Life at the South Pole

Encore

2009-02-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

I hadn't planned on writing any further updates to this blog, but three months after escaping to New Zealand, I find myself back at pole. This time my visit's only for two weeks - I'm here to train next year's SPT winterovers - but I think I've got enough pole-related material to write about to justify one final post.

Stepping off the plane and back onto the well-known ice field was a surreal moment. Walking toward the station, up the oh-so-familiar stairs, down the halls I once wandered aimlessly through the night: the ice-bound world, without moisture or smells, was eerily familiar, and strangely comforting.

Everything was exactly as I remembered it, only completely different. There was a tremendous feeling of deja-vu, as if I had just walked into a world I'd only seen in a dream. It was a homecoming, only I found my house redecorated and my family and friends replaced by strangers.

It's hard to believe that it was only 3 months ago that my winter drew to a close. So much has happened in the interim, so many lives lived in miniature, so much seen and so much changed. It feels as if I'm returning to pole not mere months after leaving, but years.

The expanded sense of time is probably the result of the year of slow-motion winterover life: returning to the real world, events fly at you so frequently, with such rapidity, that the days seem impossibly full, too eventful for 24 short hours. Somehow it just seems more likely that, as at pole, there is a full year between sunrises.

I do have to admit to a certain awkwardness in the first weeks of my off-ice life. I've spoken with many of last year's winterovers, and everyone seems to agree: something in the lives we left behind just didn't seem quite right when we returned. The best description I've heard is that you feel like a visitor to your own life. With old friends, co-workers, even family, we just don't quite fit anymore.

Even now, several long months later, I find myself more comfortable in the company of winterovers than with my oldest and best friends. Many of the others have been traveling to and fro across the US, seeking each other out, just to enjoy a meal or a drink together. Those who visited family over the holidays tell tales of retreating to their bedrooms, sitting happily and wanting nothing more than to stare at the wall in peace for a couple of hours. Pole didn't break me down quite that much, but I'll admit that I see the appeal of the idea.

Now that I've been back on the ice for a solid week, I've settled into a new way of doing things. My mind has accepted that this isn't winter pole, and I'm living comfortably as a summer-winter hybrid, still spending more time in my room than anywhere else, but friendly and outgoing with the summer folks. I'm not fooling anyone - a blind man can spot a winterover from across the room down here - but I am happy, neither reliving my old life, nor fretting about the future; life at pole really is wonderfully simple.

Coming back down here has somehow allowed me to finally box up the winter and put it behind me, as an incredible experience, one that I wouldn't trade for anything. All the memories that faded so quickly when I got to New Zealand have been gently reasserting themselves, prompted by the familiar surroundings, and my winter at pole is beginning to settle in as just another year in my life. A unique one, granted, but neither seminal, nor one that I need to pretend never happened.

It's good to be back at pole, but this isn't really home anymore. It's time to move on, maybe settle down for a bit back in the real world.

Post Mortem

2008-12-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly a month since I left the ice, and my memories of the past year are fading with shocking rapidity. All the long walks through the dark, the frustratingly short 2 minute showers, the excitement and the boredom, all the good times and the all bad seem so distant now, as though imagined in a dream.

Life in the real world is spectacular. Everything is so vibrant, practically humming with life. The birds, the trees, the rivers - they seem almost too real. My mind is buzzing with activity every time I leave my hotel room; there's just so much to see and do. It's all so new, a sort of rebirth after the confinement at pole.

I'd forgotten how much I like water. From ridiculously long and frequent showers to going scuba diving to simply dangling my feet in a stream, I've been spending a lot of time in and around water. Rain has probably been my favorite experience since leaving the ice - the smell, the feel, the sudden change that passes over the world.

Apparently all polies experience something like this on leaving the ice: complete wonderment at every little thing that seemed so routine before our polar incarceration. Flowers, animals, daily sunrises - everything holds a new importance to us. It's funny looking at the world through fresh eyes, and it's a wonder to experience it all again for the first time.

All these new experiences and sensations seem to be completely overwhelming the memories of life at pole. To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that it actually happened, that I did live at the South Pole for the past year. Those memories are so slippery now, fleeting and ephemeral. I'm sure they'll reassert themselves as I settle back in to regular life, but for now, the pole feels very, very far away.

As one final note on this blog, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who read it through the year, and particularly to those who posted comments. It was one of my few lines to the outside world, and the occasional word of support went a long way in helping to maintain my mental health. I hope you all enjoyed reading it, and that I could somehow share some of the experience of being down there.

- Keith

Leaving Pole

2008-11-11T14:53:00.000-08:00

My time at pole has finally drawn to a close, and after two more-or-less frantic days of turnover with the incoming SPT people, I'm now safely off the ice and back in New Zealand. Civilization at last. I'll try to write one final post after a couple of weeks back in reality, but for now, just a few words about my departure from pole.

I have to admit, it was much harder than I expected to tear myself away from the station. After living there so long, it was home, even with our winter community shattered amid the influx of summer folks. I tried in vain to convince myself that there was in fact a whole new world out there, oh so much bigger and more exciting that my little existence on the ice, but it was still tremendously difficult to pack and leave everything behind.

Eventually the moment came, and with hugs and well wishes from the new SPT folks and the last few winterovers, I boarded the C130 to Mactown. That afternoon & evening, the polies gathered in our berths to share a bottle of whisky and some cheap wine. Mactown is no place to celebrate your freedom, but that doesn't mean you can't get pleasantly drunk there.

The skin on my hands, which had been a sort of scaly parchment, tearing at every opportunity and never quite healing up, was smooth and supple within 6 hours of landing at sea level, wounds healed, knuckles finally no longer cracked and bleeding. The humidity & warmth in Mactown seemed obscene, and while the locals were dashing through the -12C air and 30 knot winds, giant red parkas pulled tight against the wind, polies wandered happily about in shorts and flip-flops. We smiled at the sun, sniffed the dirt underfoot, and generally looked like a bunch of madmen strolling through town.

Leaving the next day for Christchurch came as a too-long delayed release from captivity. We cheered as the C17 lifted off the ice shelf, though everyone was too hungover to celebrate for long. Most of us spent the flight napping, until we began to descend into NZ. Suddenly a rich, thick, fragrant air filled the cabin. It wasn't the smell of flowers and pollen everyone had suggested we'd smell. It was dirt, plain and simple. The smell of earth has never been quite so beautiful, such a welcome relief.

We landed in Christchurch around 9:30 at night, and after clearing customs, walked over to the CDC to turn in our well-worn ECW. The walk was punctuated by people rolling around on the grass, stopping to smell the bushes (not the flowers, the plants themselves), and generally marvelling at everything that teased our senses.

It's good to be off the ice. I'm sure I'll miss pole eventually, but for now life is very full. Tomorrow I'm off for the botanic gardens, to see trees and watch ducklings paddle about on the river. Hurrah!

Dopplegangers

2008-11-10T14:51:00.001-08:00

The last couple of days at pole, the population as been roughly a dozen winterovers to 190 new people. Bumping into someone you know in the hall is inevitably a moment for celebation as a look of immense relief at a familiar face floods over both people's faces. With so few of us winterovers left, these encounters are becoming fewer and farther in between, but flashes of recognition still cross our faces every few minutes.

Every time we turn a corner, every time a someone walks through a door, every time we catch a glimpse of anyone from any distance or angle, there's a moment where they become a fellow winterover. Someone's hair, stance, shirt - anything can set it off - will look like someone we know, an ally from the winter, and our minds will seize on that before they suddenly revert to a stranger, summer person once again.

It's an odd experience walking the halls we know so well with so many strange new faces flooding through them. Our minds haven't quite adjusted to the new reality, and continually imprint faces we know over those we don't. Things are getting progressively less comfortable for the remaining winter crew, and we're all looking to get out as soon as possible.

I think once we get back to the real world, this shouldn't be such a problem. It's just that in these surroundings, there are only 59 other people we expect to meet. Anyone else - to a winterover's eyes - simply doesn't belong.

Photo Recon

2008-11-08T18:45:00.000-08:00

The day after station opening, I got to take part in one of the more interesting start-of-summer tasks. Thanks to the many pictures I took throughout the winter, I was recruited to go up in a little Twin Otter plane for aerial reconnaissance photos. These shots are taken and archived twice a year, to watch the development of snow drifts, better understand the status of construction, and generally record the condition in and around station.

The recon flights consist of three passes over the station, repeated at 500 and 1000 feet, for each of the two photographers taken up. When it's your turn to shoot, you swap places with the co-pilot, roll down the window, lean out a little (not too much - the wind will catch anything that actually crosses out of the window and yank it violently away), and start snapping.
We took up a couple of winterovers to fill out the empty seats, and everyone had the same reaction: the station is sooo tiny! It was a shock to see our little world in context, a tiny oasis in a frozen ocean extending seemingly forever in every direction.
On each pass, there are specific things they want photographed, and the plane circles and tips to ensure the best possible angles. While this works pretty well, it's a little disorienting when you're shooting - the horizon keeps moving around, and because of all the centrifugal force, it rarely matches with what you think is level - and positively sickening when you're in the back. After the 10th or 11th pass, all the passengers were looking a little green around the gills.

I'd never done anything like that before, and am really glad I got to go up and see our world in context. It was also awfully fun to sit in the cockpit and shoot out an open window with the plane diving this way and that. I guess there are some upsides to station opening & new people.

Station Opening

2008-11-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

The weather at pole this past week has been windy - too windy for planes to land - and station opening had to be delayed a day. On Wednesday, winterovers still outnumbered summer folks 57 to 34. By the end of Thursday, we were down to 30, and the new people up to 110. Saturday it was roughly 10 to 190. Very quickly the station was overrun with new people, and most of our family of winterovers had disappeared.

Station opening is defined by the arrival of the first Hercules C-130, the workhorse planes that transport everything - people, fuel, and equipment - to and from pole. The last one left pole February 14th, beginning our winter season. Thursday, the first one we'd seen in 8 months landed and taxied over to the station, where it disgorged a mass of 40 new people. An hour later, another arrived with another 40, snatched up half the winter crew, and flew off to warmer climes.

That evening and the next day, it was tremendously clear that life had changed. All throughout our home, strange people were running about, acting like they owned the place. Winterovers were marginalized, newly ousted from places they used to tread freely. In the galley, we began to cluster at one end, suspiciously watching the masses of new folks. In the hallways and at work, the arrival of a fellow winterover - even someone who you rarely spoke to in the winter - is now greeted with a smile of pure delight.

Nobody quite realized through winter how much we had become a family. Only when a horde of strangers moved into our home and dragged away half of the members of that family, did we begin to understand. We sixty people living through the six month night on the bottom of the world formed a strong bond. We are now and always will be close; polies to the bitter end.

South Pole Diet

2008-11-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

Writing about the arrival of freshies the other day reminded me that I've been meaning for a while to write a short note on the diet down here. The meals we live off are not exactly health food. Far from it, we eat mostly comfort food. Heavy, rich, and constantly available.

Due to both the elevation and the cold here, we seem to burn calories at a ridiculous rate. To provide maximum calories with minimum complication (see my post on South Pole Cooking for details on trying to cook even moderately complex dishes), most meals end up very meaty, and very fried. Cholesterol levels inevitably skyrocket through the year, and most of the oldtimers end up on medication to keep theirs under control.

I certainly don't mean to denigrate the efforts or skills of the galley staff - they work wonders within the limitations of the place. The problem is that very little is available, meals need to be as caloric as possible, and food is one of the few tools available to keep morale up through the long dark winter. Keeping everyone well stuffed with fried chicken helps to pacify the mob.

I made no effort early on to restrict my meals, and after 6 months of eating nothing but fries, ice cream, steak and corn dogs, I'd dropped nearly 20 lbs. I feel like I should write some sort of diet book - "Eat whatever you want and watch the pounds melt away! Just spend 3 hours outside every day in -100F and at 11,000 feet, and you'll be amazed by the results!" (Since sunrise, I haven't burned quite so much energy stumbling over sastrugi, and my weight's recovered somewhat.)

I'm certainly getting a bit tired of the same greasy food day in, day out, and the arrival of freshies only served to sharpen that feeling. I'm not much of a fruit eater, but the thought of a fresh apple, some berries, or a pineapple (oh, my kingdom for a pineapple!), readily available, any time of day or night, seems like paradise. New Zealand is our first stop on leaving the ice, and it's starting to look more and more like some sort of tropical Eden.

New People

2008-10-27T18:15:00.001-07:00

The arrival of new people wasn't at all what I had expected. It started with a trio of pilots who slept over on their way to McMurdo, and rather than being the frightening unknown, they were just people. New, certainly, but somehow nothing more - simply routine visitors from abroad.

That all changed with the arrival of summer people. We've had two flights of inbound passengers, and now the station is crawling with new people. We winterovers - 3 of us having already returned to the real world - still outnumber them 57 to 34, but after a 60 to zero ratio for 8 months, that seems very high indeed.

It's a tradition at pole for the winterovers to spend months prior to the end of season raving about all the clever tricks we're going play on the new people when they arrive, everything from hiding in the subfloors to make the station look deserted, to putting up plastic sheets around the gym and quarantining them, to digging an enormous pit trap next to the runway.

Of course, none of these plans ever come to fruition (that's part of the tradition), but a couple of people did make some effort to dress up the station for the newcomers. One person ran a plank off the observation deck, complete with pirate flag and a pair of legs sticking out of the snow below. Another, realizing the US government is broke at the moment, decided to put the station on the market, replacing the NSF logo with a giant For Sale sign.
It's a strange experience to walk down the halls now and not know the people you pass. I hadn't realized how comfortable and familiar winter life had become. While it's very odd to see the new folks around station, mealtime in the galley is when it really hits home: winter is over.

As xenophobic as it sounds, I think I understand all the anti-immigration feelings in the broader world now. The small, tight-knit community we had grown into has been unbound by the influx of people coming faster than we can assimilate them. Every winter follows a unique trajectory, and each crew forms a distinct society - nobody will ever again experience our particular culture. While many here would argue that's a good thing for the world, nostalgia is a powerful force, and somewhere deep down inside, I'll always miss what this place was.

On the plus side, the new people brought freshies. I nursed my slice of tomato for a good 20 minutes, and am sure that I have never - never - tasted anything as delicious as the pineapple which came in on Sunday. Amazing.

The Waking Station

2008-10-19T18:43:00.001-07:00

The winter is rapidly drawing to a close, and with our first visitors from the outside world expected tomorrow, the station has become a hive of activity. The crew is dashing madly about trying to breathe life back into all the sections that have been closed down, frozen, drifted over, and more or less mothballed since station close.

Over the past couple of weeks, summer camp - the array of tents used to house the excess summer population - has been dug out, warmed up, and about a quarter of the winter crew has even moved in over there. (Some people really like the peace and quiet of living off station, despite the walk through -60F temperatures to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night.)

A smooth, hard packed runway has sprung up in the middle of my commute to DSL - it's a refreshing change to solid ground between sections of 4' sastrugi and 20' snow drifts. From my path, it disappears into the distance, lined by dozens of heavy black flags to help guide in pilots.

As I mentioned above, we're expecting outsiders tomorrow. This crowd won't be staying, as they're on their way to McMurdo, but with any luck they'll have freshies. From Mactown (nobody on the ice calls it McMurdo - always Mactown), they'll begin ferrying people back here to help with station opening. Our new residents start arriving Thursday.

To prepare for new folks, the entire crew got half the day off today to give the station a good and thorough deep-cleaning. Everything - walls, floors, cielings, desks, washing machines, etc - is getting scrubbed down. By dinner, the station should be gleaming and as good as new. It's funny how much crud has accumulated, and how little we've noticed it.

Over the past 8 months, life on station has been so predictable, repetitive, and almost sleepy, that we simply haven't noticed the changes that have taken place. The station has started waking up from its long winter slumber, and it's a bit shocking to watch the transition.

South Pole Cooking

2008-10-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

There was an injury among the galley staff the other day (nothing serious, don't worry), so they're a little short staffed in the kitchen at the moment. I've been meaning to cook more, and agreed to help out by making desert a couple of nights this week. It turns out that there are a couple of fairly fundamental problems with cooking down here:

First, we haven't had any fresh food or ingredients delivered since station close back in February. We're completely out of just about everything, so you sort of have to tailor meals to what's available.

Second, we're very high up, and nothing bakes quite right at altitude. Technically, we're just over 9,000 feet above sea level, but because of the earth's rotation, the atmosphere gets squished away from the poles and toward the equator. The air here is equivalent to anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, depending on the weather.

All that taken into consideration, I decided to try making a couple of cheesecakes. They're supposed to be relatively stable at high altitude, and I knew we had cream cheese, so it seemed like a likely possibility. After a quick recipe search, I thought I had found something we could do, and went to work.

Unfortunately, I hadn't inspected our stores since June, and most of what I needed was long gone. For example, we have no graham crackers - the only way I could make crust was by scavenging some "crust mix" from a pile of expired no-bake Jello cheesecake mixes. (They turned out to be "chocolate" flavor, though you'd never know by eating them.) Having resigned myself to a rather questionable crust, I went to tackle the main cake part.

Much to my chagrin, cream cheese separates when frozen. Not just into liquids and solids, but into about 5 different components. You have to take the package, scoop all the various chunks and juices into a food processor and blend it all back together. From there, things sort of went downhill.

Our eggs recently ran out, so I had to use a carton of rather chunky and unappetizing "frozen egg product". Egg yolks were replaced by a bag of thick orange goop. For cream, I resorted to reconstituted milk. Even the lemon juice has run out, and after a bit of searching, sweetened lime juice from the bar subbed in.

Oh, also, the springform pans were the wrong size - too short by an inch.

Anyway, after substituting more than half the ingredients on the recipe, it was time to bake. Things were a little tense at first, as both pies rose dangerously above the edges of their pans, but eventually things settled down and ended up looking - much to everyone's surprise - pretty much like cheesecakes. Even more surprising, they were not only edible, but quite good!

Cooking at pole this late in the season is an exercise in both creativity and ingenuity; I have no idea how the cooks do it day in and day out. I will say, though, that it's quite fun, and surprisingly gratifying when, after what appears to be a complete debacle, everything mysteriously works out.

My Toast

2008-10-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

Throughout much of the season, I've managed to maintain a fair level of mental health. I was thrilled by the sunset, enjoyed the darkness, and got a second wind along with everyone else at sunrise. Since then, however, things have started to unravel a bit.

I never really hit the irritable or angry phases of toast, and it came on so subtly that I didn't notice until it got relatively serious. I skipped straight over the hiding-in-the-room and anti-social stages, and simply stopped paying attention to things.

It's not that I became distracted, mind wandering off during conversations. My attention is still as focused as ever, there's simply less of it there. It's as if I'm still aware of all my surroundings, but many of them don't fully register. I still behave as before, and do my work as easily and efficiently as ever, but several times a day I'll realize that I have no idea what I just did. Or what had for breakfast, what I had planned that evening, or what someone just said to me. For three days this week, I had a mild suspicion that it was Tuesday.

A more common variant of this is the Antarctic (or Thousand Mile) Stare, where people gaze off into the distance, eyes glazing over, mind slowly shutting down. People all over station have begun doing it, but it's not quite what I have. My eyes still focus, my mind is still running. I'm just not paying very close attention to life anymore.

The Orange People

2008-10-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

In less than two weeks, we'll be meeting new people for the first time in over 8 months, and that's kind of scary.

The official station opening, when it becomes "summer" and the population skyrockets to 250, is Nov 5th. Because winterovers are notoriously bad at dealing with the masses of summer folk, many of our replacements will be arriving earlier than that on smaller planes, during a so-called soft-opening. That allows us to do all the turnover training before the population gets too high and we become too dysfunctional. It also means much of the winterover crew leaves Nov 5th as the masses begin to pour in.

Anyway, in 12 days, the smaller planes that operate through the soft-opening period will be passing through on their way to McMurdo. Two days after that, they'll be back with freshies, people, and who knows what else. While I am looking forward to fresh produce, the people are a little more mixed. To repeat myself, we haven't seen anyone other than we 60 winterovers in over 8 months. We're all tremendously comfortable around each other, know each other's personalities, histories, interests and quirks, and the prospect of new - unkown - people is quite frankly a little frightening.

That may be hard to understand, coming from the outside world, but isolation like this builds quite a group mentality, an us-versus-them way of thinking. Everyone one station is now thoroughly toasted in their own special way, and one of the end stages of toast is an inability to deal with anything new, particularly people.

I'm sure we'll be as nice as we can be to the summer folks, but according to previous winterovers, when that first plane shows up, there's a moment of panic that runs through the assembled crowd. Even old friends from off the ice are somehow a little more than we're prepared to deal with, and the winterovers quickly retreat to their rooms.

Adding to the distinction, none of us have had any sun exposure since arriving last summer. For me, that's about 10 months; for some, it's been as much as 16. We've all very gradually gone very very pale, and now, no matter the ethnicity, we're one and all quite white, verging on transparent. The lore is that anyone from off the ice, regardless of how mild a tan they may have, will look thoroughly orange by comparison.

Summer arrivals are the Orange People, and they bring with them an exhilirating mix of newness, excitment, and - to the toasty mind - a mildly threatening otherness. Also, freshies.

The 300 Club

2008-09-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

There's a tradition here at pole dating back decades, that whenever the temperature outside falls below -100F, the 300 club convenes & initiates new members. You gain entry into the club by first sitting in the sauna with the temperature turned up to 200F, then running outside (a 300F temperature differential, hence the name) and around the pole, all wearing nothing but boots and a smile.

Only once - in the half century for which we have records - has the temperature failed to hit -100F over the course of a winter. It's expected that the 300 club convenes at least once each winter, more likely twice or three times. Well, with the sun now up and temperatures already rising into summer, our low for the year is sitting at -99.9F, and there's no way that would count. Seriously.

Never before has the temperature hit -100F this late in the season - the previous record was Sept 28th, yesterday - so based on historical trends, we're going to have the second ever winter without hitting -100F. Last year, they made it, but only for 30 seconds, not long enough for the sauna and naked dash. The 300 club hasn't been able to meet since 2006 - global warming, anyone?

(As a side note, a couple of people have decided to try an alternate 300 club - eating nothing by fried foods and trying to get their cholesterol up to 300. This late in the season, people resort to pretty self-destructive behavior for entertainment.)

Sunrise

2008-09-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

The "official" sunrise doesn't happen until about 3am Tuesday morning, but because the sun is so big and the atmosphere bends the light, its top edge crosses the horizon a day or two earlier than that. Most of the past week has been overcast and windy, but last night things finally cleared, and we got our first view of the sun itself in over 6 months.
After 6 months without, the sun is an odd sight on the horizon, and seeing it a bit of a watershed moment. The galley filled up fairly quickly with gawkers, lining the windows and staring at the strange glow peeking out from behind the blowing snow. Yes, staring, and yes, at the sun. That's not really the doctor recommended way of viewing it, but there was simply no way to dissuade us - poor sun-starved polies that we are - from seeing it. (For the record, it was mostly obscured by clouds, just peeking over the horizon, and the galley windows are heavily tinted anyway. It hurt to look at, but more like a 60W lightbulb hurts to look at, not like the fully risen blinding sun.)

Binoculars were gathered and passed around, and because we didn't know any better, started staring at the sun through them. From beside, you could see people's eyes were alight with the sun, glowing in a slightly unsettling way, as their pupils struggled to contract after months of lazy inaction.

There's a fairly large telescope at one end of the galley, and after everyone's eyes were sufficiently exhausted and sore from looking at the sun directly, we realized it would be much simpler to just project the sun onto a piece of paper, through the telescope. That gave a fairly nice image, and we even caught some fringes of green and blue at the edges.

Those fringes are really the highlight of a South Pole sunrise or sunset. The atmosphere bends the different wavelengths (colors) of sunlight very slightly differently, giving a near invisible fringe of green to the top of the orb. Ordinarily, it's far to faint to see right next to the full brightness of the sun, but at sunset, very rarely, the sun will be obscured enough that for the last moment before it disappears completely, you can make a faint green band.

In the real world, this "green flash" lasts only for an instant, and is rare enough that it has become somewhat mythologized. Jules Verne once described it as "a green which no artist could ever obtain on his palette, a green of which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the shades of the most limpid sea could ever produce the like! If there is a green in Paradise, it cannot be but of this shade, which most surely is the true green of Hope." A little over the top, but you get the idea.

Well, down here, instead of a 1/2 second long green flash in the best of circumstances, we get about 5 hours of it in middling weather. We missed it to a storm at sundown, but last night's weather qualified, and through the above mentioned binoculars and telescope, we were able to make out the dancing green and even blue edges on the top of the sun. I didn't bring a zoom lens up to the task, but was able to get a few photos where the green is at least present.

It's a strange sensation to see the sun again after 6 months without it. Not as strange as having its light back, but still a little odd. It feels a bit like I just found a long lost toy from my childhood, a companion from years ago. I wonder if I'll get that every morning when I hit the real world...

Imminent Light

2008-09-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

It would be hard to argue these days that the sun isn't rising. The world outside has been transformed half a dozen times since the start of the month, and is now so bright that I had to shield my eyes when I walked out of the station yesterday.

It's surprising how much closer together everything seems to be in the light of day. Well, the light of pre-dawn. The walk to DSL seems to have shrunk by a factor of two or more, and everything seems suddenly more closely connected: the station is never more than a quick hike down the road, the berms are all neatly laid out just behind it, SPT is only a couple of minutes from my door.

We've got our big Sunrise Dinner this Friday, but the atmosphere is completely different from either that at Sunset or Midwinter's dinner. Despite everything I've been writing and the photos I've been taking, sunrise has somehow managed to sneak up on me. While I was excited and waiting with bated breath for both Sunset and Midwinter, I'm suddenly realizing only a couple of days out that Sunrise is about to happen. After all those months of darkness, deep down I don't seem to believe the sun is returning.

To be perfectly honest, I might just prefer that it didn't. I'm done with the dark, but the light outside now is soft and brilliantly colored, much nicer than the harsh whiteness of direct sunlight. We've been experiencing the world's longest sunrise for the past three weeks, and it really has been beautiful - I'll be sad to see it go. Some people on station are already talking about wintering again, simply to relive the sunrise. That's a little further than I'd go, but the last couple of weeks really have been a visual delight.
Two nights ago I found a Canadian flag nicely planted next to the geographic pole. I've no idea who put it there - or why - but there was some spectacular color behind it that I decided I couldn't miss. I bundled up and ran outside in the middle of the night to explore, and simply enjoy the view.

This really is a wondrous place to live and work, and the little miracles like flags from home popping up one night in the middle of a three-week sunrise do a fair job driving that point home.

The Glow

2008-09-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

In the photos from the last post, you may have noticed both a bright glow on the horizon, and a very pinkish light illuminating the yukimarimos. The sun is very clearly returning, and the lightshow of sunrise has begin.

Last week - two full weeks before sunrise - the sky was already aglow with colors. What started in mid-August as nothing more than a deep blue tint to the black of night had evolved into a fire painting the horizon.

These shots are all from last week, when we had our clearest weather in months, affording an unobstructed view of the horizon. Having been deprived of light and color for so long, even the faintest glow can catch our attention: everyone on station was more or less flabbergasted by the colors suddenly pouring over our world. Two weeks after sunset, I don't recall any colors at all. Two weeks before sunrise, I could swear the sky was burning.

Following our winterover photo on Tuesday, I spent the afternoon on my yukimarimo hunt, but that far from finished my day's photography. On entering the galley for dinner, you couldn't help but be shocked by the bright orange light spilling through the windows. Even with all the windows on station heavily tinted to keep out the blinding light of midsummer, the view from the galley was spectacular. The real horizon was even more stunning, and unfortunately well beyond my capabilities to do justice in a photograph.

Since that evening, we've had mostly overcast weather, and with the exception of occasional glimpses through the clouds, have missed the glow on the horizon. It's still a little over a week until sunrise, but it's getting hard to imagine how bright it will actually be outside. Having gone six months without sun, our eyes are not well equipped for daylight. The next week will certainly be an interesting one - I have a hunch I'll be back to my trusty tinted goggles very soon.

Attack of the Giant Yukimarimos

2008-09-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the whole crew gathered after lunch for the annual winterover photo. We'd decided to do it over by Spoolhenge, the final resting place for all the spools which formerly housed cables now running through the station and between buildings. They're too expensive to ship back north, so they languish behind the station, next to the berms. Spoolhenge makes a great subject for photography - I've never mentioned it or posted photos before because it's in the opposite direction from SPT, and I rarely made it back there through the dark of winter.
It's difficult to take photos of people outside, as they tend to breathe. Clouds of water vapor follow them around, fogging up the area and obscuring any potential shot. I had been recruited as photographer for the day, but wanted to be in the shot, so had my camera on a looped timer. I had to yell instructions from the back row (that's me with the pointy hat near the middle at the back), telling everyone to hold their breath, long enough to allow the haze to clear, before each shot.

Anyway, as the last of us were walking back to station, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but an enormous Yukimarimo! (For those of you who haven't the foggiest idea what that is, check out the earlier post on the subject.) On our previous encounter, the yukimarimos only got up to the size of a golf ball, maybe slightly smaller. This one was softball-sized, so big that it didn't seem to be able to roll anymore, at least not without much stronger wind.

Both I and my camera were frozen fairly solid by that point, so after a single quick shot, we had to run inside to thaw out. An hour later, warmed back up, and armed with three fully charged camera batteries, I went yukimarimo hunting.

There were none on the SPT side of the station - I knew that from my morning walk out. Instead, I headed back toward Spoolhenge, off into the antenna field. It didn't take long before I found some, rolling playfully around beside summercamp. Again, there were an enormous few, cantaloupe sized, sitting still under their own weight, while the smaller ones danced around.

I turned toward some drifts coming off nearby berms, and there found a sparse colony, cottonballs scattered about the landscape. It wasn't long before I started finding little nests of them, a dozen or more having rolled into a furrow in the landscape and become trapped. There was something about that image, puffballs huddled together in the glow of the sunrise, that I found tremendously cute. I guess that's what happens when you live in the cold and dark long enough - snow becomes cute and develops a personality.
Nobody here - not even the oldtimers - had ever seen giant yukimarimos before. Getting any at all is a treat, and to have these montrosities tumbling about is just amazing. As in March, they seem to have arrived with the sudden cold snap after last week's ridiculously hot & humid weather. That gives rise to lots of hoarfrost covering the landscape, and given a gentle enough breeze (though not too gentle), mother nature begins rolling snowballs. To get the big ones, that gentle breeze has to slowly build at just the right rate to continue rolling, but not breaking, these funny little bits of antarctic wildlife.

My world has suddenly become exciting and very new again. Funny what a sunrise can do.

The Greenhouse

2008-09-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

We ran out of freshies - that is, fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, etc - from the real world shortly after station close back in February. Since then, our only fresh greens have come from the greenhouse - without it, we would be completely salad-free for almost 9 months.

You can imagine then, that having a functional greenhouse is fairly critical for our diets. Beyond that, simply having something else living on station actually does a tremendous job keeping morale up. It distracts people from the cold, dark, lifeless plain we live on.
Terry, the greenhouse tech this winter, has done a tremendous job keeping it running, and we've had record yields all season. The main crops are various sorts of lettuce, a wide variety of herbs (basil, chives, etc), and more cucumbers than we know what to do with. About a month ago we had out largest harvest of the season: 160 lbs of greens in a single week (of which roughly 80 lbs was cucumbers). Typical weekly yields are closer to 60-80 lbs, but in any case, it's a lot of food from a 10'x20' room.

The greenhouse runs entirely on hydroponics, simply because foreign soil is forbidden by the Antarctic Treaty (and the local Antarctic soil is both sterile and buried under 2 miles of ice). The unfortunate result of that is that - given our setup - we can only grow plants in a very few chemistries at once. That is, some plants prefer more acidic soil, some need extra nitrogen, etc, and when growing hydroponically, the water they are fed has to be fairly carefully tailored to that plant. While the setup is perfectly capable of growing, say, tomatoes, logistical problems keep us from growing them alongside cucumbers. Due to the vastly greater yield of a cucumber plant, fresh tomatoes are off the menu.

Beyond just providing food, however, the greenhouse is also a popular room to relax in. There is a small antechamber/airlock on the front - complete with couch to lounge upon - to allow people to sit in the thick, damp air, soak up the light, and marvel at green things. No other room on station stands out quite like it - when you enter, you're immediately blinded by the light, choked by the humidity, and often overcome by the smell of living things; everywhere else in our world on the bottom of the world, the air is cool, thin and dry, the light is pale, and there are rarely smells of any sort, even around the galley.

I made the mistake of spending an evening reading a book in there back in July. Mistake might sound like an odd word for describing time spent in the relative Eden I just described, but allow me to explain. My time in there certainly wasn't unpleasant - quite the opposite: it was a lovely way to spend an evening. The problem is that you eventually have to leave, and by comparison, the rest of the world here seems that much worse. The halls become dimly lit with a pale bluish-grey light, the air thin and cold. Everywhere I went for the next few days, things seemed somehow less substantial, a pale mockery of reality, devoid of color, smell, or any sort of feeling.

Within a week of that experience, I was back to enjoying this funny little world we live in, and I've been avoiding the greenhouse since then. Now that the sun is rising, the windows are open, and the world is apparently re-awakening, I may poke my head back inside and see how it strikes me. Then again, I may just wait until I get back to the real world, and try to enjoy my last couple of months here with the ice.

Changes

2008-09-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

After 4 months of life in the unvarying darkness of night, the changes occurring around station over the past couple of weeks have been both surprising, and a bit unsettling. Driven by the dawning light, the world around us is evolving, and at a pace none of us is quite prepared to deal with after the plodding progress of winter.

Don't get me wrong - lots of things happen throughout the depths of winter, just nothing changes. Nobody new turns up, there is no new food or drink, nothing new on TV or in the store, and even the weather is only variable within a few categories (windy/cloudy/clear). Each day, week, and month is virtually indistinguishable from those which precede or follow it.

Now, the sky has lit up with the brilliant light of a sun not to rise for two weeks. It's a rich, warm blue twilight, well distinct from anything we've seen in months. Heading outside inevitably brings up some long dormant memory of a sunrise seen in a previous life: sometime in early January for me, last November for most people. I can't count the times I've walked out of DSL to visit the washroom (ie. the bucket in the boiler room) and caught myself thinking it must be nearly Christmas, based solely on the quality of the light outside.

The sastrugi and drifts, which have been growing ever larger all winter, are now clearly visible, and the whole landscape has changed from a black emptiness into a sea of windswept textures. The stars are gone, and the moon (which rose again yesterday) sheds a light so pale and cold that even it - our erstwhile surrogate sun - is easily missed in the glow of the not-yet-risen real sun.

We're scheduled to unplug the windows this weekend, when the station will suddenly revert from a sealed box into a building, more reminiscent of a home up north than the cage it has been slowly becoming. Seeing the world outside from the comfort of the galley seems like an unimaginable luxury, and being able to assess the weather without going outside to check will be a nice novelty.

The changes in light outside have brought on remarkable changes in the psyche of everyone on station. People who had largely been hiding in their rooms since shortly before or after midwinter have emerged, friendly and excited. The rest of us are no less affected, with personalities well known abruptly gone, and some of the quiet folks now boisterous.

The weather, while still in essence either clear or stormy, has become more extreme with the dawn. Sunlight tends to churn up the air, and we've been hitting both colder colds and warmer warms, along with some absurdly hot storm fronts. As I write this, the temps have risen into the -20s F for the first time since January. Last week, the windchill broke -100C, just barely missing -150F.

I hadn't realized how much I'd settled into the steady unchanging darkness of winter. It's astonishing to me how plastic we as people are - something as basic as a sunrise can come as a shock, and the month it takes to complete can seem disarmingly rapid.

Frozen

2008-08-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

There are two primary factors that mark life here at pole as completely different from life in the real world. The first of these is the year-long day, with only a single sunrise and sunset per year. The second is the cold. I've gone on at length over the past four months about the night, but haven't delved too much into the many effects of the cold.

By and large, no machinery works cold. Anything with moving parts takes oil or grease, and there doesn't appear to be any grease which won't freeze solid by -90F. We aren't allowed to take vehicles outside below -80F, not for fear of damage to the engine - running keeps it warm enough - but because if stopped for any length of time they tend to freeze solid to the ground.

As far as SPT goes, the telescope's primary motors are kept warm inside the building (which is heated by waste heat from our electronics, supplemented with heat from the DSL furnace), while the smaller ones sit in the receiver cab on the end of the secondary arm, kept warm by a battery of electric heaters. Without heat, the telescope is dead in the water, just like everything else down here.

With that as preface, at 3am this past Sunday, the telescope lost power. The alarms failed, and Sunday is the one day of the week both Dana and I tend to sleep in a couple of hours. The telescope was without power for 6 hours before we discovered the problem, by which time, it was cold. Very cold. The building and main motors were slightly below freezing, while the entire receiver cab had dropped to -80F.

At that point, simply restoring the power wasn't an option - motors would turn back on and seize, hard drives would fail, fans would stall - in essence, everything breaks if powered up cold.

Instead, the cab needed to be reheated before powering anything back up. That set up a bit of a catch-22 - the heaters are electric, but we couldn't restore power until things were warm again. Worse, the fans on the heaters were all frozen, so powered heaters were likely to melt or catch fire.

Well, after much crawling in and out of the emergency hatch on the back of the cab (the main doors require the cab to be docked against the building, which in turn requires that the motors in the cab be functional), flipping breakers, disconnecting electronics, and fiddling with heaters, we finally got things warming up. Six hours later, the cab was up to freezing, and we were able to begin turning stuff back on.

Several systems came online relatively easily, while others did not. Some metals' resistances drop precipitously when deep frozen, with the result that several of our external heating systems cannot be turned on cold - if you try, they draw too much current and trip a breaker. They work fine once warm, but again, that makes for somewhat of a catch-22. Many of our electronics failed to initialize properly cold, and had to be reset several times as they gradually warmed up from different systems coming online.

Last night at 3am, fully four days after losing power, we finally got everything back online and were able to resume normal observations. It's been a hectic week, all because an alarm didn't go off, and the temperature outside was so cold. This is the sort of thing that makes life and work down here so different from the real world.

With everything back online, it's been amazing to look up from our work and suddenly realize how bright it's been getting outside. The sunrise is starting to feel rather imminent.

First Light

2008-08-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, the it's been fairly windy down here at pole. In addition to building impressive new sastrugi and several enormous (>10 foot tall) snow drifts, the wind-driven snow does an excellent job of obscuring the horizon.

Because of that, we haven't been able to see the glow from the sunrise growing day by day. Well, on Friday, the clouds and wind finally cleared, and everyone on station was fairly shocked to see not just a faint glow in the sky, but a strong band of pink light along the horizon.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't quite believe my own eyes. My mind couldn't quite accept that sunlight was returning, and somewhere deep inside I assumed it was some sort of trick. (What sort of trick, or why or how such a thing would be done, I can't imagine, but at the time, it seemed more plausible than the sun returning.)

On Saturday the weather turned foul again, and by the time it cleared Sunday morning, the pink band had expanded into what passes for a rainbow of colors down here - a glow, orange through purple, covering a quarter of the sky.
A conveniently timed lunar eclipse momentarily stole away our surrogate sun, and the true sunrise shone out over the darkened landscape. I've been thinking of the moon as a temporary sun for months now, but the sheer quantity of sunlight spilling over the horizon has left me marveling lately at how blindingly bright the real sun must be. Of course, it is - quite literally - blindingly bright, but that's the sort of thing you forget after months and months in the dark.

If I didn't quite believe the Friday's pink band, Sunday morning convinced me. Something very primeval took over when I saw the full colorful glow of a sunrise, and millions of years of evolution kicked in to tell me that the day was dawning - to my mind it would be light out in a matter of hours. It's a month yet before the sunrise, but there's no reasoning with your instincts.

By now, half the sky is aglow with sunlight. The moon is gone, but it's bright enough to see the major features on the path. With the exception of overcast or windy weather, my days of stumbling blindly to work and back seem to have passed.

Things are changing in our world, and both light and color are returning. It'll be nice (if slightly surreal) to have them back.

New Colors

2008-08-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

Winter at pole is without a doubt visually spectacular, but it does lack one thing: colors. Sure, there are red lights wandering about the landscape, and the auroras cast a pale green glow over the snow, but by and large color is something we don't get much of.

Last week, just before sunrise, all the lights at DSL were turned on (why, I'm not entirely sure). All that red was enough to make my eyes - and camera - see the stars as a lovely shade of electric blue, the first natural blue I've seen since... New Zealand, I suppose, back in January.
Beyond tricks of the eye, however, we've been getting some genuine color the past couple of days. The auroras have been remarkably bright lately, and have started to include the red and yellow fringes that only show up in the strongest storms.
Auroral activity is strongest at the equinoxes, which are sunrise and sunset here. Of course, once the sun is up (or close to up), the auroras are completely invisible, but for the next couple of weeks, we should get bright, colorful displays complementing the growing glow on the horizon. I haven't quite figured out how to photograph the really active ones yet, but I'll keep working on it.

On a sidenote, I should probably point out that, despite all my talk of how bright it is outside with the moon up (and it really does seem bright), the photos I've posted in the moonlight are kind of a cheat. They're all long exposures, much longer than the camera's light metering thinks is appropriate. The photo to the right is a more realistic portrayal of the lighting outside under a full moon - plenty to move around and operate by, but I wouldn't want to try reading anything in it.

From now until sunrise is probably the most colorful time of year at pole. Between the newly invigorated auroras and the ever-growing glow of sunlight, we should get the better part of a rainbow, and after months of black and white (ok, and green) existence, that'll be a pleasure.

Surprises

2008-08-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

It's been 6 full months since we've had any direct contact with the outside world. No visitors, no planes, no airdrops. There is no new "stuff" to be found anywhere on station - we're developing the ultimate anti-consumer culture.

Having said that, you can't begin to imagine the thrill which comes with the discovery of something new.

Back in December, my mother put together a series of small care packages, and shipped them all down before station close. They're each labeled with the month they're meant to be opened in, and I keep them carefully squirreled away at the bottom of my closet. The past couple of months, I've been looking forward to the first the way a 7-year-old looks forward to Christmas, giddy and excited for the ~$5 worth of stuff I'll be getting.

Those packages, along with others send by friends, are wonderful, and all give huge boosts to my mental well being, but a couple of days ago, I got a true surprise.

An email came from one of my collaborators (also a good friend) asking me to phone him because he had to locate some of the holography equipment used to align the panels on the telescope. I gave him a call when the satellites came up later that morning, and he described the package he needed me to find and look inside.

A couple of hours later, I managed to track down the "Sensitive Holography Equipment" tucked in the back of one of the many closets used to store spare parts for the telescope and equipment for summer work. It was an oddly wrapped bundle, which I'd come across earlier in the season but never gave another thought.

On unwrapping it, I was surprised and delighted to find - not sensitive holography equipment, but a bottle of excellent scotch which several friends had conspired to hide way back in the summer! A little bit of luxury to help me get through the toasty months. After reading of my recent illness and practical incarceration in my room, it was decided the time had come to unveil the present.
Just to be clear on one point, it's not the alcohol which is so nice to receive. There's plenty of liquor on station, and if I really wanted to get drunk, it wouldn't be a problem.

There has been no new food or drink on station since February, and while the galley staff is certainly talented, after 6 months the limited flavors of frozen food start to get old. A bottle of Lagavulin is such a nice surprise because it's such a wondrous luxury to have a new consumable, a fine scotch to sip.

Somewhere along the line, I did something right in choosing my friends.

Returning Light

2008-08-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

At 10am this past Friday, we officially re-entered twilight, leaving behind the full darkness of night. There's not a hint of discernible light anywhere on the horizon, but with the sun now less than 18 degrees below the horizon, we're technically in astronomical twilight. In a couple of weeks, it'll be bright enough to be nautical twilight; in a month or so we'll hit civil twilight, and so on.

That means the end of the spectacular sky shows we've been getting day after day, but I'm completely ok with that. For a couple of days now, I've been mentally quite finished with the darkness - it no longer holds enough interest to justify the difficulties it brings. I'm sure my recent spike in toastiness is playing heavily into it, but over the last few days the walk to DSL has become sufficiently frustrating and hazardous underfoot to overwhelm the stars and auroras overhead.

Sastrugi and snow drifts are now thick enough on the ground that it's essentially impossible to take even a single step without stumbling. Some are aligned almost parallel to the flag line, catching and subtly deflecting feet onto awkwardly angled slopes. Ankles twist and knees jam as the ground falls away suddenly, and the body is repeatedly jolted as you stumble in slow motion through an invisible obstacle course changing daily.

The moon rises tomorrow, bringing with it the end of the darkness. By the time it sets two weeks from now, the sun will be casting a clear glow across the horizon, easily enough to navigate or tell time by. We'll still get a couple of weeks of auroras, but the galaxy and the millions of fainter stars are more or less done with.
We had some good auroras today - one last hurrah in the dark.

Sick

2008-08-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

I've been experiencing many of the rarer events down here (yukimarimos, halo crosses, etc), and can now check off another. It's not supposed to happen at this point in the season, but for the past week I've been really sick.

It's not supposed to happen because there are only 60 of us, and by now, we should all have been exposed (and developed immunity) to any infectious diseases on station. Quarantines do just as good a job of keeping bugs out as in, and we've got a perfect quarantine situation; this ought to be among the most germ-free environments on earth.

My previous medical difficulties - the stone that led to an infected salivary gland - wasn't all that odd because it was my own bacteria that infected me. People have a large bacterial flora, and it's not all that uncommon for some portion to go a bit out of control. Some of the bugs in my saliva got trapped and did just that.

Well, this time was different - I got a legitimate infectious illness, which for several days had everyone on station (doc included) quite confused.

It started last week with a sudden fever - alternately shivering under dozens of blankets, and lying in a cold sweat. I went to see the doc, and after a quick check, he told me it couldn't be viral, all viruses having long since been cleared out of the community. My white blood cell count was normal, so if it was bacterial, it wasn't too serious. He told me to drink lots of fluids and sent me on my way.

Three days later, still feverish, I returned. My throat and tongue had become covered in (very painful) open sores, and I clearly wasn't improving. As it turns out, there is a single, highly communicable virus still on station, and about 2/3 of the US population carries it: Herpes simplex 1, the source of cold sores. Apparently I've never been exposed, or at least I hadn't, until sometime a couple of weeks ago, probably from taking taste of someone's drink.

My immune system hasn't had anything to do since March, and looks to have gone on vacation. I was caught without defenses, and within a day or two, I had full blown viremia, viral presence in the blood. That's what was causing the fever, and by the time we caught it, I was pretty much doomed to a long and painful illness. I've been on antivirals for several days now, and things have finally started to heal.

For the past week, eating has been nightmarish experience, so I've more or less stopped. The last three days I haven't even been able to talk. I've been generally locked in my room, surviving off mug after mug of tea, and watching every movie the store can loan. It's been a long week.

Stuck in my room, my toastiness has been growing unchecked. I went to DSL today for the first time since the fever started, and the whole walk out I was angry. On the return trip I caught myself swearing at and kicking a lump of snow on the path. I mentioned this to someone, and they pointed out that it is now Angry August; I've just been catching up with the rest of the station.

Looks like it'll be an interesting last couple of months.

Lunar Halo Cross

2008-07-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

We were treated to another rare and uniquely Antarctic phenomenon the other day, just as the moon was setting. Reaching out from the moon were four bright bands of light, forming a nearly perfect cross in the sky. Halo crosses are (apparently) frequently seen around the sun, but to get a lunar one is fairly rare.

It's worth mentioning that this is not an optical effect from the camera or our eyes - it remains perfectly oriented in the sky no matter how you tip your head/camera from side to side.

Rather, it's formed by reflections off ice crystals in the air. Humidity in the air condenses into millions of tiny plates of ice, and as they drift down under the influence of gravity and the wind, they all align parallel to each other and to the earth.

Reflections of light off different parts of these crystals make various lines and circles of light in the sky. One particular reflection makes the vertical pillars, while another makes a parhelic circle which parallels the horizon. If the moon (or sun) is low enough in the sky and these two reflections are of roughly equal strength and dominate others, you end up with what appears to be a cross-shaped beacon of light in the sky.
One of the IT guys down here often comments on how we live in a science fiction movie. Usually that seems about right, but every now and then events seem closer to something out of a fairy tale.

Two Months

2008-07-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

It seems like midwinter was just yesterday, but already it's less than two months to sunrise. Two months of continuous night must sound like forever to people used to daily sunlight; to a mind wintering down here, it's barely a moment.

The first light of dawn will be visible sometime late August (people have reported seeing it on clear days in early August in previous years), so we've really got less than a month before the sun begins intruding on the night sky. Take off the two weeks of moonlight we get every month, and we're really down to only two more weeks of full darkness.

Again, a two weeks of fully dark night outside must sound unending and dismal to people in the real world, but down here it's the blink of an eye. And it's beautiful.
Mentally, I'm not quite done with the night, and already feeling a bit apprehensive about losing it. I'm not generally a huge fan of the dark, and certainly do miss sunlight, but I doubt I'll ever get another chance to live in a perpetual night - best experience it while I can.

The moon sets tomorrow, so our last chance for truly vivid auroral displays is rapidly approaching. I'm going to have to alter my schedule to make sure I'm outside as much as possible over the next couple of weeks - get it all out of my system.

Toast

2008-07-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me the other day that I've referenced Toastiness several times already, and never really defined the term.

'Toast' is the name given to the condition of antarctic residents as they slowly go stir crazy. At its core, toast is an extreme variant of cabin fever.

Living in Antarctica poses some unique challenges to a persons physical and mental well-being. While this is no doubt true in summer - with flights and new people constantly coming and going - it's manyfold truer in winterover life.

Just so we're all clear what sort of things I'm referring to, here's a (very incomplete) list of highlights:
1) No temperatures above -40C outside.
2) No sunlight for 6 months (4+1/2 if you count twilight)
3) Your entire life contained within the main station, or - for those lucky few who get out - within the station and a half dozen other buildings.
4) No travel beyond a 1 kilometer radius around the pole.
5) No escaping the 59 other people on station, no matter how much they get to you.
6) No living things except people & the greenhouse

There are dozens of other particular things that get to individual people, but you get the idea. Life here is, in a word, limited. After enough time, people all react in the same way - they go toasty.

Toastiness begins almost immediately after arrival on the ice, developing slowly over the months. It can manifest itself in a variety of ways, appearing on any given day, disappearing just as suddenly the next.

The most common symptoms include crankiness, a shortness of temper (often resulting in largely unprovoked outbursts of anger), apathy, a loss of focus, extended daydreaming, and the "thousand mile stare", where a toasty person gazes off to infinity, eyes slowly glazing over, completely unaware of their surroundings or the passage of time.

Shortly after station close, I was eating dinner with one of the crew who had wintered before. His comments at the time summed up the polie attitude on the subject nicely: "I can't wait for July, to stop caring. Life's so much easier once you're toast."

Six Months

2008-07-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

Today marks six months since I arrived, excited and confused, at pole.

For a long time, I was having trouble believing how fast time has been passing, but somewhere around midwinter that changed. Now this place feels like home, and it seems I've always lived here.

Memories of the flight in, from the days at McMurdo and in New Zealand, even the hectic pace of summer life, all feel like they belong to someone else. I've fully adapted to the cycle of life without warmth, light, or freshies, and have come to think of it as normal (though the 2-minute showers still seem a bit harsh).

These days, I more or less expect an auroral light show every time I step outside, and have become a bit blasé about all but brightest and most active. It seems reasonable and ordinary to wear three layers of pants and hats, two pairs of mittens, five pound boots, and an enormous puffy parka whenever I want to leave the station.

I've begun to dread the return of summer people, stomping around station, acting like they own the place, and generally messing it up. With such a small crew, winterovers tend to develop a sense of ownership and responsibility for the place. Having all those strangers in our home just doesn't feel right.

All that said, I'm starting to feel a tug whenever I think of the outside world. I'm not ready to leave yet - far from it - but another couple of months and I'll be getting close. It's probably four months before I actually get off the ice, and that's starting to sound like kind of a long time.

It's been an amazing half-year, and I can only imagine the adventures I'm in for over the rest of my stay.

More Auroras

2008-07-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote anything about the daily auroras we get down here, and the photos are starting to pile up, so here's a photo-heavy post to catch up a bit.
They really are a significant part of my days, and sharing pictures is starting to seem like one of the best ways to give people an idea of what my life is like.

Saying that we have auroral storms every day may sound like an exaggeration, but to a very good approximation, we do.
We may get one day every week or two where the auroras are only a faint green glow, but most days we will have at least a couple of bright bands or curtains hanging overhead.
Auroras seem to come in two general forms, the static band or ribbon, which hangs overhead moving very slowly or not at all, and the much more active dancing variety.

They usually form fairly contiguous bands, stretching nearly from one horizon to the other. Auroras form primarily along the "auroral oval" which encircles the magnetic South Pole, and passes directly over the geographic South Pole (where I live). Because of this, they tend to orient themselves in a particular way, perpendicular to the path between the station and dark sector, and all of the active ones tend to happen over the ICL (Ice Cube Lab - where the Ice Cube neutrino detector houses its electronics).

These photos are all long exposures - at least 15 seconds, and usually 30. The SPT (where I work) is among the most photogenic bits of life down here, but unfortunately, it's usually in motion and blurred in any aurora photos.
Instead, I tend to use MAPO (the nearest building to SPT, and wonderfully stationary) as a foreground. These photos include what is probably my best shot of the season, which has been widely borrowed, particularly for the Midwinter's Greeting card.
Far from being six months of frozen darkness stranded on a barren icescape, life here really is beautiful.

The Galley

2008-07-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

Apart from the gym, the largest room on station is the galley. It's the only place that everyone visits at least once a day, it's your best bet for finding entertainment on a slow evening, it's our auditorium, our cafe, our bar, and our backup TV lounge. The galley is the social hub of the station, and - of course - the source of all our food.

The flags from the signatory nations (to the Antarctic Treaty) - which flew outside all summer long around the ceremonial pole - hang along the walls. The many large windows which have been blacked out since sunset, and three large overhead TV's play the scroll on an infinite loop.

It may look a little industrial at first glance, but after six or seven months on the ice, the galley is as comfortable and comforting as anywhere on station. On special occasions like Midwinter, we dress the it up, and the galley can become genuinely lovely.

Of course, its primary purpose is to feed the crew, and the kitchen staff do an admirable job with that. We get 3 square meals a day, usually with a couple of options at each, and are free to dig through leftovers or prepare something on our own whenever we feel a bit peckish.

Beyond simply feeding the body, the galley at mealtimes is where people gather, sit, chat, and get a moment away from the day-to-day drudgery of work. Because of that association with relaxation and socializing, people tend to congregate there in the evenings as well.

Through the summer, the galley was always pretty busy. With 250 people on station working every hour of the day and night, just keeping everyone fed kept it humming 24/7. Since the population dropped to 60 for winter, it's calmed down a lot: first thing after station close, half of the tables were removed, and one end was designated a lounge area, complete with comfy chairs and a couple of couches. Most times of day or night, you can find someone reading, resting, or just fast asleep there on a couch.

The Galley - beating heart of the South Pole Station.

8-Ball

2008-06-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned in a previous post that most evenings there are at least a couple of people playing pool in the game room. Pool is actually a significant source of entertainment on station, and one of the most popular pastimes.

Since just after sunset, the yearly 8-Ball tournament has been pulling in crowds every Tuesday and Thursday. Its a place to go, have a drink, chat with friends, and of course poke fun at the competitors. I never really thought of pool as a spectator sport, but life at pole has certainly proved me wrong on that one.

The finals were held just after midwinter, and enough people showed up to cheer that we had to call in the carpenters to build grandstands. Bleachers seem a little excessive when your entire social universe is limited to 59 other people, but I guess at this point in the season people are willing to do whatever takes to have a fun evening. And it was fun - the championship match was tight, and exciting to the end.

Pool spectating is a surprisingly pleasant way to spend the odd weeknight. Hopefully the 9-ball tournament will start up soon.

Son of Polestock

2008-06-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

The midwinter dinner wasn't quite what I expected. Far from the upbeat, celebratory reprise of our Sunset dinner I was expecting, it was a subdued, quiet affair. Conversation was strained, and immediately following dessert, the whole galley cleared out and everyone went to bed. For the first time since arriving on station, I actually felt a bit lonely.

That said, I guess I should have expected it - the real party wasn't until Saturday.

Our resident bands have been working overtime since Polestock, preparing for the midwinter concert, affectionately christened Son of Polestock. Their repertoires had all grown impressively, and we were set for 7-8 solid hours of live music.

Everyone else on station was getting into the spirit of it, from the graphic design guys making fliers and advertising posters, to the crowd that set up a production line in the arts & crafts room to manufacture souvenir t-shirts.

The concert itself, though not quite up to the standard of the original Polestock, made for a fun evening. A crowd gathered, drank, danced, and for a couple of hours, forgot their problems. As with the dinner, it was more subdued than last time, but everyone enjoyed themselves, and our by now fairly tense winter crew was finally able to unwind a bit.

As for the bands, they were outstanding, and the production of the entire concert was well beyond anything I'd have thought possible here at the end of the earth.

Midwinter

2008-06-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

Midwinter is the biggest holiday of the season down here - a sort of Christmas-in-July, only in June, and largely without presents. It's a milestone marking the halfway point of the winter, as well as a two day weekend featuring a fancy dinner and more or less continuous parties.

We've reached the darkest point of our long night - at least, we would have, if the moon weren't blazing brightly overhead. We still won't see the first hints of sunlight for another couple of months, but after today it's officially on the rise.

The formal Midwinter Dinner, social highlight of the year, is tonight. The galley crew has been working overtime preparing a tremendous meal, while the rest of us are busily decorating for dinner or preparing the gym for tomorrow's concert (more on that later).

The atmosphere around station isn't quite as happy and relaxed as it was at Sunset, but that's to be expected - the excitement of simply being here has largely faded, and a good fraction of station has begun to go slightly toasty after 4 months of isolation.

This weekend will go a long way toward restoring the mental health of the community - once the festivities begin, everyone should unwind pretty quickly. I think we're in for a wonderful Midwinter's celebration.

Moonlight

2008-06-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

The moon's back, and the world is once again awash in light. All but the brightest stars and auroras have been frightened off, and the broad band of the galaxy overhead is no more.

It would be hard to exaggerate the change outside when the moon comes up. I know I already wrote a post about this earlier, but I think it's worth repeating just how bright moonlight is when the only thing you've got to compare to is the gentle twinkling of starlight or the unearthly light of the auroras.
We don't have a day-night cycle here. The sun rises in September, and sets in March, the rest of the time it's either full blazing daylight or the long winter night. Almost.

The moon rises and sets every two weeks, and makes for a fine substitute sun. None of us have seen the real sun in 3 months, and have largely forgotten what real sunlight looks like.

The light-dark cycle here, rather than being a daily occurrence following the sun, traces the month long lunar cycle. It's become easy to internalize these as extra-large days, not as bright as remembered from our previous lives, nor as frequent, but days and nights nonetheless.

A new day every month is still a far cry from ordinary, but compared to the yearly rise and fall of the sun, it's wonderfully frequent. The sun may not rise every morning to set in the evening, but at least the moon comes and goes on a timescale we can follow.

Wandering

2008-06-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

The station isn't a big place, and while a good chunk of the winterover crew does go outside fairly regularly, the bulk of our lives still take place indoors. There are two main corridors - one of each level - which run the length of the station, and these days you can always find people wandering along them, searching for something unknown.

It's been 4 months since station close, and most people have by now largely exhausted the entertainment they brought with them. Some, particularly the repeat winterovers, have even gone through the (fairly impressive) video collection at the store. After a certain amount of time in one place, a general feeling of restlessness takes over. We all spend an inordinate amount of time in our rooms and workplaces, and eventually need to get out.

The problem is, there's not really anywhere to go. Some people go for a walk outside, but many still fear for their lives when leaving station. (The rest of us are outside so often that we've probably just returned from a 2 hour walk.)

Instead, people tend to wander the two main halls, peeking in all the windows, seeing what's going on out in the wider station. There's usually some sort of entertainment to be had - a pool game or movie to watch, someone in the galley to have a drink with, or at very least a fellow wanderer to salute or chat with.

So far I've been kept busy enough that my wanders only come in the middle of the night after resolving a telescope alarm. Within a couple of laps around station, I almost always run into someone with insomnia, shuffling by in their pajamas, nowhere to be and nothing to do.

The wandering is bound to ramp up over the next couple of months, as we pass midwinter and people begin waiting with baited breath for the sun to return. I'm not quite there yet - still busy with work and enjoying the aurora-filled starscape - but the isolation has begun to take its toll on some of the crew.

Winter Commute

2008-06-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

We're two weeks away from midwinter, when (in addition to the huge celebrations we'll be having) the sun hits it lowest point below the horizon. Midwinter is the darkest day of the year, and from that point on, it'll get lighter every day, with visible bands of sunlight starting on the horizon around mid-August.

For now, though, sunlight is a distant memory. It's pitch black outside (one person got lost on the 10 -foot square observation deck last week because they couldn't find the door to get back inside), but given time, your eyes still adjust enough to make out the gross details of the world. Buildings are black blobs against the slightly less black horizon. The ground is a uniform, featureless gray, and the flaglines a series of shapeless dark patches fluttering in the breeze.

Contrasting all that, the night sky is a marvel. Having your pupils dilated as wide as they'll go, and looking through some of the clearest skies on earth, you get an incredible display overhead. Our galaxy is the dominant feature, an imposing and irregular band across the sky. It rotates overhead, one full revolution per day, the enormous hour hand of a celestial clock.

Off to its side, the two Magellanic Clouds (small globular galaxies near ours) twinkle softly, while closer stars blaze brightly away, a million motes of light cast across the sky. And across it all, the constant showers of light from auroras, sometimes bright enough to illuminate the ground.

Barring bright auroral light, the path has become ever more treacherous. It's now nearly saturated with invisible drifts and dips, their shifting presence the bane of all polie wanderers. The days when we could take 5 consecutive steps without tripping are nothing but a fond memory now, and more than once my tripod/walking-stick has saved me from faceplanting into a snowpile that wasn't there the previous day.

The commute to DSL has changed considerably since the easy days of summer. The first couple of times you find yourself stumbling a kilometer through the snow, climbing over a never-seen hill of unknown height, or stopping to catch your breath for the fifth time in as many minutes - all in -120F windchills - it seems a titanic struggle for survival. Now, it's just the price of admission for the spectacular views, and one well worth paying.

Sleep

2008-06-02T22:42:00.001-07:00

People have a natural circadian rhythm (day-night, awake-asleep cycle) which is naturally slightly longer than 24 hours. In the normal world, our clocks get reset every day by the sunlight, so we keep fairly well synced up with the wall clock. Down here, the whole day-night thing only happens once a year, so we're more of less left to our own devices to work out a sleep schedule.

Since my arrival back in January, I've been having trouble hitting a regular schedule. For the first couple of months, I free-cycled. That is, I went to bed when I was tired, and I got up when I was done sleeping, time of day be damned.

Since sunset, that hasn't worked so well. Social opportunities through the winter are... limited, and after a couple of months away from civilization, quite necessary. Most of the crew works regular (7am-5pm) hours, so it's fairly important for mental health to stick to something at least vaguely resembling a normal work-play-sleep cycle.

I found out pretty quickly that without sunlight, it gets progressively easier to sleep longer and longer. After a 16 hour nap, it's pretty tough to go to bed again before putting in a 30-hour workday.

I've tried several options, but the only thing that really seems to work is to set my alarm to go off long before I finish sleeping, with the goal that I'll still be tired come evening. Since my infirmity last week, I've been trying this regularly, getting up at 6am daily, and its been a fair success so far. It's pretty tough to drag myself out of bed some mornings, especially knowing that there's no actual need for me to be up at that time, but on the whole, it's an improvement. (It also gives me an excuse to walk back and forth to DSL twice every day - before and after lunch - and delight in the amazing night sky.)

A lot of people get severe insomnia over the winter, only sleeping a couple of hours each night, and spending the days wandering around like zombies. All in all, I'm pretty lucky on the sleep front.

Infected

2008-05-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I awoke to find the left half of my face swollen to twice its normal size. That - I think understandably - caused me some alarm, and I ran off to find the doc.

Turns out I had a stone in a salivary gland, same sort of thing as getting a kidney stone. Only this one had clogged up the works and become infected. Apparently these stones are almost unheard of in people my age, and are usually brought on by dehydration. If there's one thing living down here does to you, it's dehydrate. Doc put me on a course of antibiotics and sent me on my way.

I tried to eat some cereal for breakfast, but my jaw was too swollen to chew, and hurt a lot when I tried. I gave up on the solid food and decided to try a glass of orange juice. I should have though that one out a bit more, because as soon as I took a sip, the gland tried to do its job, and - because it was clogged by the stone - swelled up quickly and painfully.

For three days I couldn't eat anything that required chewing or tasted good. Because of the antibiotics, I couldn't drink either. Not an ideal condition to be in for all the parties which inevitably accompany the monthly two-day weekend. Ah well, at least the infection was being taken care of.

Monday I woke up at 4am doubled over with a stomach cramp. Side effect from the antibiotics. Doc put me on a series of other meds to try and fix things, all of which came with a warning not to stray too far from a toilet. DSL doesn't have a toilet (or any sort of plumbing), so I ended up stuck in the station for the better part of a week.

Up until last weekend, I had walked to DSL and back every day since my arrival. Being cooped up in the station, even for only a couple of days, I started to go a bit stir crazy. "Toasty" in polie-speak. I don't know how the people who never go outside deal with it.

A couple of days on the meds, and I'm back to normal, enjoying food, drink, and the commute once again. The moon (which had resumed its role as floodlight through the latter half of May) set during my down time, and it's now wonderfully clear and dark out. I halfway froze my fingers off snapping photos on the walk this morning.

Glad to have things back to normal. Well, "normal".

MCI Drill

2008-05-22T01:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had our monthly fire drill. Fire safety is serious business here. We're completely dependent on this station for our survival, and everything is so dessicated that fires are a real danger. That means that fire drills here aren't like they were in elementary school - evacuate the building and wait for the all clear. We have to do whatever we can to save the station.

Because we don't have any extra personnel on station, every one of the winterovers is assigned to an emergency response team - Trauma, Quick Response, SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus - the firefighters), or Logistics. None of us are experts in the field we're assigned to, but to make sure we're prepared in case something happens, we have monthly fire drills where we practice our duties.

I'm on the logistics team - we haul equipment (oxygen tanks, fire extinguishers, ventilation fans, etc) to and from the site of the incident, and are largely responsible for patient transport from site to Medical.

This month's drill was an MCI - a Mass Casualty Incident. That means there were more casualties than we're prepared to deal with. Yesterday, that meant 4 people down.

The scenario (of course, nobody knew this ahead of time) was that an engine had caught on fire and exploded in the heavy shop, where all our heavy machinery is kept and maintained. It ended up being a really good drill, because it exposed a lot of vulnerabilities that we weren't aware of.

Turns out the heavy shop works as a near-perfect Faraday cage, so no radio comms could get in or out. News never made it out about the 3rd victim, or the location of the fire. It was almost an hour before he was retrieved - by which time he had long since passed - and even longer before the fire was cleared. Had this been for real, the shop would have burned to the ground in about 5 minutes (as happened at McMurdo station a couple of years back).

Without mechanized transport, we had to physically drag the casualties back to medical on sleds, and because it was -90F outside, everyone pulling a sled experienced a fairly severe episode of cold-induced asthma. About 20% of the station spent the rest of the afternoon coughing and trying to catch their breath. Half a dozen got frostbite, too.

All in all, the drill was a bit of a fiasco, though I for one am relieved to have found that out while it was still all pretend. Every now and then I'm reminded that this is a pretty dangerous place to work and live, and the more we can prepare for the worst, the better.

People are working on fixing these failures on every level, and I'm actually feeling somewhat more confident in our ability to deal with a disaster. Here's to hoping it doesn't come to that.

Re-Oiling

2008-05-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Woo! Egg oiling party! Woo!

Wait - what? Yup, it's that time of year again, when we all get together and re-oil the eggs.

The Antarctic treaty prevents us from keeping any sort of livestock, and we're completely cut off (physically) from the outside world through the winter. Eggs - important not only for breakfast, but also for most of the baking done here - will ordinarily only last a couple of months, but if you keep them well oiled, the oil will seal the shells and keep them from going off until fresh supplies come in November.

They were all oiled at the start of the season, and last night it was time to freshen up their coatings. About half the station crowded into the kitchen, poured themselves bowl after bowl of canola oil, and started dipping, rolling, and massaging eggs. There were the predictable casualties (beer, very oily hands, and thousands of eggs were never meant to go together), but within an hour we'd unpacked, oiled, and repacked more eggs than most people see in a lifetime.

It's funny the stuff nobody tells you about until you get here.

...and Warmer

2008-05-12T23:07:00.000-07:00

Not long after the cold snap, it got very warm, very quickly.

The temperature soared above -40C (-40F), but much to everyone's surprise, it remained clear and calm outside. Usually warm periods come with wind and clouds, but not this time, leaving us free to take photos of the crystal clear sky for hours on end. (And to be fair, this was more of a tropical heatwave than a warm period.)
Several pipes in the belly of the station, which had (unbeknownst to anyone on station) frozen solid and burst during the cold, thawed out fairly quickly, and at 4am one morning an alarm went off to let us know we had dropped over a thousand gallons of water through the floor.

After weeks at -70C, -40 feels hot. Not cold, cool, comfortable, or even warm. Hot. Walking over to DSL every day felt like walking through an oven, and I rarely had my hat on or jacket zipped by the time I got there.

I'm kind of afraid of positive temperatures now, and can't really imagine what they must feel like.

Colder

2008-05-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the windchill hit -90C (-130F), and I'm willing to admit it: that's too cold for comfort. I kept bearably warm enough bundled up in my ECW, but was a long way from toasty.

That said, the cold always comes with crisp, clear skies, and now that we're finally out of twilight and into full-on night, they're stunning. There's always an aurora somewhere on the horizon or overhead, but for the past couple of days, the backdrop of stars has stolen the show.

I interrupted my walk to DSL to lay down on the path and stargaze for a good hour yesterday. The Milky Way is now a bright speckled band across the sky, and even the Magellenic Clouds are impossible to miss. Despite the cold, I can't imagine a nicer walk to work every day.

If history is any guide, we've still got 10C (18F) left to drop before we hit our low for the year, but the temperature is likely to hover around this for the rest of the winter. I'm probably going to have to start wearing a sweater.

Polestock '08

2008-05-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the first 2-day weekend since sunset, and everyone on station felt the need to celebrate. We've got a lot of musical talent down here this winter, and there are 5 bands of various shapes and sizes who have been rehearsing since station close. It was time for Polestock 2008.

People went a little overboard with the whole concert setup. The stage and backstage took up the majority of the gym. Then again, that may have made sense, since more than half the station was accounted for in the performers, roadies, sound technicians, bartenders, and security. (Yes, we had two guys working security. They had metal detectors, and were quite drunk on power. Also liquor.)

Of course, it was a blast. People here know how to party, and the combination of free booze, a big dance floor, and live music certainly didn't hurt. The music started at 5pm, and we were still going strong at 1:30 the next morning.

I've got to give people here credit for their creativity, too. Some bands played covers, but there were also a couple of thoroughly entertaining South Pole originals. Mike "Fancy Pants" Symanski did a solo performance of his new composition, "Bang Your Head Against a Vast Expanse of Seductive Nothingness", while the Death Metal band Korpsicle gave a stirring rendition of their hit, "6 Months of Darkness, 1 Night of Pain". Beyond being surprisingly talented, the whole crew seems to have a great sense of humor, particularly about life here.

I can't imagine how people could get bored down here.

Moonrise

2008-04-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

It's still not completely dark here, with an obvious glow remaining along the horizon, but we are gradually approaching a nice, dark, star-filled night. At least, we were.

The full moon rose a couple of days ago, bathing the world once again in light. It's as if someone suddenly turned on a spotlight - the moon is bright enough that it hurts to look at, and flags, buildings and people have all grown distinct shadows.

Unfortunately, the outdoors are now so well illuminated that only the strongest auroras show through. After two weeks of daily displays, I quite miss the auroral company on my commute.

Without their motion to bring the sky to life, we've returned to an ageless world of ice and snow. It's a lovely silver-white light that floods down on us now, and the world has truly taken on a dreamlike appearance.

Of course, a handful of auroras do still show through, and with the world now awash in light, can make for spectacular scenes. Every time I think I've hit the visual high point of this place, something else comes along to correct me.

Wow.

2008-04-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

Well, that does it. I'm thoroughly enamored with auroras. They're incredibly beautiful things. Anyone who's never seen one up close should go to Alaska and find one. Now.

Why the newfound zealotry? I got caught in a full-on auroral storm.

I was leaving DSL to walk back for lunch. I'd taken to using my tripod as a walking stick, carrying it everywhere I went to catch whatever splendid sights might appear. Not far from DSL, I happened to glance back and notice a light green band behind the telescope. It wasn't terribly impressive, but made for a nice backdrop, so I set up to take some shots.

Over the next ten minutes, it grew in intensity, then started to climb in the sky. Before long it completely dominated horizon, towering over DSL. The colors started shifting, yellows and greens, reds and purples, and then it was overhead.

An aurora dancing off in the distance is lovely, no doubt. But it can't hold a candle to one directly overhead. Up close and personal, the details begin to show themselves. Every ripple comes into sharp focus, every undulation can be tracked across the sky. Every streak of dancing color effortlessly shifting and sliding through space, every curtain a thousand tiny marvels of liquid light. It's amazing.

(Unfortunately, photos blur all these details out, miss the motion entirely, and can't even begin to approach the experience.)

By this point, my camera had frozen solid, completely unwilling or unable to take any more photos. I kept expecting the aurora to peak, but it kept getting bigger, brighter, more colorful, and more awe-inspiring. Actually, awe is the wrong word - it was somehow utterly unreal, but completely accessible and present. Awe implies some sense of distance or unattainability. This felt like it was right there, and just for me. And it kept getting better.

Shifting, shimmering, multi-colored curtains of dripping light, dancing, rolling, undulating, and crashing overhead. I can't find the words to describe it. I don't think words are adequate tools.

I stood on the path for over an hour watching, unable to keep myself from giggling and cheering it on. Honestly - standing alone in the middle of a vast frozen emptiness, waving my arms and cheering.

Wow.

Red Lights

2008-04-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

Over the years, people have worked out that when wandering around outside in the dark, a bright white light is worst possible option if you want to actually see anything.

Flashlights and headlamps only illuminate small patches of ground, and in doing so, prevent your eyes from adjusting to the dark. Wearing a lamp, you become trapped in a tiny circle of light, with nothing but empty blackness beyond. Allowing your eyes to do their job, a vast expanse of ice, sky, stars and auroras opens up all around you.

Of course, there are limits to what an eye can do. Traveling by foot, there is no doubt that unaided is the best option. However, if you ever need to read something, perform fine work, or operate one of the many tracked vehicles ferrying equipment and personnel between far-flung buildings, some form of light is essential.

As a compromise, any light for use outside - be it a hand held flashlight, a beacon on a distant lab, or a headlight on the heavy machinery - has been covered with red filters. (Red light has a significantly less detrimental effect on night vision than does white.) The result of this careful light management is that the darkness outside is generally preserved, and unaided visibility remains good.

The only colors to be seen on a clear night are the purplish-blue of snow and ice in the starlight, the green, yellow and red curtains of auroras across the sky, and points of red light going about their business behind the station.

My First Aurora

2008-04-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

Sometime about a week ago, it finally got dark enough outside for auroras to start showing themselves. Since I'm outside for at least an hour every day wandering back and forth between the station and DSL, I've been lucky enough to catch them fairly regularly.

They began last week, as vague whitish-green patches, slightly lighter than the surrounding sky. I only realized they were even auroras when one suddenly shifted shape, then vanished. Over a couple of days, these blobs of faint light evolved into distinctly green ribbons floating across the sky.

Early this week, we had our first real show. I was leaving the station to hike back to DSL after lunch, but was stopped by a surprisingly bright band of green across the sky. I paused on the stairs to take photos, and instead of quickly fading away like all the other auroras I've seem so far, it started to dance.

I ran up to the observation deck on top of the stairwell, and stood to watch. Auroras put on a really neat display - dozens of distinct branches constantly growing, fading, waving and undulating across the sky, all with astonishing grace.

After a while, I was surprised to find myself listening for some sort of noise to accompany the visual feast. Of course, auroras are silent, but I caught myself honestly believing that it should have been making some sort of sound. It just seemed so incongruous to have such an amazing display appealing to only one of the senses.

In any case, I can't wait for it to go fully dark outside, when the multi-colored auroras will finally show themselves.

Chores

2008-04-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

It's expensive to ship someone down here, and even more expensive to feed, clothe, and support them for a year. As a result, everyone on station through the winter is in either science, or an essential position. We don't have any janitors, dish washers, or other "luxury" personnel.

Every Monday, every person on station is assigned a cleanup task. These range from sweeping and mopping the main hallways to scrubbing down the toilets. A second bathroom cleaning is done on Thursdays, with each person responsible for cleaning a pair once every two months.

The biggest task, though, is the dish pit. It also operates on a rotating roster, with each person on station assigned a 10-hour day in the pit every two months. On that day, you live in the back of the kitchen, washing the dishes of the other 59 people on station (no, we don't have a dishwashing machine), cleaning the galley (vacuuming, sweeping and mopping the floors, scrubbing the tables, etc), washing the pots and pans from the kitchen, and otherwise generally taking care of whatever labor intensive and thankless tasks come up.

Dish pit's a tough day, particularly for the science folks. Everyone else gets the day off their regular work, and are allowed to sleep in until 10am before starting. We in science don't get days off, so we tend to get up extra-early to get some work done before dish pit, work during the two 15-minute breaks we get, then work late that night. Combined with 10 hours on your feet scrubbing, it makes for a long day.

Dana and I decided to split ours, each taking a 5-hour shift every month, instead of a 10-hour day every other, and that makes a huge difference. The real drawback is that we don't get to spend as much time outside, enjoying the sights.

Iridium Flares

2008-04-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

Day by day, the remaining light from the sun is fading, and the darkness growing. Stars have emerged by their hundreds, and we've had our first astronomical excitement of the long night: Iridium flares.

Iridium is a constellation of low-orbit satellites designed to provide global satellite phone coverage. South Pole Station uses the Iridium network for email and phone communications during the 13 hours each day when the satellites used for internet connectivity aren't visible.

Occasionally through the year, a quirk in the shape of the Iridium satellites will catch the sunlight and reflect it down onto earth with blinding intensity. This reflection, brighter than anything else in the sky except the sun and moon, occurs all over the planet, but is generally rare. At the pole, however, the orbits all intersect, and every 9 minutes, a satellite will pass overhead. When things are properly aligned, the sky will light up, regularly and predictably, giving dozens of flares in a row.

During a flare, the satellite passes dimly above, gradually growing into a brighter and brighter point of light, before bursting into a brilliant flash, then slowly fading away again. They're truly a beautiful sight, but a tricky experience to capture on film. By setting a sufficiently long exposure, though, a flare will turn into a wonderfully photogenic slash of light across the night sky.

The Iridium flares last only a day or so before the satellites fade back to their usual dull passage. Thankfully, they will recur several times through the coming winter. The show this past weekend was only the opening act.

Dana

2008-04-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

Introductions are long overdue. Obviously, I'm not alone on station - there are 59 other people stuck down here for the winter. Two people were left down here to work on SPT and keep it running: myself, and Dana.

Dana's an oldtimer. He's wintered in the high arctic once, and this is his 4th winter at pole. That makes him an indispensable source of timely information about life at pole, in addition to being a great guy to work with. He's clearly fascinated by the science we do, the environment we work in, and the amazing sights everywhere.

He thrives on both the cold and the dark, grows champion-level eye-frost, and is full of stories from years past. He also keeps a website about his travels here and up north. Check it out for some great photos and to get an idea of what's still in store for me later in the year.

Anytime you see a photo of me down here, it's almost certainly been taken by Dana. He's an avid photographer, and we spend a lot of time exchanging tips about how and what to shoot. Since he's spent so many years in the cold, he's got a good idea of how best to operate outdoors.

Dana clearly loves life down here, and that sort of attitude is wonderfully infectious. Whenever I might feel a little down, lonely, or bored with the now-familiar surroundings (which, granted, is a rare occasion), he'll bring up some miraculous new sight or phenomenon I hadn't yet noticed, then dash off to share with everyone else on station.

It's be hard to imagine a better co-worker through the long, cold, and dark Antarctic winter.

My World

2008-04-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last night I finally got around to stitching together a panorama I took a week or so ago. Looking at it, I realized that it's a photo of what's essentially my entire world. I never venture further afield than what can be see in this shot.

(Click on it for a blowup - it's a little dark because, well, it was taken in the dark, and I wanted to give an accurate impression of how things look here.)

At one end of my daily commute sits the elevated station. This is where I eat, sleep, write blog posts, and - when time permits - socialize. A large fraction of the winterover population never leaves the station, so in relative terms, I'm quite mobile and well travelled.

Next to the station sits a small empty stretch of windblown snow, followed by the now drifted-over runway. On the far side of the runway sits the Dark Sector, which includes several buildings belonging to astronomy and cosmology experiments.

ASTRO, the now mostly-buried home to experiments back in the 90s, is the first sign that you've arrived in the dark sector. MAPO, now retired as a home for experiments, still houses the machine shop, where Dave the friendly machinist spends his days making bits to replace whatever breaks on station.

DSL and SPT are the last buildings you'll come across in the Dark Sector, with only Old Pole (the station which predates the old dome station) further out, buried somewhere in the frozen ocean beyond.

My whole existence is confined to a stretch of barren ice less than a mile end to end. I'm sure it'll get old eventually, but so far, my little world - with all it's beauties and challenges - feels more free, expansive, and open to me than anywhere else I've been.

Photography

2008-04-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

People who've been following along with this blog have probably noticed that the photos are a big part of it. Photography has been my major passtime down here when not at work, partly because I've wanted to learn about it for years, but mostly because there are just so many amazing sights.

Antarctic photography poses some unique difficulties, most of which arise from the extreme cold. It's currently -65C (-85F) outside (not counting the wind), and very little works as it should in those temperatures.

I, for example, can't have exposed skin for more than a couple of seconds if I want to avoid frostbite. I have a pair of gloves which give me about 2 minutes outside without fear of frostbite, but for longer sessions, I have to wear my giant gauntlet gloves. Either set leaves me seriously lacking in dexterity, and finding the little buttons on the back of the camera to set it up for a shot rapidly becomes impossible. Even finding the shutter button is difficult enough that I've gone to a remote, which stays nice and warm in my left mitten.

The camera itself refuses to take photos after its internal temperature drops below -40C, which takes about 10 minutes if left exposed. The LCD response slows and washes out, making it unusable after 15 minutes. Batteries rapidly run down if they get cold, and to get more than 5 photos off a charge, I've had to build a battery-on-a-wire which I keep inside my parka. Tripods seize when the grease inside them has frozen, and I've had to completely disassemble and degrease mine.

It's dark enough outside now that I'm taking 5-20 second exposures. That would be near impossible without this setup, but remains difficult even with. While shooting, I've got several wires/cables running from me to the camera, all of which quickly harden into solid beams and shake the camera if I move at all. Even breathing produces a large enough cloud that it can easily ruin a shot. During an exposure, I have to remain perfectly still, standing behind the tripod, trying not to breathe.

All that said, I can now get about 30-45 minutes outside before having to go in because my face is too frosted to see. And I love every minute of it.

Darkness and Light

2008-04-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

This week, we had our first real storm of the season, or, in polie-talk, a blow. Storms here don't really include any sort of precipitation, and so are limited to just wind. This wasn't a "good blow", when the winds get up to 40-50 knots, but simply a blow, with winds peaking around half that. Enough snow was kicked up and tossed about to severely limit visibility, blot out most sun, moon and star light, and fairly quickly lead to a whiteout (though blackout would be a more accurate term).

Earlier this week, some work was being done down in the power plant, necessitating a power conservation day. All non-critical computers, lights, heat and other equipment was turned off, and the station went into a sort of hibernation. Everyone was still working, but it was much quieter and darker than usual, and the whole day had a sleepy middle-of-the-night feel to it. When I got to Science (the lab space reserved for science people), the lights were out, it was pitch black, and in a corner someone was playing a harmonica. Certainly a new way to start my day.

That same day, people started spotting the first stars in the sky. The sun officially set almost two weeks ago, but a distinct glow still migrates daily around the horizon. Every day it gets fainter, and every day we can make out more and more of the night sky. In another couple of weeks, the whole Milky Way should appear, and the auroras will begin.
For the time being, though, there's still plenty of light outside, and on a clear day it's easy to forget that it's nighttime at pole.

With sunset now well behind us, the station has begun battening down the hatches for winter. Because of the light-sensitive nature of some of the science projects going on down here, no stray light is permitted from buildings - all windows need to be blacked out by Monday. Only half of them are done, and out of the remaining half spills a warm and friendly glow. I'm going to miss that glow - it makes things here feel quite cozy.

Behind DSL, the frozen ocean is more beautiful than ever, glowing an ethereal, almost electric blue. The commute to work continues to be a pleasure, now filled with serene, timeless scenery the entire way.

Telescope Wrangling

2008-03-30T22:00:00.001-07:00

So far, I've tried to stay away from discussing my actual work in these posts. As I settle in to the ebb and flow of life down here and things become routine, I'll probably have to include occasional posts about work to fill the gaps. First up, a bit about the less-cerebral work of a cosmologist.

Most of the time, my job is a desk job. Generally speaking, I sit at a computer and analyze data, then try to fit the results into a larger picture of how the universe operates. I also spend a fair bit of time working on equipment, trying to improve stability or performance. Up north, that would mean time in lab, developing and testing new detectors. Down here, that means keeping the telescope going.

Most of the sensitive equipment in SPT is located in the "receiver cabin", a large room-sized box held on the end of the boom, into which the primary 10m mirror focuses light. To work on anything in the receiver cab, a large 3 ton section of the roof rolls back and allows the telescope to "dock" the receiver cab against the control room. The roof was supposed to be motorized, but people are more reliable than motors, so we use a pulley instead.

Some tests we have been doing lately required moving the telescope by hand. It's a half-million pounds of steel that has to be moved, so hand-driving isn't the easiest task under ideal conditions. Actual conditions require you to wedge yourself into small spaces and work around sheets of metal so cold they burn at a touch.

Any large and complex system will invariably have failures or problems in one of its many many subsystems, and figuring out which one failed and how is actually one of the joys of this work. Of course, sometimes it requires you to wedge yourself into cracks not quite wide enough to let you inhale, 30' above the floor, while you disassemble and rebuild a motor with a blown coupling, but that's all part of the job.

Physics (cosmology at least) can be a surprisingly physical field of study.

Dusk

2008-03-28T23:06:00.001-07:00

The sun doesn't rise or set very quickly at the poles. Even after it dips beyond view, the world stays well lit for weeks. Sort of like an extended evening.

It's still easy to tell time by the sun, just by finding the brightest portion of the sky. Opposite that, the earth's shadow is growing daily, a sapphire blue band against the still pale sky. A slight rainbow persists on the edge of the earth shadow, adding the only touch of color in our world.

Not to say that things are drab now down here - far from it. Everything has now taken on one shade or another of blue, and the world almost glows with a thin, cold light. It's an enormous contrast to the glittering, white, shiny world of the day, but just as beautiful.

No longer warmed by the sun's rays, every surface now accumulates frost and wind-driven snow. Whereas in sunlight that accumulation would sublimate away, it now simply sits and builds. Everything is becoming encased in ice crystals, lending an eery, untouchable, end-of-time sort of feel to the world.

Everything here continues to amaze and delight. I can't wait for the stars.

Twilight

2008-03-24T02:11:00.000-07:00

I awoke the Sunday after sunset to find patches of clear sky visible through the clouds. The prospect of clear skies, even two days after sunset, was tremendous.

The sun is pretty big, and "sunset" only refers to the moment when its center crosses the horizon, while assuming there is no atmosphere to bend the light. The upshot of that is that part of the sun can appear to linger above the horizon for days after the official sunset.

Through the day, clouds continued to clear, and some amazing colors began to resolve themselves. Opposite the sun (which was still obscured by low clouds circling the horizon), the Earth's shadow was creeping up, a dark blueish-purple band just above the ground. Above that, a swathe of purples and pinks, topped by a nearly full moon.

From DSL, the station was backlit by the mostly-set sun, which threw up a rainbow of colors as a backdrop.

The temperature had soared to a record high, -38C. We haven't seen temperatures like that since station close, and it left us free to take pictures outside for hours, developing admirable eye-frost.

Sunset

2008-03-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

I set my alarm for 5:45 am Sunset Day. There was a bubbly giddiness about the station - like we were a community of 6-year-olds on Christmas morning, not a pack of young adults living at the end of the earth about to see the sun for the last time.

All day, people were dashing to and fro, making preparations for the evening's festivities. Most employees at pole work 6-day weeks, with a special 2-day weekend scheduled once a month. (I say most, because beakers - scientists - don't get days off, ever.) March's 2-day weekend was scheduled for sunset weekend, so in addition to the general celebrations, there was a short vacation for everyone else to look forward to.

Everyone showed up for the celebratory dinner dressed their best. The galley had been rearranged by a small army of volunteers, with lighting dimmed, white tablecloths throughout, and candles spread across two long banquet tables. The food was exquisite, the company outstanding, and the conversation practically sparkled. Everyone was in the highest spirits, there was a wonderful feel about the room, and the evening was a delight. Really one of my happiest times so far at pole.

Following dinner, people maneuvered into smaller groups for coffee, tea, or - for those who fancied - Scotch. There are 3 major celebrations through the year at pole - sunset, midwinter, and sunrise - and people pull out all the stops on those three nights. Half a dozen bottles of excellent scotch (which had been carefully hoarded in closets so far) made their way into public, and everyone relaxed, laughed, drank, and talked for a couple of hours. That was followed by a fantastic party - think of a REALLY good New Year's party, minus any worries about the New Year or anything else, with 60 of your closest friends, and you're getting close - which went until the wee hours of the morning.

Saturday, people slowly filtered into the galley all morning. The station was quiet, people were smiling and calm, and a quiet mellow atmosphere hung over the place. Through the station, they sat, sipped mimosas, and just enjoyed life in the slow lane. I had to go to work, but the general feeling of peace was wonderfully rejuvenating.

Of course, not everything could be perfect - the weather didn't hold. When I awoke early Friday morning, it was to catch every possible minute of the sunset. Instead, I woke to find the world covered in thick cloud, the temperature up above -40 for the first time in a month, and a diffuse white light which had replaced the pinks and purples of the sunset. It even snowed that afternoon - a rare event here. We ended up missing the actual sunset completely.

Still, I can't wait for midwinter and sunrise.

One Day

2008-03-20T03:20:00.001-07:00

There is now one day left until sunset, and excitement is certainly mounting. The sun is diving ever lower in the sky, but so far, the weather has been cooperative, and the band of haze which usually circles the horizon largely dissipated yesterday afternoon.

The world is now distinctly tinged with pink, the wispy clouds overhead positively glow, and everywhere you turn another sight makes your breath catch. The 15-minute walk to DSL took me over an hour today, with my camera making an appearance every five paces.

Exhaust plumes emanating from every building occasionally envelop the world in thick fog, making the view eerily reminiscent of a foggy morning up north. So far, the sunset hasn't disappointed.

Yukimarimos

2008-03-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, we here at pole were treated to one of the rarer weather phenomena in Antarctica. We woke to find the landscape littered with little spherical puffballs. Dana (the other SPT winterover) had been telling tales of the strange cottonballs which mysteriously turned up one day four years ago, then disappeared just as mysteriously the following day, and he was thrilled to see them again.

This time, though, they showed up during daylight, and that made all the difference. The temperature had dropped suddenly, and the ground was covered in hoarfrost. Looking across the plain, dozens - hundreds, probably thousands - of little balls were tumbling in the wind. Think tumbleweed - natural snowballs made of the fine frost covering the ground for miles around were rolling along, almost jovially, without a care in the world. It was actually a pretty comical sight, the whole landscape suddenly alive with motion.

The little balls are called yukimarimos (formed from the Japanese word for snow and the name of a small globular water plant from Hokkaido), and form when a light wind follows a sudden drop in temperature to below -60C (-80F), rolling the frost into snowballs. The yukimarimos collect in any little crevice or hollow, forming into large piles until a gust of wind disperses them, or they sublimate back into the atmosphere. They rarely last more than a day.

Yukimarimos were described for the first time in 1999 in the Journal of Glaciology, after almost 50 years of continuous inhabitation of the antarctic interior - that should give some idea of their rarity. Oddly, they have the consitency of cotton candy, almost exactly. Nothing like a hand packed or rolled snow, they're disctinctly fibrous, virtually weightless, and dissolve almost instantly if you take them inside.

I'm running out of words to describe how amazing and unique the world down here is. Incredible, surprising, and always novel.

Commute

2008-03-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the telescope I work at/on/with is about a kilometer from the station, connected to the Dark Sector Laboratory. Every day, I hike out to DSL and back, usually twice. That puts me outside for an hour or so each day - not a lot, but enough to get a good feel for the weather and environment.

To repeat the obvious, it's cold down here now. Spending fifteen minutes outside takes a little bit of preparation, mostly donning half a dozen pieces of Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear. I still haven't worked my way up to the heavily insulated Carhartt work overalls, but am otherwise pretty well decked out. Blue boots, Big Red, and gauntlet mittens are the major pieces, complemented by some long undies, a second pair of gloves, a balaclava/hat/gaiter combo, and a pair of goggles. Together, all that keeps me pretty warm outside, to the point that I sometimes overheat when the wind dies down.

Because some of the science projects are light sensitive, outdoor lights aren't allowed here. Once it gets dark, all the windows get blacked out, and buildings become pretty much invisible from any distance. Add to that the occasionally thick ice fog and enough wind-driven snow to cause a whiteout even in direct sunlight, and finding your way to work a kilometer across the frozen plain can get a little tricky. There's a flagline to show the way, and a well trod path has grown alongside it.

Late Afternoon

2008-03-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

It's now late afternoon in the South Pole's yearly day.

There is less than a week left now until sunset, and it shows. The sun just circles on the horizon, and shadows extend ridiculously far. The temperatures have continued to drop, and the windchill broke -80C (-115F) the other day.

It's cold enough now that the power plant gives off an impressive plume of steam, extending for (literally) miles downwind. For hours in the middle of each day, it blankets my entire world - station, flag line, and DSL - in shadow.

The snow has begun to take on an orangey-pink tint from the setting sun, and the landscape is filling with color for the first time since I arrived. Someone commented yesterday that the fields of snow now look like an ocean, only frozen in time - I think that describes them nicely.

This time of year, every day is more beautiful than the last here at pole.

Sastrugi

2008-03-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

The winds here don't just pile snow up, they also carve it away, and they do so in a particularly strange manner.

High winds tend to pile snow up into large drifts. Any obstacle (lump of snow, building or even a flag post) will rapidly develop a large complex drift downwind, complete with peaks and valleys caused by eddies in the wing passing over it. When the wind dies down, it also tends to lie closer to the ground, and instead of building drifts, begins to eat away at them, bottom first.

This leaves the tops of some drifts poking off unsupported into space, their bases having been eroded away beneath them. These funny sideways spikes in the snow are known as sastrugi, and are absolutely amazing to see.

So far, most are only a couple of inches high, but through the winter, they should grow up to a foot or so. Just large enough to catch your boot and trip you, and because of both the lack on contrast in the snow, and the lack of sunlight for the next six months, all you can really do about it is get used to the idea of falling on your face several times each time you go outside.

While they only grow to a foot or so here, further inland, they can be 4-5 feet high, meaning 10 foot long spikes, which most people travel on top of, and risk breaking off or falling through. Sastrugi - another beautiful environmental factor that'll try to kill you in Antarctica.

March

2008-03-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

It's March now, and things down here have begun to change. The temperature has been dropping for a week or so, people have started to settle in on station, and the sun is getting dangerously low in the sky.

It's now cold enough outside to hear your own breath. Not your breathing, your breath. The moisture freezes out and it contracts with sufficient force now that it makes sound. Exhaling without a balaclava or other covering sounds a bit like a fire extinguisher, only deeper and sharper. It kind of looks like one, too.

You may have noticed from some of the pictures lately that shadows are starting to get very long on the ground. Every little ripple in the snow now casts one, and the landscape has changed from brilliant white into a mottled grey.

The sun is down to about 6 degrees above the horizon, but it's getting hard to imagine life here without it. Since I got here almost 2 months ago, I've had sun 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I've completely internalized it. In my mind now, the sun is supposed to be up all the time. That adaptation, along with the fact that after two months I've never seen any of my surroundings in the dark, is making contemplation of a dark life here difficult. I guess I'll see for myself soon enough.

Wind

2008-02-29T04:59:00.000-08:00

Alright, I'm finally ready to admit it - it's cold outside. I'm not quite sure I'd say uncomfortable yet, but cold it is.

The other night, after a long day's work, it was time for another fairly tired 3am trudge back to the station. I hadn't really noticed, but since the weather cleared a couple of days ago, the temperature has been dropping like a stone.

The windchill on the walk back was under -100F, and for the first time since I got here - probably in part because I was tired - I got a little bit cold in Big Red (the traditional name for the large red parka you're given to wear down here). Most of that cold came from the high winds, which, in addition to being cold, make amazing patterns in snow drifts.

The ground was carpeted in what looked to be streams or rivers of blowing snow. They flowed and swirled, always keeping low, within a couple of inches of ground level. It made for a mesmerizing show, and a couple of times I had to stop to watch the snow dancing. As always, things here are an amazing blend of harsh and beautiful.

Space

2008-02-25T02:02:00.000-08:00

With the population down from 264 to 60, the station since close is much emptier. In addition to the general quiet which pervades the area, there is now quite suddenly free space. While we were crammed in like sardines through the summer, now everyone has room to stretch out.

There are 50 "winterover berths" on station, basically bigger rooms for winter folks to live in. All summer I was living in one of the summer rooms, which contained a bed, a 2' walkway next to it, a miniature desk straight out of elementary school, and a chair which completely blocked the walkway. If you sat at the desk, you had to climb over the bed to get past the chair and to the door. I like tight spaces, but even I'll admit, calling the summer rooms cozy is generous. Winterovers affectionately refer to them as "coffins". I can see why.

Anyway, with 60 winterovers and only 50 large rooms, there was some competition for them. I finally got one three days after station close, and after the coffin, it seems like a luxury suite. I can get from my desk to the door without climbing over anything, I can put on a shirt without scraping my knuckles, and I have enough desk space for a laptop AND a pencil. There's even a window with a view of the old dome station. I love my new room.

We've rearranged the galley to include a little cafe at one end, science lab has been cleaned out and reorganized to give us all the space we need, there is no longer the ongoing struggle for desks at DSL, and generally everything has gone from cramped to spacious.

A friend back in Chicago referred to the summer population as tourists, commenting that I should be glad to finally be rid of them. In a funny way, nothing could be truer. Of course, it's going to get a little lonely here sooner or later, but so far, I quite prefer the smaller population.

Weather

2008-02-22T03:42:00.000-08:00

Since station close, the weather down here has been terrible. Actually, for a normal person, quite pleasant, but from an experimental cosmologist's standpoint, terrible.

It's been completely overcast for days, with only brief glimpses of clear sky, and several times now has actually snowed - not just ice crystals condensing from the atmosphere, but full-on snow. It's not supposed to snow at the South Pole, and the veteran polies are fairly confused by the strange weather. Today the temperature flopped several times between -32C and -43C; normally a 2 degree change is considered extreme.

The winds have also been picking up, and coupled with the snow, often make seeing anything at all quite difficult. The ground is entirely made of snow, and when light becomes so diffuse, all contrast from shadows is lost. The world takes on a uniform (and I mean completely uniform) shade of grayish white. Your eyes struggle to find something to focus on, but can't. Structures are still visible in the distance, but the ground, horizon and sky all blend into one single white void.

I really have to emphasize how little contrast there is. You honestly can't distinguish the ground under your feet from the sky, except by direction. It's like having your eyes closed, except they're wide open, and your brain is still struggling to identify something - anything - in your surroundings. You exist in a field of completely uniform color, without any sense of where or what anything is. Buildings appear to be floating in a mist of nothingness. It's tremendously disorienting, surreal, and, like everything else down here, surprisingly beautiful.

All in all, the weather's been fascinating since station close, but completely useless for observations. I guess we'll have lots of good weather later in the season, so I might as well enjoy the strangeness while it lasts.

Freeze-dried

2008-02-19T03:07:00.000-08:00

WARNING: This post includes discussion of my bloody knuckles.

The cold and incredibly dry air here does funny things to your skin. For the first month, I didn't have any real trouble with it. Over the past two weeks, however, my hands have started to degrade. It began with some slightly rough skin on the knuckles. The roughness spread along my fingers, and over the backs of my hands. My hand have now taken on a funny sort of parchment feel, and their skin doesn't seem to work very well any more.

By that, I mean it's not very tough, resilient, or even flexible. Whenever I bump something - be it climbing around in the telescope or just reaching into a drawer - the skin tears and splits. My left index finger somehow has 6 distinct cuts on the first knuckle, and my hands are generally turning into a bloody mess. It seems that the nerves don't seem to work very well in these conditions either, because although my knuckles have all been cut, scraped or torn, they never seem to hurt.

I've been avoiding skin cream so far because of the oily residue it leaves, but I think it's time to give in.

Peace & Quiet

2008-02-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

The station feels very different since close. We're now down to 60 people, from a summer peak of 264, and you can tell. The hallways are generally empty, the science lab is quiet and dimly lit, the galley is never more than half full, and a surprising feeling of peace reigns over it all.

The day after station close, it snowed. Not just ice condensing from the air, but full on snow, 2 inches of it, and with it came warm temperatures. The air shot up from -46C one day to -33C the next. By south pole standards, it was practically balmy out.

Most machinery has been stored for winter, and very few people are out these days. On the walk out to DSL, all you could hear was the wind and your footsteps crunching in the snow. Today, even the wind died off, and if you stood still, there wasn't a sound to heard. After the hectic 36-hour-a-day schedule of the summer, it's a nice relaxing change of pace. (Don't get me wrong - we're still working 18 hours/day and have our hands more than full; the environment is just completely different.)

Station Close

2008-02-15T23:34:00.000-08:00

Midday Wednesday, a rumor began to circulate that due to weather, station close had been pushed up a day to Thursday. Few rumors spread as fast as a station close rumor, and within half an hour, everyone knew about it. At 4pm, an all-call went out, telling everyone their bags had to be packed and ready at cargo by 7pm, and to be ready for an early morning flight the following day.

This of course caused a mixture of joy and panic to bubble up through the community. The SPT crew went into panic mode and started filing complaints with the chain of command. Rooms were madly being packed and cleaned, and there was a general frenzy throughout the station. By dinner, things had settled down a bit, and everyone had brought out the last of their liquor stores. Several bottles of wine, champagne, and whisky later, I went to bed while the rest of SPT went to the science lab to put in one last heroic night's work.

The following morning, there was a peculiar vibe through the station. Excitement mixed with exhaustion mixed with sorrow and giddiness. SPT folks were madly dashing about putting out one last fire, then quite suddenly, it was time for the last flight. Everyone said their farewells, and the winterovers gathered beside the runway to watch it depart.

It's a tradition for the last flight to do a low-altitude flyby after takeoff, buzz the station, then wave its wings goodbye. The plane taxied to the far end of the runway, skied past us and took off, disappearing behind its contrail. About 5 minutes later, it returned, accidentally flying through the clean air sector's no-fly zone, missing the crowd by about 1/2 mile. They circled again, and this time flew directly over us, giving an impressive wave.

We're all alone now. No way out until November.

Hero Shots

2008-02-12T00:58:00.000-08:00

Everyone who makes it to the South Pole - be it by skiing in, or just hitching a flight to work on station - wants a picture with the pole. There are actually two poles - the "ceremonial" candy striped one surrounded by the flags of all nations who signed he Antarctic Treaty, and the real pole, a bare metal rod, which moves relative to the station by about 10m every year. (Actually, it might be more reasonable to say that the station moves relative to the pole, since it - along with the glacier it rests upon - is fairly rapidly slipping off the continent.)

The Hero Picture is a hallmark of Antarctic Travel. Everyone has to pose with the pole, or with their telescope, or something - to prove they were here. I haven't yet done my photo shoot with the pole, but since station close was rapidly approaching, all wakeful members of SPT decided to have a photo shoot on the telescope. We all climbed up on the secondary support (the arm that holds stuff out in front of the large dish), and posed for a group photo. It's hard to tell from a distance, but up close and personal, the 10m really is a big machine.

Record Cold

2008-02-07T04:36:00.001-08:00

It's always fairly cold at the south pole - the all time high is -15C, set in 1958. Still, the speed with which the temperature can drop in late summer can catch you off guard. Two weeks ago, it was a balmy -30C, today it hit -46C. For the past 8 days, we've been setting record lows for this time of year.

Cold snaps happen during calm weather here. If there's weather of any sort, it's likely to bring warm air with it. Wind, fog or clouds all mean warmer weather's coming. We haven't had any of that - it's been clear and calm for weeks now, and without injections of warmth, the temperature plummets about a degree C per day, just radiating off into space.

Below about -42C, the air takes on a different feel. It's not just a colder version of -30C air, it's distinctly different. It gets a strange sort of sharp stickiness to it which is fairly hard to describe. Thankfully, the ECW gear handles these temperatures easily. Unfortunately, machinery doesn't.

The planes bringing people and supplies in leave their engines on while on the runway, or else risk freezing up. As the temperature drops, larger and larger clouds of condensing water vapor form behind the planes, making operations behind them (such as loading and unloading cargo) impossible. Contrails sit on the horizon for hours on end, and generally make a mess of the place. Below -50C, the planes don't fly, which can lead to an early station closing. We've got a week before scheduled closing, and only 4 degrees left - rumors have begun to circulate.

Yesterday, we had an 85% solar eclipse. It was quite a spectacle, to finally see the light outside dim, after living a month in perpetual sunlight. The station was quite abuzz with people running around snapping photos and starting out the windows. Start to finish, it lasted about 1+1/2 hours, during which time the temperature dropped another 2 degrees C. At that rate, station close could come at any moment.

While I'm on the subject of the cold, there's one more aspect of life here I want to mention. Out at DSL, where I work all day with the rest of the SPT team, there are no toilets. It's a kilometer walk through the -60C windchill to get back to the station, but we have an alternative. A small black box on skis sits just to the side of the building, and serves as an outdoor port-a-potty. It has no plumbing, no insulation, and no electric, steam or gas heating. Through the summer, it's heated by the sun, and most of the time somehow manages to stay above freezing. Now that the sun's a little lower, the solar heating doesn't work so well, and it's starting to get pretty frigid in there. In winter, you make damn sure you hit the washroom on your way out of the station every day.

Rumor Mill

2008-02-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

Because of both the relative isolation of the station, and the extremely tight-lipped nature of the Raytheon hierarchy, everyone on station is more or less in the dark about most things. Good information is hard to come by, and so to compensate, Antarctica has developed a thriving rumor mill.

It's pervasive enough that the [mandatory] introductory video warns new arrivals against believing anything anyone says. The most popular topics are who's doing what to who (usually dating and/or fighting), how far behind the station is on food or fuel resupplies for winter, and who/what's coming or going on the next flight.

Recent rumors have involved the station closing early due to the extreme cold lately (more on that soon), and some of my coworkers were told to "consult the rumor mill" so many times that they began to believe it was a tangible thing, posted on a wall or webpage somewhere.

Actually, most of station social life resembles junior high school. Discussion topics are similar, relationships follow similar paths, and the interpersonal rumor mill is just as active. It's kind of surreal to be in junior high with a couple hundred 30-year-olds. Does keep life interesting, though.

Down Time

2008-02-01T00:39:00.000-08:00

The other day, we decided to replace some of the bolometers in the SPT receiver. I'm not going to go into what exactly that means, but the offshoot is that we had to wait for the cryostat to warm up, giving the entire receiver team (who I'd been shadowing) about 24h of downtime.

There's a lot of entertainment available down here, from regular activities in the gym to hundreds of movies you can borrow from the store. We were all pretty burned out, though, so Clarence and I went and sat in the galley and split a couple of beers.

There are 3 large monitors which hang overhead in the galley, constantly displaying The Scroll". The Scroll consists of half a dozen pages telling you the weather, the flight schedule, the Daily Dose of offensively stupid safety advice (eg. "Careful taking plates out of the microwave - if they're hot, they could lead to burns.") The weather page always includes a photo submitted by someone around station, sometimes of Antarctic stuff, but more often they're unattributed and untraceable shots of "cute" pets or am unknown vacation. This usually leads to ludicrous pairings of "-51.2C Windchill" next to a photo of a beautiful green landscape.

Some of the other receiver guys took a sauna night, sitting in a ridiculously hot (200F) sauna for half an hour, then wandering out to the pole (-50C windchill) in their swimsuits for a photos shoot. Apparently the mild fever being rapidly snapped along with the sweat crystallizing on your skin makes for an invigorating experience, and actually feels fairly good.

Along similar lines, in the winter, when the temperature drops below -100F, the 300 degree club convenes. The idea is to experience a 300F temperature drop wearing nothing but shoes and a smile. More on that when the time comes.

Frost

2008-01-29T03:16:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things so far about being down here is the frost. Everywhere you look, everything is coated with ice.

Walking anywhere outside, for any length of time, guarantees a nice frosty beard. If you're out for long, solid ice blocks form around your mouth. If you're not wearing goggles, your eyebrows and any stray hairs will frost up. Even your eyelashes will coat themselves in a super-fine layer of ice crystals, which - on the off chance you blink while outside - sometimes fuse together, freezing your eyes shut.

There are lots of tunnels which connect the various support structures (power plant, garages, etc) to the station, none of which are heated. People walking through them tend to exhale quite a lot of water into them, which forms spectacular structures of frost all along the walls.

While this is one of the driest places on earth in absolute humidity, the air is usually saturated (100% relative humidity), so once ice forms somewhere, it never sublimates away. Anything outside colder than ambient (in a shadow or something like that) will condense water from the air, and slowly but inexorably grow an enormous ice block. The telescope has heaters all the primary mirror to hold it just a degree or two above the air temperature to make sure it never ices up.

Ice is a big part of south pole life.

That Sinking Feeling

2008-01-25T03:30:00.000-08:00

It doesn't snow at the south pole. Small quantities of ice crystals fall from a clear blue sky, but the vast majority of the snow here blows in from the rest of the continent. To put that in perspective, and give an idea of the winds here, the station sits on 2+1/2 km of ice. Yes, kilometers, yes, I mean 2+1/2 straight down, and yes, it all blew here from somewhere else.

The old station, a geodesic dome 50' high, is now largely covered by snow. It's hasn't sunk at all, snow has accumulated to the point that it's no longer above ground. The previous station is completely covered, with not sign it ever existed visible from the surface.

The new station is on stilts, and angled to coax the wind to clean out any accumulation beneath it. ASTRO, a building in the dark sector from the early 90s, was also placed in stilts, 20 feet off the ground (comparable to the ones the station stands on). The snow now covers its windows, and yesterday a crew was busily trying to dig it out. A couple more years and it will be gone.

That's the fate of every building across the antarctic - to slowly sink beneath the ice. The continent is peppered with old US and Soviet stations, frozen in time and preserved beneath the surface. From time to time, people explore the old bases, provided they can find them and dig a tunnel in. They're still full of supplies, old magazines, food, and personal items. According to everyone who's been in them, they're utterly surreal, something out of a movie.

It's odd to work in and with the SPT, knowing that it's only got a 10-20 year life before it, too, disappears beneath the ice. For all its beauty, this is a strange place, with shifting snows like the sands of an Arabian fairytale.

The 10m

2008-01-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

The primary reason I've been sent down here is to operate and maintain the new 10m radio telescope, built by the SPT (South Pole Telescope) collaboration, through the long antarctic winter.

The 10m (so-called because it uses a 10m dish as it's primary mirror) is really a hell of a machine. My thesis work was on a 7m dish, so the size isn't really unfamiliar (particularly down here where there are no visual queues to tell size by), though the speed and power of this telescope are. When you get half a million pounds of steel swinging around overhead, it can be a bit intimidating.

It was built during the 2006-2007 austral summer (Nov-Feb), and more or less continuously improved since then. This summer (again, austral: Nov 07 - Feb 08) has been spent fixing all the little problems that were discovered during the first year of use. I've somehow managed to show up at the perfect time, when everything's still new (still has that new-telescope smell), but after the major bugs have been worked out. Frankly, it's been a delight crawling around the telescope and working with it.

The 10m, along with several older telescopes, lies about a kilometer away from the station, in the so-called "Dark Sector", where radio communications are discourage/disallowed. The DSL (dark sector lab) is a large building attached to the telescope mount, and where I spend most of my time. Every day (twice or three times most days), I walk 15 minutes each way through the cold & snow. In the summer, that's not too bad, since visibility is good, the road to DSL is well trod and flattened, and the windchills don't fall much below -45C. The winter can be another story: temperatures plummet to -75C, windchills to -95C, visibility can be poor, and large snow drifts form along the path. Haven't quite figured our how to deal with all that yet...

Dedication

2008-01-22T09:47:00.001-08:00

The new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has been under construction for almost a decade now, to replace the old geodesic dome which has been slowly swallowed by the snow over the past 30 years. The official opening/commissioning was schedule for the day after I arrived, which meant the station was being overrun with DVs (Distinguished Visitors, like VIPs, but with a different name) flown in from DC for the occasion.

The speeches were a little dull and given in the gymnasium, lending the air a of high school assembly, after which flags were raised over the station, subtly telling the world that the US owns Antarctica. One upside to the whole event was that we got a wonderful celebratory meal (duck, beef tenderloin, lobster, etc). We also got goodie bags, including posters, patches, and a commemorative coin. Sweet.

To give it that "finished" feel, half of the station was finally covered in siding. The rear is still bare plywood, but it sure looks nice from the front. It was also scrubbed clean inside and out, making life here even nicer.

I spent most of the day wandering around checking out the station and environs. The candy-striped ceremonial South Pole was probably the highlight, but equally interesting were the skiers. People ski either across the continent, or just the last degree of latitude, as some sort of twisted holiday. I say this having ridden a bicycle - for fun - across North America: the skiers are all mad.

Later that day, I decided to switch over from "day" (8am-6pm workday) shift to "swing" (2pm-midnight) shift to get better overlaps with the other SPT workers. Shift names here are completely arbitrary, since every day the sun just circles overhead, only rising and setting once per year. My fourth day on station, I switched to a 28-hour day, with 20 hours of work followed by 8 hours of sleep - with the sun always up, things like that are not just possible, but often easier than a standard 24-hour day. My weeks are only 6 days long, but it makes for very productive days, and regular overlaps with everyone else here.

Arrival

2008-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

Our second day in McMurdo, Joaquin sent me and Steve an email, urging us to hurry so as not to miss Ladies Night at the telescope. That's right - ladies night, in a telescope, at the South Pole. Complete with junior-high slow dancing. Awesome.

By the time we finally boarded a plane, the party had already started. We landed around midnight, and Joaquin met us on the runway with a skidoo to ferry us over and make sure we caught the tail end. All in all, not a bad introduction to the culture here.

It is cold at the pole, but not uncomfortably so. When we landed, it was about -25C, with a windchill of about -40C. The sun was high overhead, and the air was sparkling with ice crystals. Coming off the plane, most people - unfamiliar with freezing temperatures - ducked their heads and made a B-line for the station. I stood around, took some photos, and drank in the crisp clear air for a couple of minutes before hopping on Joaquin's skidoo and hurrying off to the party.

Frankly, it's beautiful here. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea - there is no scenery other than the station & associated buildings; just clear flat white to the horizon - but with 24/7 daylight, the almost perpetual "sundog" (like a rainbow, but due to ice crystals, a bit smaller, and usually a complete ring) which encircles the sun, and everything glittering, I simply don't see how anyone would find it bleak here.

A couple of hours later, once the party had died down, I made my way back to the station for midrats (the midnight meal for nightshift workers), after which I went in search of my room and stuff. I spent the rest of the night unpacking and trying to settle in a bit. Thankfully, I avoided being stuck in summer camp, a collection of tents behind station to house the excess summer population. The summer rooms on station are pretty tight (there's a tiny desk next to my bed, and you can't leave the room without climbing over the chair), but remarkably well designed. I'd say they're cozy, not cramped.

I did learn one important lesson while unpacking: never carry your vitamin pills in a plastic baggie. The smell leaks out, and it's powerful. All my clothing (and, after unpacking, my entire room) smells overwhelmingly of that musty, slightly sharp, vitamin pill smell. I've now got them quadruple bagged and hidden in my laundry drawer, but my clothes still smell when they come out of the wash. Sigh...

To The Pole

2008-01-16T02:53:00.000-08:00

Getting from my hometown of Fredericton (a relative backwater in eastern Canada) to the South Pole (an extreme backwater in the middle of Antarctica) is not a simple task. I did finally make it, 10 days after leaving home.

My first stop was Chicago, where I visited my graduate advisor for dinner, then stayed the night with Steve, with whom I would be traveling the rest of the way south.

The nominal schedule for our travel was via LA to New Zealand, where we would pick up our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear, and catch the military flight to Antarctica. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as scheduled. The flight to LA was delayed by an hour, then boarded, then delayed another hour. By the time we landed, our flight to Auckland had already left. We were told to see the Qantas specialist, an unfortunately dim lady who decided we should be booked through to Sydney instead. We tried to explain to her that Sydney and Auckland were quite different places, but our pleas fell on deaf ears.

We, along with a gaggle of about 20 Kiwis, followed her (outside, through the rain) to the ticketing counter where a pair of shocked agents asked what the hell we were doing there. Apparently the flight to Auckland had been holding for us for the past 2+1/2 hours. So, we rushed back through security, ran aboard the plane, and then sat, delayed, for another hour before finally taking off.

New Zealand is a bit different from the US or Canada. As the plane descends, the cabin begins to flood with humid, fragrant air, as if you were landing in a greenhouse. The baggage claims urge passengers to "uplift the correct baggage," and the beer bottles come with those little aluminum-can opening tabs to help get their caps off. So similar, but so very different.

Steve and I landed in Auckland too late to catch our flight to Christchurch, so we got seats on a flight later that day. We sat around for a while in the airport garden (well, on a bench under several trees along a path somewhere in the airport) and enjoyed the greenery while we could. By the time we got to Christchurch, we were both pretty exhausted, had a quick dinner, and went to bed.

The following day, we wandered out to the CDC - Clothing Distribution Center, not Center for Disease Control - and grabbed our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear for the year. As a winterover, I had 3 large orange bags of clothes to go through, none of which fit. We spent two hours trading in clothes for bigger, smaller, nicer, less worn, and otherwise better versions.

It's worth pointing out that we were trying on Extreme Cold Weather gear in the middle of the New Zealand summer: 30C (80F) and 98% humidity, and we were dressing ourselves (repeatedly) for -80C (-120F). It's also worth mentioning that for the flight down, you're required to wear your ECW, meaning you have to stand around for 2-3 hours in the NZ summer, bundled for the South Pole winter. (Many people strip down to undies under their ECW while waiting for the flight.)

That evening, we went downtown and wandered around the fantastic botanic gardens for a couple of hours. I felt one last hurrah of greenery was in order before my long dark winter, and took enough photos of flowers and shrubbery to last at least 10 months, probably 20.

We reported for our flight an hour early, and Steve pointed out that not once in his decade of Antarctic work had his plane left Christchurch the day it was scheduled to. Christchurch is a pretty nice place to be stranded, particularly in the swanky hotel we were staying at. Of course, as soon as a flight delay becomes a pleasant proposal, everything runs on time, like clockwork.

Our flight to Antarctica was 4 hours on a C-17, a military cargo jet. For some reason, all the standard screening procedures - no liquids or gels, no knives, baggage x-rayed, ourselves metal-detector-ed (which went off for EVERYONE because all the ECW has metal bits all over it) - occur when boarding a military flight to Antarctica. It struck me as particularly odd when, after boarding, I noticed the easily accessible axes attached to the plane walls. I guess they're only worried about people brushing their teeth in flight, not axe murderers.

McMurdo station is a US base with a summer population of about 1000 people on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, just off the coast of Antarctica. It acts as a staging ground for all polar operations - people, equipment and fuel destined for the South Pole all pass through McMurdo. The downside to this system is that people, equipment and fuel can all get stranded there if there weather turns.

Steve and I arrived in McMurdo late in the afternoon, with a flight to the Pole scheduled for the following morning. Because we were only supposed to be there for 12 hours, we were crammed into a 10'x10' room with 4 other guys, our bags were packed onto a cargo pallet and carried off to the runway, and we were only allowed to keep our carry-ons.

Remember now: we were required to wear our ECW, had stripped down to underwear under them to cope with the NZ summer, and all our bags had just been taken away.That would have been fine, but for the snowstorm which delayed our flight to Pole by 3 days. No, you don't get your baggage back when your flight is delayed in Antarctica.

To make matters worse, our flight was never actually cancelled - only delayed - so we had to be awake and prepared for departure anywhere between 6am and midnight, and watch the flight schedules constantly. When we finally did make it out, it was with only an hour notice.

McMurdo is not a resort town. It looks more like some sort of run down frontier mining-town. Everything is dirty or muddy, the ground is a mix of dark brown and black, and consists entirely of pulverized volcanic rock. You have to wear eye protection outside or sharp little grains blowing everywhere will scratch up your cornea. All the buildings are painted some shade of brown or dull cream, and frankly, the whole place is fairly run-down.

On the second day in McMurdo, Steve and I decided to wander off into the storm and hike around Ob Hill. It was a two hour trudge through driving snow, along steep hillsides, but helped alleviate the boredom. The third day, we wandered off to hike the ridge out by Discovery Hut, the 100 year old building (complete with 100 year old preseves, and dessicated seal carcass) that Scott built on his first visit to Antarctica.

The second walk was a little more interesting, by virtue of our being able to see more than 5 feet ahead of us. Some of the highlights include the biodiversity study (a 5'x10' patch of barren earth), the large catholic shrine with a Mary in it, and fact that the path led into the explosives storage area (which is, understandably, off limits). After a couple of hours trying to figure out how we were supposed to get around the off-limits bits, we consulted my incredibly low-resolution map of the station, then turned around and backtracked the whole way.

Thankfully, not long after we returned, one of the other polies (we had met most everyone scheduled to be on our flight, and formed a tightly-knit bitch-about-McMurdo clique) mentioned that the flight was back on, and leaving in an hour. We quickly grabbed our stuff, caught Ivan the Terrabus to the runway, and soon enough were on our way.

I should mention that the flight to Pole was beautiful, and surprisingly pleasant. We paralleled the Transantarctic Mountains, got some amazing views of glaciers hundreds of miles long, and landed safely a mere 2+1/2 hours after takeoff.

Intro

2008-01-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

I've already been at the pole for a couple of days as I write this, so there's a bit of backstory I should catch you up on. Actually, there's quite a lot, but I'll leave most of it for another day.

I'm a cosmologist, which means I study the universe. Not planets, stars or galaxies - the universe as a whole. How it works, what it's made of, when it began, what it's doing, and ultimately, where it's going from here.

Last summer, through the prodding of a friend/colleague, I started talking to people on the South Pole Telescope team about being their winterover. I should explain - a "winterover" is the poor sap who they leave running & repairing the telescope through the south pole winter, when it's too cold to land planes, and physical contact with the outside world is completely cut off.

Well, to make a long story short, I got the job, spent the next 3 months madly finishing up my PhD (and defended - successfully - Dec 7th, 2007. Hurrah!), and after an oh-so-brief Christmas vacation with family, I left on Jan 3rd, 2008, poleward-bound.