Tractor Falls through Snow Cover into Buried old South Pole Station

A little oopsy from this summer. Many hours and much blushing later, the tractor was extracted.

Midwinter Polar Plunge

Winter solstice. Months of darkness. - 20 degrees ambient, -40 degrees windchill, 29 degree seawater with bits of ice floating on top.

Submissions for 2010 Yearbook Cover, by MacTown residents

Our Trucks Leak and it's Cold Down There

Bay floor after E2 pulls out.

It always finds a way in...

Storms and Black Island

A million gallons or so of gasoline-like mogas.
The legendary midwinter storm of 2004 blew the lid off one of these tanks. One year a big storm blew away 300 brand-new mattresses from the ballpark outdoor storage area. Scientists are still finding them everywhere.
In these conditions in 2004 SAR team wound up out on a Black Island traverse. The air was so thick with snow that GPS wouldn't work. There was no visibility, and they ended up sending out someone on a rope to find each sucessive flag so they could keep on the trail. Going off trail around Black Island is bad- there are some big cracks and rough terrain. Especially the front route- the North side of the island. Black Island is so named because, unlike White Island immediately to the East, winds keep Black Island nearly free of snow. Wind speeds of 50-200mph are common there. The narrow channel between White and Black Island is known as "Herbie Alley" because it is directly south of McMurdo- the direction most bad storms come from. When Black Island disappears, you know you have 1/2hr-1 hr to get to shelter.
Last weekend I went on a Black Island traverse with half of the SAR team as a training/work detail. We took a Hagglunds and a Pisten Bully. Our kit consisted of the personal SAR gear of the 6 team members, survival kits (with tents, sleeping bags, shovels, stoves, food, first aid kits, and trashy novels), some SAR tools (roof-mounted radar, a thermal imaging camera, iridium phone, VHF and HF radios, etc), lots of reflective bamboo pole flags and ice drills, and my MP3 and three books.
On the first day we were blessed with really nice weather. Almost no wind and a balmy temp of -10F or so. We packed up and picked up our stray Kiwi from Scott Base, then checked out with Firehouse dispatch and crossed the transition and drove south over the Ross Ice Shelf.
The traverse route took us southwards over seasonal packed snow-covered ice roads towards LDB (Large Diameter Balloon weather and atmospheric project- it is a few miles from Scott Base, it's staffed full time in summer and has really good food. A few times a season they send up gigantic balloons to monitor conditions up high.).
From LDB we drove along the old Willy Field runway. From here the ground was more or less unmaintained, but still pretty flat. Willy Field, the 3rd runway, was taken out of use last year in an attempt to consolidate runways. Willy was named after a Navy man, Richard T Williams, who drowned when his D8 tractor broke through sea ice in 1956. Wikipedia says the field sits on top of 25' of compacted snow, 260' of ice, and 1800' of sea water! Apparently the new plan is a midsummer ice runway right next to town, and a permanent ice shelf runway further away the rest of the year. They run the Ice Runway- on annual sea ice- right up until the ice is so thin that seawater is coming up through cracks and making pools on the surface. At this point the surface deflection caused by larger parked planes such as C17s means they are sitting in water if the sea can find a crack to come up through... then they run the risk of getting frozen in... This summer there was a good crack that ran under the Station 2 and a saltwater pond next to the station for a week or two before we left. We named it Lake Doherty after one of our guys.
Pegasus seems to be well-positioned as far as weather patterns and ice quality goes, but it's 7-17miles from McMurdo depending on which roads are navigable at the time. Pegasus, by the way, is named after a C-121 Lockheed Constellation that crashed there in 1970, and still sits on the edge of the runway. Analysis of possible closer Ice Shelf runway locations is in progress.
The roads outside of "the rock" (Ross Island) are called ice roads, but you generally don't do much driving on actual ice. The transition onto Ross Island- were the ice meets the land and gets melty and crushed and messy- is one place you drive on ice. And further afield there are other transition areas and surface melt pools called lenses. But most parts of the ice roads go over very hard, very deep snow that is constantly drifting. When the structures at LBD and Pegagus are winterized, big snow berms are built and the building are placed up high on them so they won't have to be dug out in spring. LBD site has several black-flagged areas where the hollow spaces of old buried buildings lie just below the surface. The same thing happens at the South Pole. The new station is built on 'stilts'- which are already being buried faster than anticipated. The old geodesic dome South Pole station was dismantled this year, but not before a tractor fell into it while driving across the snow surface. There are places on the continent that experience dozens of feet of drifting each year, and entire stations that are now well underground. Antarctica is the world's biggest desert, and most of this drifting isn't fresh snowfall, it's just blown in from elsewhere.
1-2' high sastrugi were scattered at irregular 10-30' intervals at right angles to the road. They gave us a bumpy ride in the Hagglunds- worse in the PB- but were a blast on snowmobiles on our summer traverse. It was pretty weird to be jumping sastrugi on a snowmobile on an old ice runway in Antarctica.
Anyway, we headed south off the airfield and started drilling holes for flags. Four maintenance guys had headed out to BI a couple days in advance of us. We watched their tracks take a couple wrong turns where the flags ran out and their GPS had given them difficulties. We had flagged the route on the snowmobile trip in January, but there were quite a few sections with flags broken off or blown away already. When the fuel in the drills' priming bubbles froze solid, we learned it was best to keep them in the warm cab if we wanted them to start.
Eventually we approached the channel between the islands. In Herbie alley, the ice sheet crests a broad rise, then dumps downhill to the north. It can be a very rough area. On the snowmobile trip the SAR lead entertained us with stories of people getting dumped into 5' deep/+ lenses. We had all our spare gear in waterproof packing and were instructed to try and give the machine throttle and get out quickly if we started breaking through a lense. So I was very disappointed when we arrived in January to find that nature had greatly smoothed the area. It wasn't really a challenge at all. The Kiwis had been in December, when the cracks were big, and the road rugged enough that they had to crawl along and use an outside spotter to get the vehicles safely across the terrain. But when we arrived in Hagglunds and PB June 4th, it was just as mild a trip as in January!
The route I'd really like to take is the Black Island Front Route. It's shorter than the Back Route, but much rougher. It goes across the ice to the north of the island- onto which the prevailing southerlies blow a continual rain of BI volcanic dust. The dust causes diffential melting. From what I have heard BI Front Route is a labyrinth of deep deceptive melt pools and weird mushroom-shaped snow formations, some as high as the Hagglunds roof.
We got out of the channel and into the smooth ground behind the island. It's a pretty area, with Minna Bluff to the south and the steep glaciers and hills of Black Island to the north, just visible in the starlight. The sastrugi were a little closer together and they made the Hagglunds jump like the shocks were going bad. But, as our speed was up, the heat was really blasting, and I slept pretty comfortably for most of the rest of the journey.
We arrived at the Black Island facility, and suddenly the wind was up and the air was full of the whoosing noise of wind turbines. We jumped out into the cold and unloaded our gear into "the night train"- a little towaway trailer that serves as spillover housing at BI. It's so named because when the wind picks up it rocks and rumbles like a train going down the tracks. The crew that preceeded us had lit the preway stove for us, and before long it was pretty cozy in the top bunks. Lower down, an armchair next to the stove was full of snow that had drifted down. The snow managed not to melt all night.
Inside the main BI facility, we had one of the best dinners I've ever eaten. It was very warm and cozy with nice furniture (Very rare in McMurdo!), and we sat around til 9 or 10 with some home-brewed beer. It's really great to hang around the old hands and hear all the crazy stories about Antarctica. Towards the end of the night a friend and I went out to explore and check out the stars and auroras. It doesn't get all that dark here- the starlight was enough to walk by without a light. There was no light pollution and the auroras were pretty nice. At one point we had almost 360 degrees worth of aurora-lit sky.
The night-train stayed cozy til around 0300 when the wind picked up. I ended up bundled down in my winter sleeping bag with the preway on high, listening happily to the building's rumble. I wished I could spend the rest of the season out there.
In the morning we packed up and were blessed by easily-starting vehicles. The winds were 50knots and firehouse dispatch called and asked "I assume you're not going this morning?" which had me very excited until the SAR lead reiterated his decision that we'd be OK to go anyway.
The other traverse stayed on several more days. They were there to repair and maintain generators and communications equipment. Black Island is a several-million dollar communication facility that only exists because Mt Erebus and the rest of Ross Island is in the way of McMurdo's northern horizon. That's where the good satellite coverage is- low in the north- so a big dish at BI sends and receives all the comm.s for the entire station. BI consists of a few trailers hooked together and a couple satellite dishes in protective metal-fiberglass domes. The fiberglass panels of the domes flap deafeningly in the high winds. BI went down for a few days at the start of the season and we lost comm.s and internet, which was delightful.
Much to my dismay, the trip back was uneventful. We covered the 55 miles in 6 or 7 hours. For a few hours around noon a lovely rosy blush lit up the whole northern horizon, making me suspect that it will never get entirely dark here. I mean to write Someone a strongly worded letter about this, as it is counter to my expectations. Just after we got back on the main LDB road, I startled the other crew by pulling off to the side and doing a 180, because the best auroras of the season so far were dancing behind us. We watched them for half an hour- wide green zigzags stretching down til they disappeared behind the horizon. Their bottom edges were low enough to have just a hint of yellow and red.
Far too soon, it was time to head back into town and get everything back to response readiness. For days I had a strange feeling of having gone very far away, like after R&R in NZ...

McMurdo Summer Film Festival Film- One Day in the Life of Vladimir Fyodorovitch - Bellingshausen Station

Almirante Brown Fire and SAR drill

Crazy Antarctica story of the week:

In 1984 the station doctor at the Peninsular Argentina station, Almirante Brown, lost it when faced with an imminent Antarctic winter. He set fire to several of the station's buildings as the last ship was leaving. The station had to be abandoned and was later rebuilt. (rebuilt Almirante Brown in photo above).

McMurdo has its own, less dramatic odd doctor story. Rumor has it the 2009 winterover doctor went a little loopy and started keeping to himself and designing spaceships. One of his plans is still making the rounds of the station!

We had a good SAR drill Thursday. After practicing variations on mechanical advantage systems indoors at Scott Base all morning, we headed outside to the Scott Base Road. For most the road's length there's a sharp dropoff on one side. About halfway between Scott Base and McMurdo on the right there is a steep valley into which a Kiwi truck went off the road in Con 1 conditions in recent years. It's a bad drop; fortunately the driver managed to self-extricate and crawl back up the hill.

In another recent Scott Road accident, a real short girl was driving a Nodwell. Nodwells are tracked vehicles that are steered by dual levers, one for each track. You brake by pulling back hard on both levers. This girl started down the hill to Scott Base, only to find that in order to drive she'd pulled her seat so far forward that she couldn't pull the levers back far enough to brake effectively. The Nodwell was heading for the roadside dropoff, and horror of horrors, she gave up trying to stop it and jumped out! The machine and it's compliment of passengers went over the edge and hung up on a pipeline halfway down the cliff. I believe there were some injuries.

Back to our drill. It was dark, naturally, and breezy with a windchill of around -60F. We were pretty motivated to make the drill go quickly. We tossed our dummy victim down the hill. He slid about 40'. Then we set about building a rope system.

We parked our Hagglunds and van 50' apart and built 2 anchors onto the Hagglunds (which was positioned above the victim) and one on the van. The backup line was led through a pulley and secured with a double prussik, then tied, along with the main, to the stokes basket with a double longtail bowline. The main line went through a break bar rack for the lower.

The cold was pretty bitter and I'm definitely still learning how to gear up optimally to be able to maintain dexterity in these conditions. I had chemical heaters, glove liners, and insulated leather gloves, but I still ended up with slow fingers and some good hot aches by the time we headed down the hill. Finally the stokes basket was ready to go, hypo kit and backboard all strapped in. (the hypo kit contains a harness and webbing to secure the pt to the stokes, and a moisture barrier, big down wrap, and tarp to keep them warm. The moisture barrier is actually one of several hundred body bags they ordered after the 1979 Erebus plane crash. Haha, aren't we resourceful?) Four litter attendants roped up with a) a purcell onto the stretcher and b) a purcell onto the main longtail. And down the hill we went.

It was pretty nice once we got over the edge. After 20' or so the wind cut off, and we were moving enough to be pleasantly warm. While we'd been setting up the system, the dummy went ahead and slid another 100' down. We all let the rope take most of our weight and hustled down there pretty quick. Maybe even a little quicker than we would have liked! We strapped up the dummy as the guys up top did a hot swap onto a raising system. I think they had a 3:1 set up between the 2 trucks.

I guess the slope was 65-75 degrees on real loose scree-including large boulders- and deep fluffy snow. The snow was interesting, since there's almost never deep, fluffy snow around McMurdo. It's mostly like rock, and you can saw it into blocks or dig real strong deadmen into pretty easily. But this was fluffy. Crampons are miraculously effective in most snow here, but they would have just been a hazard to the other attendants on this stuff. It would have been a nightmare to try and actually walk up the slope, especially while carrying the pt and eating rocks from the guy directly above you. But, to my delight, after a few feet I found a happy little balance between leaning back on the longtail, and leaning out while balancing my weight off the guy on the other side of the stokes. It was really a hell of a lot of fun, and I walked up the slope like it was nothing. The guys on the rope system, however, were working pretty hard. Every now and then one of the litter attendants would lose that sweet spot and fall, then crawl along unhappily on their knees for a few feet until the rope crew (out of sight on the road above us) stopped to reset the system. Before I knew it, we were over the edge and on the windy road again.

(disclaimer: this post- and this blog in general- is just chock full of real, genuine, Antarctic rumor. This is the one of very worst kinds of rumor and the reader should never fail to take any of it with a grain of salt.)

This May we had what turned into the most interesting call of the year by far. At around 0930 Fleet Ops was working the ice with a bulldozer on the McMurdo Ice Road Transition. A little geography: McMurdo is on a little 10-mile longish spit that sticks out to the south from an island built of three massive volcanos. The permanent ice of the Ross Ice Shelf is hundreds of feet thick and stretches for hundreds of miles south of us. Gravity and ice fed in by glacial flows push the ice north towards the open sea at the rate of 5-10'/day. McMurdo's site was chosen by early explorers because it was the furthest point south on the continent with open water in summer. (although in modern times, for poorly understood reasons that may have to do with massive icebergs, temperature gradients between pole and lower latitudes, and current changes, the harbor doesn't open up naturally anymore). The Ross ice shelf also provided a convenient, relatively flat route deep into the continent towards the Pole. The thick permanent ice meets the thinner (12-20') seasonal ice at McMurdo. I've heard the edge of the permanent ice described as a towering blue wall elsewhere, but at McMurdo the two ice types just seem to flow together relatively seamlessly.
The ice shelf crunches into Ross Island on the Scott Base side of our little spit. On that side it buckles up into pressure ridges. These can be 10-20' high depending on the season. The summer road to Pegasus Airfield loops out around these ridges and runs along the permanent ice. On the McMurdo side of the spit, there seems to be sort of an eddy that creates a jumbled mess of cracked, broken, upheaved ice in front of town. The shorter spring road to Pegasus runs right through this and out over thinner ice. This spot has to be groomed and smoothed in preparation for summer use.
So Fleet Ops was out there with a dozer around 0930 Tuesday morning and they dropped one track into a big tidal crack. The rig was at about a 45degree angle with one track in the water and one in the air, so they had to call in a second machine to pull it out. As chance would have it, one of our firefighters was out on the road at that moment and he took pictures. The first pullout attempt was unsucessful when a cable broke and the dozer settled back into place.
At around 1030 the EOC (Emergency Operations Committee- station lead, NSF lead, fire captain, and other leaders) was activated. They went to their planning room in MacOps and took charge of the incident. Fleet Ops attempted a second pull-out but broke another cable. This time the dozer settled in much deeper and was now at a 65 degree angle with the track fully submerged.
By dinnertime ice profiling had been done and showed that the ice in the area ranged from 3-6'. 3' around the dozer. The decision was made to put someone in the dozer and attempt another extrication rather than leave it there to freeze in place until summer or later. Three tractors were hooked to the dozer with snatch blocks and pulled on it from solid ice. Another rig pushed against the blade of the trapped dozer.
The fire department and SAR were asked to standby to provide icewater rescue if necessary. Unfortunately neither the AFD or SAR are trained or equipped for ice rescue. This is odd since vehicles constantly travel on ice roads here, the station is surrounded by areas with open cracks, and major ship offload activities take place once a year in icewater. We ended up scrounging a couple drysuits left in the closed-up dive shack. Two of us that have had ice rescue training squeezed into those. I drew the short straw and ended up in some insulated foul-weather gear topped off with a harness. The crew put together an incredibly weird rope system and we stood by with fingers crossed. Fortunately the final pull got the tractor our sucessfully, and nobody got (too) wet.

Quiet day at the AFD. Lt is on kday, so we've knocked everything out quickly and are enjoying some down time. Three of the crew are online and the fourth is reading an American history book. I've asked the old-timers what everyone used to do down here in the winter in the days before internet. Apparently they all basked in warm incandescent light and played a lot of board and card games. That sounds a lot better than sitting through endless days of long silences broken only by the tapping of four sets of fingers on keyboards. That said, there is some liveliness and conversation today. Saturdays are usually good days. It seems like things have picked up some too over the last month; our recent hands-on drills might have helped.

The drills have made this sort of an odd month. We were busy with a lot of other things and didn't drill much, and call volume is low, so the crew has actually worked together very little until now. We've done a few full medical scenarios, including a cardiac patient, hazmat exposure, and traumatic injury. A lot of equipment shortcomings and unforeseen challenges came up. I'd like to get a reeves stretcher here, since nearly every building is accessible only by sets of slippery snowy metal stairs. Due to permafrost, everything is built on pilings set onto horizontal wooden beams. I'm surprised some of them stand up to the wind. Every winter some structure is done in by winds that get up to 200mph. Last year there were 3 days straight of Con 1 storms that brought all unessential work to a stop. The roof blew off one of the VIP housing trailers on the east side of town. A few years ago the entire roof blew off a million gallon storage tank during a storm. An old hand told me the other day that in 1984 or 1985 ( I forget which), 300 brand new mattresses blew away from "the ballpark" outdoor storage area. Scientists are still finding them out on the ice today.

I'm still waiting for some good storms this year. Unfortunately the historic worst portion of the year, fall, is pretty much over. During the time between last sunset at Pole and last sunset on the coast, there's a huge temperature gradient between here and there. All that dense, cold air flows down the slope from the central plateau of the highest continent and creates some of the world's worst winds by the time it reaches the coast. Now that the sun is gone, there's less daily heating and cooling and we're entering the intensely cold, calm part of the year. Yesterday the temperatures plummeted from the balmy 10F days we'd been enjoying to -20F. At winfly the winds will pick up again, and the bitter cold will treat us to some beautiful nacreous clouds.

Last night was quite entertaining. The upper floor of 155 was awash with the annual ungodly loud White Trash party. Couches filled the hall and beer cans and spilt cheetos coated the floor. Cleavage and butt crack abounded. There was a lot of flannel and one incongruous fellow in black leather and pink spandex. It was the 2nd most drunk night I've had here so far.

One Month of Antarctic Sunsets

26 April 2010

26 April 2010

26 April 2010

24 April 2010

23 April 2010

20 April 2010

18 April 2010

16 April 2010

14 April 2010

13 April 2010

13 April 2010

12 April 2010

11 April 2010

10 April 2010

8 April 2010

6 April 2010

4 April 2010

3 April 2010

2 April 2010

31 March 2010

30 March 2010

29 March 2010

Meanwhile, at a station that is not McMurdo...

Vogons are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.
Vogons are described as officiously bureaucratic, a line of work at which they perform so well that the entire galactic bureaucracy is run by them.
The Vogons' battle-cry, and counter-argument to dissent, is "resistance is useless!"



"Oh freddled gruntbuggly/thy micturations are to me/As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes. And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"

Oh nos- time for options

Here is our lovely greenhouse; it's a bit drab and weather-worn on the outside, but instead is a pure delight for the senses. Especially if you've been surrounded by snow and ice for eight months. Fleet ops delivers water to an inside tank twice a week, and between humidifiers and leaf transpiration that's used to keep the greenhouse humidity around 20% most days. Outside is 10% or less, so it feels like a tropical rainforest when you step inside. And there's LIGHT! 17 hours a day of bright full-spectrum lighting. Everything is hydroponic and the plants grow quite fast. I volunteer on sundays, balancing nutrients in the tanks, pruning, and transplanting, and there's very noticeable growth every week.

The plants are really sensitive to low water levels and nutrient/pH disruption. All this has to be measured and adusted every single day. In the Antarctic climate evaporation is fast and a single day of imbalance will cause a whole row of tomatos ( carefully nurtured for months) to wilt and nearly die... The plants are less sensitive to temperature and humidity fluctuations, which occur depending on weather conditions outside. The greenhouse is about 75 degrees most of the time, but frost builds up in most of the corners. Myself and another firefighter come in on Sundays so the greenhouse manager can have a day off. I've never dealt with hydroponics before, so it's a great experience.

Food production was a bit delayed since the building is almost condemnable and had to be shored up at the beginning of the season. But in the past couple weeks we've had our first ripe tomatos, cucumbers, and mixed salad greens. We also grow assorted herbs and edible flowers including mint, thyme, lemon basil, coriander, nasturtiums, and violas. Finally, there are some hot peppers which should come into bloom soon.

After the work's done, it's time to lounge in the hammock with a good book...