Field Work Begins

We are almost at the halfway point in the field and things are steadily coming together. We were able to make it out into the field this past week to begin some of the site installations at the Willie airfield site and the Phoenix airfield site. There are technically three different airfields here near McMurdo (not counting the helicopter pads). Phoenix is the primary site where the Intercontinental flights from Christchurch takeoff and land (usually the C-17 aircraft). Willie Field is where the LC-130 aircraft, the Twin Otter aircraft and the Basler BT-67, which is just a refurbished DC-3, are based. Pegasus airfield was used until December of last year, but operations were moved to the new Phoenix airfield due to excessive melting issues during the summer months at Pegasus. For the aviation buffs following my blog, I've posted a few pictures of some of the aforementioned aircraft below.

A row of the LC-130 "Hercules" aircraft.

The Basler DC-3 aircraft.

Yesterday was spent getting the power systems installed at the Willie and Phoenix sites. Because Willie is our premier site, it will have a few more instruments and require more power. Since all of these sites are located away from any obstructions, we have no access to power, thus everything we are running will be run on batteries .... lots of batteries. The Willie site will be powered by 22 car-style batteries, which will provide a continuous five watts of power. The Phoenix site will be powered by 16 batteries, which will provide a continuous three watts of power. In terms of weight, that's over one ton of batteries between the two sites (which my back can attest to as I lifted almost all of them into their cases yesterday). The batteries will be charged by solar panels in the summer and should have enough power to last us through the winter months. Nikko (one of the support people from UNAVCO down here to help our project) and I worked at the Willie site while Mark shuttled people and equipment/batteries between McMurdo and Willie. We dug out areas where the battery packs would reside to make them nearly even with the snow surface. This will help prevent them from becoming obstacles in the wind that could cause drifting near our sensors and affect our snowfall measurements.

Nico, one of the team members from UNAVCO who helped us set up the power systems, stands behind the battery packs in awe of my abilities to dig holes in the snow and fill them with batteries.

Getting the solar panels installed took a little more work. They had to be mounted on poles (which also needed holes dug in the snow) and then guy-wired in place to prevent them from blowing over. How do you guy wire something that is installed in snow and ice when there is no land to anchor it to? You use deadman anchors. These are essentially 3-inch wide angle aluminum strips that are cut about 3 feet long with a guy wire looped through one of the sides. These deadman anchors are buried in the snow and once the snow settles (over a period of a few weeks), the anchors will become frozen in place.

Deadman anchor with guy wire for the solar panels before we buried it in the snow.

We finished the installation at Willie as Mark joined us with two other people to finish burying the last of the anchors.

Our installation team consisted of (from left to right) George, Nico, Carol, Mark and myself (not pictured because I took the picture). Also in the background is White Island (to the left) and Black Island (to the right). It's not hard to see how they got their names.

We moved on to Phoenix, with a warning from the airfield flight tower that the weather was forecast to change in the next few hours. With now five of us working on the installation, we were able to get things installed much more quickly, especially since we watched Black Island become obscured as the front approached us, and then White Island began to disappear into the clouds. Just as we were finishing the last of the guy wires, the airfield tower came on the radio and demanded everyone evacuate the airfield as the front was almost on us. We loaded up and headed back and noticed that White Island had started to come back into view. As luck would have it, the forecast ended up being mostly a bust. The wind increased slightly but the weather itself never deteriorated.

As time has allowed, I've been able to do a few other things, including some nearby walks/hikes. One of the walks was out to Discovery Hut on Sunday, which Robert Scott had built for his men around 1902. Discovery is one of three huts in the area from that era that you can visit. Certain people in McMurdo will sometimes do tours of the huts and will take people inside to show them what was left behind (everything from food, to seal blubber and dead penguins, to clothes). If I have some time, I hope to be able to do one of the tours.

Discovery Hut just outside McMurdo. You can see a small portion of McMurdo to the right and Observation "Ob" Hill towering above McMurdo also on the right.

Some old rope and canvas left behind in the early 1900's outside Discovery Hut.

A cross was erected near Discovery Hut in honor of George Vince, the first man to die in McMurdo Sound when he slipped on the rocks during a blizzard and fell into the sea.

A view of McMurdo from the same point where the cross in the picture above was taken. Discovery Hut is in the foreground on the left. The sea ice area in the center and on the right is where the ships will come in sometime in December/January once the sea ice melts.

I was also able to get some good pictures of some of the seals hanging around the shoreline. Some of them are quite .... plump and most of them were laying on their side or back. Here are a few of the seal photos I captured (taken with my telephoto lens in case anyone was wondering .... no, I was not walking on the sea ice).

A Weddell Seal chilling on the ice ...

Another (very large) snoozin' seal.

A mother and her pup.

I will end this blog entry with one bit of bad news. I managed to break the monitor on my laptop not long after getting here. I went to grab the satellite phone and didn't realize the antenna was loose. It fell off and must have hit my monitor just right to break the crystals in the screen (though the screen itself is physically fine). Thankfully the IT folks here had an external monitor they let me borrow. Naturally this is not covered under warranty (and my IT people at NCAR didn't seem to believe that a Skua attacked me and pecked at my monitor) so I'm waiting for a replacement laptop to make its way down here so I'm not stuck in the lab anytime I want to get on the internet.

Sad monitor .....