course. I've volunteered to pick up the first 3 flights of mainbody, which were scheduled to start on Tuesday and have yet to make it here. There are about 300+ people stuck, if you can call it "stuck" in Christchurch, and everyday the flights are delayed and then cancelled. We did have one make it within an hour of the runway only to boomerang back to NZ. There are mixed feelings here, those folks who are ready to leave after a year here are frustrated, as are those who are waiting for friends, spouses, significant others. Then, there are those who are psyched to have the station population kept small at 300 people for another week. As with most things, they'll get here when they get here.

Here is a nice photo I took out the window on my flight down this year. We had beautiful weather and it actually was really warm when we landed. It was great to walk off the plane and be greeted by friends.

I spent hours watching the sunsets, they literally last 5 hours here. Here are a couple of photos from Hut Point.

That's Ben...
This is me & my BFC friends, Lisa and Quinn. Very windy that evening.


More adventures to come...

James Ways and Houses on Big Sleds

Hi to Friends and Family,
So we are in swing of work here. Gretchen continues at the Berg Field Center getting equipment and food ready for science groups going out in the field. I'm figuring out what it means to be a foreman at the carp shop--getting little done on my own but facilitating others. It is keeping my mind active--definitely.
Last week we put in a Jamesway hut--a "fine" vintage Korean war quansit hut. We cobble them together with bits of playwood to patch the fabric, and many extra nails. This one is being used for seal research. It came complete with custom divisions to keep the seal away from racks of scientific instruments, cargo rollers to roll a 1000 pound sedated seal into the building, a tripod to weigh the seal from, and a dive hole to release the poor critter into. A group is working on the question of how much activity changes when the daylight increases. This involves critter cams to view activities but more importantly they have a chamber that the seal is placed in so they can measure its oxygen use. I think our Jamesway will soon smell like seal poop--think fishy feces. Maybe I will be gone before we take the hut down. Anyway, here we are at the end of getting the basic strucure up. Observation hill is in the background. Temp was -20 f with 20 knot winds. One of the new carps frost-nipped his arse--or at least he said he did--I didn't look.

Another interesting task we have been given is to mount a small structure (9 foot by 11 foot by 10 foot tall) on top of a sled. Sounds reasonable but the hut is rigid and the sled is basically a flexible sheet of plastic (16 feet by 68 feet) that will be drug to the South Pole--800 miles away across a glacier or two or three. This sled, one of many, will also have a bulldozer, and 6 or 8 large aircraft pallets on it. The mounting of the hut is all experimental so we are working with reused tires and a very overengineered platform. More pictures in a while, I promise. You can google "South Pole Traverse" and get some history. It's basically a project to take fuel and other cargo to the pole by land instead of by inefficient and old military turboprop C-130 airplanes. The technology for sleds has evolved to something similar to what mountaineers use to pull loads across unpacked snow--big, flat, and light plastic that distributes weight and give flotation. Of course, they are using huge 4-track articulated tractors to pull the sleds.

Enough for now, gotta go to bed.

Enjoy yourselves out there across the divide up there.

Love and Cheers,

Ben