Looking out the Crary Lab window late one night

Back Down again!

Mt. Erebus from Taylor Valley

Just a quick note to say that I'm back down on the Ice for another (almost full) season. Stay tuned, more to come....

Life in MacTown

Home sweet home, from the top of Ob Hill

It's about time I post something about station life here at McMurdo. Originally opened in 1956 by the Navy to support the US's scientific efforts during the International Polar Year (1957-1958), the station feels like the cross between a mining town, an army base and a college campus. The population during the summer months rises upwards to 1,100 people, 200-300 of which are scientists and the rest being support staff.


It's a place with no children, very few old people, even fewer minorities, a 3-1 male/female ratio, and virtually no private space. There are few colors, and most smells are associated with our human presence - the most common smells are fuel, cafeteria food, and soap on passerby. There is no nighttime during the summer months - no need for headlamps or streetlights for my entire residency here. The flora is limited to a few species of algae and lichen in the Dry Valleys, though millions of years ago the place teemed with prehistoric life, as evidence by fossil records. The fauna includes penguins, seals, whales, birds, microscopic organisms, and, most recently, human beings.

In a lot of ways, coming down here is like a long fast. Yep, it's weird. And challenging at times. I (mostly) like the weirdness and challenges.

Work
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My average day on station goes something like this: I wake up sometime around 7:30am and make it to the office shortly afterward. Throughout the day, I am busy prepping GPS gear, training science groups on how to use the equipment, processing data, and generally helping people with the GPS or LiDAR portion of their projects. Sometimes that means schlepping truck loads of gear to a central cargo location that will ship the equipment out into the deep field. Sometimes that means hunting around the rows and rows of cargo stored outside for that one pallet of batteries that is desperately needed for a field mission. Because plans change here so often, there's usually a surprise mission every day.

How our stuff gets down here

Right now I'm busy closing out the season, which means I have become a packing machine. Most of the equipment we've used down here must travel back to Colorado so that it can immediately be turned over to the Arctic projects that we will work on or support this coming summer. We have some 2500 - 3000 pounds of equipment that needs to get shipped north, and most of it travels in these large, triwall cardboard boxes. The gear first travels to New Zealand on a C17 military flight, and then to California on a commercial airliner. Once in the States, it will be put onto a FedEx freight truck which will deliver it to Boulder. All in all, the triwall will have traveled close to 10,000 miles over 7-10 days by the time it gets back to Boulder.

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The Galley

Food
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Twice a day, I head to the Galley for lunch and dinner (I know I'm not supposed to skip breakfast because it's the most important meal of the day, but I do anyway). The food is buffet-style, all-you-can-eat, and it's dished out in large bain maries. This year we were lucky to get a steady of "freshies" - salad, fresh fruit and fresh vegetables - about 3-4 times a week. The rest of the food is frozen, canned, or dried.

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My (messy) dorm room

Housing
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Everybody on station lives in a dorm, and everybody minus a few esteemed individuals must have a roommate. There are some dozen dorms to choose from on station, each having its own perks. The bottom line is that it's all about having a roommate you jive with because that space, no matter how you rearrange the furniture, will never truly be private.

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The library is a good place to chill

Recreation
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There's plenty to do on station, especially if you aren't afraid to get creative. It's possible that the center of social life on station revolves around the 3 bars, two of which serve beer and hard alcohol drinks. The third bar is really a combo coffeehouse and wine bar, and it's referred to simply as "the coffeehouse". About twice a month, there is a themed party of some kind in one of the work centers.


Around McMurdo, there is a small network of hiking and skiing trails that are open to anyone. There is also quite a variety of league and intramural sports and fitness classes, most of which take place in our small indoor gym. Like everything else, these activities are open to one and all.

ET and I duke it out in the gym.

For the more artistic members of the community, there is a crafts room with all sorts of artsy materials, from fabrics to beads to sewing machines to clay, etc. Every year, one work center - most recently the Carpenter's Shop - will host the McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery (MAAG), where members of our community get to showcase their art for one night.

The Legendary Beep Beeps play at Freezing Man

You can check out musical instruments of all kinds at the "Gear Issue", which also has some sporting goods (skis, mostly), costumes, and other random items. There are several bands on station, each offering its own genre of music to the community. My favorites are "Porn Spill" - a funk band - and the duo called "The Ukeladies", but bluegrass, rock 'n roll, pop, jazz, and indie are all represented in quality bands that play periodically throughout the season. Annually on New Year's Eve, all of the bands line up for Icestock, an all-day outdoor music festival of sorts.

And finally, but certainly not least, there is improvised recreation that people down here create for themselves. There are endless ads around station for anything you can think of - philosophy classes hosted in a dorm lounge, a call for submissions to the McMurdo Independent Film Festival, travel lectures, meditation sessions, metal-working classes, etc. Most of these activities are more or less underground and run by one or two dedicated and passionate individuals. This pseudo-counterculture is a really definitive part of the experience down here, and it's one of the things I find most interesting about McMurdo.

Man-Hauling

January is usually a beautiful, warm and pleasant month down here, but this year’s weather has been a bit wonky from the start. So, I wasn’t entirely surprised when some shifty weather started building up early this past week. First, my flight out to the Dry Valleys was pushed back by a full day, and once out there the conditions remained sketchy. Instead of the usual summer clear blue skies to be found in the *DRY* Valleys, overhead clouds slowly built up, dropped down, and pretty soon engulfed us.

Waiting for the ride home as the weather gets worse...

It was on the second day of my 3-day scanning trip that we had to pull the plug on our data collection. We got a call from our helicopter, piloted by the valiant Sir Paul and teched by Lady Alicat, helicopter tech extraordinaire (the woman kicks some major ass), and the word was that it was time to scramble. The goal was to get us back to Lake Hoare and to try to get the helicopter to Marble Point, a refueling stop 60 miles from McMurdo, where it and its crew could spend the night. We hoped the helicopter would come in, otherwise we would be stuck for the night (or possibly longer).

When groups fly out to field locations with no camps within walking distance, they get a large survival bag that gets dropped off with them in case the weather turns and the helicopter can't pick them up. The survival bag isn't a luxury hotel bag of schwag - it's a bare bones, bare necessities bag. Inside are a tent, 2 sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, a stove, fuel, enough dehydrated food for 2 poeple for 3 days, a snow saw, a shovel, and an emergency field guide. For entertainment's sake, a trashy novel (usually in the Romance category) is included as well.

The helicopter showed up and after a speed demon helicopter packing frenzy, we had taken off and were heading up into the clouds. I would say that the weather was definitely getting to be marginal, but…. But Paul is a truly excellent pilot and I have total confidence in the man. With not a whole lot of extra visibility over the mountains, we safely flew into Lake Hoare, just as snowflakes started falling. The helicopters would have to stay the night and wait it out.

Helos parked at Lake Hoare

The next day, it was clear early on that the weather wasn’t improving very quickly. After a fantastic breakfast cooked by Paul and Mike, the lead hydrologist I was working with, the group started planning. One of the sites we wanted to work at was just across the lake, a mere mile as the crow flies. However, Lake Hoare has a maze of treacherous, delicate ice formations that make walking across quite an endeavor (and a wet one at times, when you fall through some thin ice into a puddle), one not to be taken when carrying a quarter million dollars of expensive science instruments. The other thing Lake Hoare has is a moat – a beautiful, smooth, flat frozen moat all around its perimeter. So, rather than risk the death march across the lake, we decided to strap our equipment to sleds and man-haul it all the way around the lake to reach the other side.

Packed and ready to go

5 miles around the lake, 1 mile as the crow flies

Mush!

Under a gentle sprinkling of summer snow, my part-husky companion Will and I set out for our trek around the lake. It was pretty uneventful, but I’ll just say that given the chance to carry 60 lbs or to haul 120 lbs, I’d do the hauling any day. It’s the way to travel. After helicopters, of course.

We finally made it to the other side of the lake, and from there we carried the gear to the surveying spot. The hydrology team was setting up a tarp over a plot of land which the winter weather would cover in snow.

In the spring and summer, the tarp would collect any meltwater and funnel it into a bucket they had buried at its lowest point. Using this method, the group would know how much water would have soaked into the ground, and could see how the bacteria colonies in the earth reacted to having less water. There is a big debate amongst different groups here about whether the annual snowfall affects or contributes to the biology in the Dry Valleys – some groups argue that the snow ablates, or evaporates, and that water comes from different sources, while others argue that the snow melts into the ground and is a crucial source of water to the life here. There’s only one way to find out...

Mike tells his war stories...

My job was to scan the tarp so that when we return later in October, we can scan the snow that has accumulated on it and get a volume. And scan away I did. When I get back to Boulder in 6 weeks' time, I'll have a mountain of processing to do, including putting all of these scans together. The little white balls in the image below (on top of the tripods next to the tarp, it's hard to see) are georeferencing points that I'll use to pull the entire scan into a georeferenced data set - that means all of the scanner data points will become GPS coordinates.

As always, Mike's group was a real treat to work with - they are good at what they do, they're organized, they generously helped me carry my 300 lbs of gear all around the valleys, and.... they have an awesome sense of humor. I've been really lucky this season to work with some stellar groups this season, and this is but one example.

All in all, it was a great way to make use of an otherwise slow weather-day.

Hut Cave Tour

The weather has gone seriously downhill - we're sitting in a 30 knot, -30C storm - and so most of our science is off. However, the weather inside the ice caves is barely affected since they are sheltered from the wind and cold, and so we were able to do a little bit of GPS surveying inside the caves yesterday. It's wonderfully warm, moist, and dark in the caves. Here are a few highlights from the trip.





















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From the top of Ross Island....

Mt. Erebus - the crater rim

Greetings from the top of Ross Island! I’m spending my holiday season up at 11,400ft in elevation, just a thousand feet below the top of Mt. Erebus, the world’s most southern active volcano. There are 16 of us here on this Christmas Day – 9 vulcanologists and geochemists, 3 BBC crewmen, and 4 “randoms” of which I belong. This mountain is a truly amazing place, and the people on this mountain rock. These are the two reasons that the top part of this mountain is probably my favorite place in Antarctica.

Skidooing up towards the top

This is what Mt. Erebus looks like from just outside of camp on a clear day. Today is not a clear day and the scenery is remarkably reminiscent of a blank piece of paper, so I won’t bother posting a picture of the “view”.

A fumarole.

Our camp is located a thousand feet down the north flank of the crater, and the landscape is beautifully volcanic. There are old lava flows all around, and peppering the landscape are ice towers (called fumaroles) formed by escaping steam from cracks in the volcano. Below the ice towers, there are usually complex cave systems – the BBC crew loves these (one of the guys here told me it was in the top 5 most amazing things he’d seen) and they’ve been filming these ice/lava caves religiously.

The camp itself is not exactly spectacular, but I’m very attached to it. There is a main hut that is heated where we can all pile into for meals, which are cooked by Anna, our do-it-all camp hand. It’s got a lot of personality as people have added their personal decorations over the years.

Lower Erebus Hut

There is also a shed, so to speak, and it houses scientific equipment, the toilet, a generator, and a small workshop.

Personal accommodations are tents. Here is a part of the tent city out back.







Skidoos are the main mode of transportation here.


So what am I doing up here? I am helping out with both the LiDAR and GPS aspects of the project, and fixing a couple of our permanent GPS stations that are located up here.




Scanning the crater



Before I sign off, here are a few pictures of our Christmas celebration. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate… and happy winter and end-of-year celebrations to all!



Santa visits LEH






The winning stocking - people get
very creative!





The table is set.


Not your average nativity scene, but we'll take it...




The team preps the Xmas meal


The BBC crew films the exotic behaviors of the
elusive Erebus penguins.

Anatomy of a Field Camp

The Jamesway at the field camp at Lake Fryxell

This year, I was immediately whisked out into the field upon my arrival at McMurdo. I usually have a week or two of settling in and getting things going, but within 3 days, I shipped off to the Dry Valleys for a weeklong data collection extravaganza. The Dry Valleys are a set of valleys in the mountains across from McMurdo Sound. They make for an incredibly beautiful settings and unique environment in terms of weather, life and land.

The Dry Valleys of the Transantarctic Mountains are just
some 60 miles west of McMurdo Station (lower right)

Most of what I do down here (and back up north) involves helping various science groups collect GPS data and terrestrial LiDAR data. A lot of them are glaciologists, geologists, and other earth scientists, but we also work with other researchers, like biologists, environmental groups and atmospheric scientists. This makes my job really interesting as I get to dip my fingers into a lot of different projects and see the different studies happening on this side of the continent.

For a majority of the groups that ask for GPS support, we train the team members on how to use the GPS gear and then hand them the equipment and wish them the best on their field campaign. But often, the groups want us to collect the data for them and we get to go out into the field to help them do just that. In fact, with the LiDAR, I get to go out on 90% of the data collection runs, and I consider myself pretty lucky in that respect. That’s my favorite part of my job – the field aspect.

Fieldwork is awesome because you get to have this as your commuter vehicle:

I *heart* helicopters.

And this as your office:

That photo is of the Canada Glacier, which is in the Dry Valleys, just a 45 minute helicopter ride from McMurdo.

Often, science groups will stay in established camps that are pretty cozy and comfortable – some of the buildings are even heated and have 24-hour electricity. This post will be about one such camp. Other times, the groups will have to set up their own temporary camps, and these vary from group to group. These generally don’t have any kind of heating and very limited electricity. I’ll post something about these camps at some other time.

Solar power provides most of the electricity [Lake Fryxell]

The main hut at Lake Hoare

My favorite field camp in the Dry Valleys is the one at Lake Hoare. Lake Hoare is located in beautiful Taylor Valley, which has 3 large lakes: Lake Fryxell (lowest elevation), Lake Hoare, and Lake Bonney. Two things make Lake Hoare my favorite spot in the Taylor Valley – the location and the food! The camp sits right at the foot of the Canada Glacier and just above the lake. It’s a gorgeous spot and getting to camp that close to a glacier makes my knees weak every time.

Making pizza dough inside the Lake Hoare kitchen hut

The camp is pretty luxurious – there are several little lab huts where scientists can look at the samples they’ve collected right there in the field so as to avoid the samples spoiling while waiting to get back to the main science lab at McMurdo. There’s also a main hut with a big kitchen/dining room and an annex that serves as a computer room/nap room/hang out room.

The lab huts at Lake Hoare

Lake Hoare has a wonderful staff that cooks delicious meals (easily 10 times better than the regular McMurdo Galley fare) and takes care of all of the camp chores. The staff really helps move things along and, in general, they are just great people. In almost every other camp, the science groups are responsible for all of the camp duties – cooking, cleaning, organizing cargo, ordering food, coordinating helicopters, etc. So getting to stay at Lake Hoare comes with a big dose of pampering.

Inside a Scott Tent

Welcome to my tent! There are two kinds of tents; the Scott tent is a tall, pyramidal shelter that is great for space, but not so warm, and the mountain tents are your everyday mountaineering tents and are much warmer, but a little low on space. I like ‘em both.

I’ve always slept in a tent in the field (as opposed to a hut), and I really love it. There’s something about the cold air, the warmth of your sleeping bag, and the absolute silence that is entirely unique to this place and makes for a really good night’s sleep.

People are often curious about taking care of those basic human needs in field camps. Well, in short, the answer is that pee gets collected in big 55 gallon drums and solid human waste goes back to "town" in a bucket. Every camp is a little different, but usually the loo is either in a small closet sized shelter or in a tent. I once worked with a group that didn't like shelters for toilets... the bucket just sat in a private spot behind a rock. Wonderful views, but I'm glad it didn't storm when I was there. Anyway, here’s a photo of what one of the closet-type toilets looks like:

On the left, we have the ladies’ peeing seat,
and on the right the co-ed pooing seat.

I think that's about it... soon I'll post something about the work I do out here.

The moon cresting over the top of a
peak at Lake Fryxell camp.