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
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