Turkey Trot

Me in background

Wedell Seal scratchin'
Skua Bird

Cape Evans and Pegasus

Scott and Shakeltons 1911 hut

Wrecked airplane from 1970's

Airbus A319

The Australian Antarctic program decided to get into the air transport game down here and built their own runway. The next logical step was to land an airplane on the runway. They came to McMurdo to practice and see just how well the air bus would do on packed snow and ice.

Mail

I've had bad luck getting packages down here. The weather has not helped either. When we get a weather delay the science stuff takes top priority and package mail gets last. Currently the lag time is about a month.

I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving. We didn't celebrate yesterday like everyone else. Holidays here allways happen on a weekend. We have our big dinner tomarrow.

Cold

Every so often I get the urge to complain about the constant cold, or the constant light. Then I remember where I am...

Work

Some folks have been asking just what it is they pay me to do here. Here it is. When a plane comes in it can be so cold that they need heat on the engines and brakes. This keeps them from getting condensation and locking up. The C-17 below can only stay so long. After a few hours it needs to move or it will start sinking into the ice. Over the course of several hours the ice will actualy bend below it. C-130s are light enough to stay indefinitely.

We use either trucks or a tracked caterpillar to drag stuff to and from the airplanes. They always need a power cart which is the more orange looking box above. Below is a picture of the airfield from ob hill. There are no planes. You can make out the runway on the far edge of everything. The road out is in front. I've been running back and forth to work recently. Road out there is about a mile but its hard to tell, there nothing to gauge it by.

So about 75% is dragging heaters and power carts around to airplanes. The rest of the time varies. We inspect the runway a couple times a day. If the planes break we get the National Guard the stuff they need to work on the airplanes and we empty the toilets. Thats it. We spend some days fairly busy, others we wait around for something to do.

On another note. Just outside of town, very close to the ice pier is Scotts hut. Built in 1902 and used by several expeditions. Due to the dry air here nothing rotts so the hut a very well preserved. They never used it for shelter, it was a design that got used alot in the outback so it held heat very poorly.

The food they left out is still there and some of the seals and penguins they had killed are mumified.

These dog bucuits looked almost good enough to eat, almost.

Heres one from scott base nearby. The winterover crew did a perfect recreation of the last supper for thier yearly picture. This one isnt that clear but you get the idea.

Happy Camper

So a couple days ago I spent my weekend out in the field at a mini snow survival course. For two days a group of about twenty got trucked out on to the permanent ice shelf west of town and we spent a night.
Building a snow fort is not only fun but a good way to survive when its freakin cold out. One way to do that is to have everyone pile their gear like so. Then, cover in snow.

Pile a crap load of snow on the gear then beat it copiously with shovels. After you have about 2 feet of well beaten snow, dig a tunnel under the gear and pull it out, sleeps 4.



The weather was not always pleasant.
But snow walls keep the wind down. The all blue rig was where I spent the night. The triangle shaped tents are called scott tents. Its an old double walled canvas design but it stays quite warm and stands up to hurricane force winds. The night was actually pleasant and I stayed warm enough. The downside of all this was after you do alot of hard work building walls and setting up camp you have to go back home. It would have been nice to hang out a while longer.

24 hour day light

Some folks inquired about 24 hours of continuous sunshine before I left so I thought I would share what thats like.

We had our last official sunset on October 20th. At that point though the sun was just barely dipping below the horizon and we had 24 hours of light, just not direct sunlight. Currently the sun is overhead nearly24 hours a day, it goes behind the hills near town for a bit. One odd thing though, being from the northern hemisphere we are accustomed to seeing the sun linger in the southern half of the sky. In the winter its lower and in the summer it can get nearly overhead. Here the sun stays in the Northern half of the sky and because of this, and it sounds weird, the sun seems to move the wrong direction.

Whats also weird is the you can tell time by the sun but not like home. At home you can tell that the sun is near rising or setting, or even directly over head. It moves 15 degrees per hour so you can reason that if its a certain height in the sky its a certain time. Here the sun never goes down it swirls around in the sky. But, I know the if it's shining over Scott base (the Kiwi's base) its morning, if its over Mt Erebus its getting towards dinner.

The sun being out all day play tricks on you mind some times. When I wake up in the middle of the night and see the sun shining through the cracks around the shudders it's hard no to think the its the middle of the day and I should get up. Just the other day my roommate was sleeping, woke up and saw 8:25 on his clock. He saw me with a coffee mug and assumed that it was morning and he was really late for work. He went into full spaz mode trying to get all his clothes on and run out the door. When I told him that it was infact nearly eight thirty at night and he had slept through dinner he was dumbfounded.

We won't have another sunset until March 20th, long after the station closes and I leave. So this means that I won't see stars until late February when I get back to New Zealand.