First week completed

The first full week of being in Antarctica is already drawing to close and it has flown by (primarily because of how busy we have been). The theme of the week has been training. Lots and lots of training. Since I arrived, we have had a science in-brief meeting with the NSF Science Representative and the NSF Station Manager, the work center supervisors and any other personnel who would be helping support our work. We also had the Light Vehicle training (how to check out and safely drive the vehicles here), Fire Safety, Waste Brief (what can and cannot go down the toilets as well as what can and can't be recycled), Medical Brief, Lab Safety Orientation, Lab IT Meeting, Antarctic Field Safety (how to light the stove and put the tent up if you get caught in the field in bad weather), BFC (Berg Field Center) Allocation for equipment we will need to take into the field, Environmental Field Brief (there is no "P" in Antarctica ... refer back to Waste Brief), Outdoor Safety Lecture, MacOps Pre-Field Communications Briefing (how to talk on the radio), Airfield Safety Training (don't drive on the runways) and the Helicopter Operations Safety Brief (don't walk behind the helicopter). Needless to say, we haven't had as much time as I would have liked to start prepping our equipment, but many of the talks were worthwhile in preparation for going into the field. The Antarctic Field Safety class was one of the more interesting classes because we actually got to practice starting the gas stoves (used for melting into water) and setting up the tents. (I feel the need to point out that one doesn't need to worry about yellow snow down here because there is no P in Antarctica). Since I was the newbie and the others had been down here before and gone through this training, I was the one in my group who got to start the stove.

I got the stove started!!!!

I should point out, though it looks like the table is about to catch on fire, that was exactly how you were supposed to start the stove. Once the flame dies down, you increase the gas and get a nice blue flame going.

With all the training going on, you might think we didn't have much time for other things. We did find ample time to settle into the lab.

Our very organized lab space

Actually, the lab didn't look like that until a few hours ago when we really started to get things connected and tested. So far, everything is working as expected ..... except the modems and dataloggers. I have now learned more about iridium communications in the past two days than I ever thought I would. Right now, our data logging equipment isn't playing nice with the modems, but we are making good progress on solving that issue.

We did manage to make it out into the field one day last week to do a survey of two of our sites, both of which are located near the airfield landing strips on the ice shelf. This ice shelf is a mostly permanent layer of ice roughly a couple hundred feet thick that "floats" over the ocean. Not only does that mean the planes takeoff and land on ice, our sites will also be on the ice, which does move slowly throughout the year. Because we are on the ice, the terrain is also very flat, making it an ideal location for snowfall measurement with no notable obstacles to the wind patterns. The first site, Williams "Willie" Field, will be our premier site with three precipitation gauges, including one in a Double Fence Intercomparison Reference (DFIR) shield and two in double Alter shields. For those of you unfamiliar with these, the DFIR shield is composed two octagonal, wooden fences, each about six feet tall, with the precipitation gauge in the middle. The outer fence has a diameter of 40 feet (yes, it's big) and the inner fence has a diameter that is closer to 16 feet. This shield is generally accepted as the world standard for measuring snowfall but its large size makes it impractical to install everywhere. Because of this, we have the double Alter shields, which are two concentric circular shields with swinging metal slats that hang from them, that we will be deploying next to the DFIR. We will use the measurements from the gauge in the DFIR shield to come up with a correction factor for the gauges in the double Alter shields, which are the shields that will be deployed at all the other sites. (More details to come on this in later blog posts with pictures once we start getting the sites installed).

Mark and Carol standing at the Willie Field Site where we staked out the position of our sensors using the flags.

In addition to the fact that our sites are going to be floating on the ocean, they will also be positioned near the base of an active volcano. Mount Erebus rises over 12,000 feet above the ocean and was putting on a nice display while we were staking out our instrument sites.

Mount Erebus with a plume of steam coming from the crater at the summit.

A closeup of the summit.

After surveying both sites, it was time to head back to town. I had the pleasure (and to my passengers, the displeasure) of driving back to town from the sites. This meant I got to drive on the ice shelf (who can say they have done that before??) and on the snow road back to McMurdo. One thing I did stop and take pictures of were the pressure ridges that form in the sea ice along the shore. These occur when the sea ice is being pushed against the land but the ice near the land doesn't slide up onto the land (because it's frozen to the land), so the ice buckles near the edges. They take people on tours of these and hopefully I'll be able to get on one of them for better close up shots in the coming weeks. If you look closely at the left side of the picture below, you can see a red flag. That flag stands about 6-8 feet tall, which should give you some perspective of how tall the ridges are.

Ice pressure ridge

It's now 10pm (my day started at 7am this morning), so it's time to sign off and get some sleep, even though the sun is still shining brightly! More to come soon, including pictures from our hike last weekend (complete with mirages and seals) and hopefully pictures of our sites as we begin to set them up later this week.