Merry Christmas

Our holiday is in a few days and it’s been a long week so far. Most of us are working 7 days this week to have Monday and Tuesday off for Christmas. It is Saturday night now. There are some decorations around town that attempt to be festive but it is really difficult to dress up an industrial village. Inside, it’s a better attempt, but with the large fluorescent lit spaces, the Christmas tree lights don’t do much. I’ve always been used to Christmas a la Katch Family style, so maybe I am just noticing the difference of being somewhere else. I don’t have that PHEW- off of work for a week! feeling and the plane ride that makes it feel like Christmas also. It’s just new and I’m sure I’ll have a lovely holiday. It’s been snowing lightly on this summer solstice, so if that keeps up I’m sure the town will be giddy. Snow may stop me from taking a 6 hour trail inland for a new getaway. I’ve done the other local hikes around town so this is my last one to try. One day I walked out on a trail on the sea ice and it happened to be such a warm sunny day that I laid down and tried to get a belly tan. It didn’t really work, but it felt nice.

Today I went on a small ½ hour walk and the wind was blowing so hard I had to lean into the wind. When I got to the nearby promontory, the wind whipped my pants against me in the same tempo as the music I was listening to on my Ipod, and no one else was around (I did feel a bit removed from -things). And then I spied two seals. One of the seals was swimming in a melted pool of sea water and the other crawled on its belly to meet the other seal. Then they both went down a deeper hole to disappear. The melt pool water was green as if it were a tropical cartoon lagoon, the ice was white/gray/dirty yellow/ice colored, and the hills I was standing on were rich with dark rocks and soil. The sea ice is starting to melt and a dark blue band of ocean can be seen on the horizon from the top of Ob Hill, but not from town. The sea ice runway that I landed on has been dismantled and moved to another location on the permanent ice shelf. All other sea ice buildings or research areas have been dismantled for the season. Besides the last few days, it really has felt warm lately and the temperature has gone up to even 37 degrees. I want to take daily walks, 15 mins- 1 hour, whatever I can squeeze in, even if the weather is windy and cold.

I also got to tour some nearby ice formations that occur near neighboring Scott Base (NZ-- the green buildings). The pressure ridges form as the sea ice moves against the permanent ice shelf. The trail is flagged for the safest route and the tour is led by someone experienced with being around this ice movement as it can be dangerous around the cracking and shifting ice. Obviously. These areas are pretty amazing and it is nice to be near something so ephemeral and sculptural.

There are other areas like this for sure, but they not easy or safe to get close to most of the time, unless you have extensive mountaineering and glacier training. My friend Karen works in the field safety department and trains or assists workers or scientists with going out to remote camps. She spent 10 days at the top of Mt. Erebus with some science groups and got to peer into the edge of the volcano. There are also these amazing (as described to me) tunnels near the top of the mountain where the thermal heat from underground escapes through the ice and creates beautiful icy blue tunnels and rooms and then escapes to the outside through a fumerole or a vertical tunnel. Only few people get to do these kinds of adventures and it was one of the regular Erebus scientists that introduced her to this. She also spent 8 days in a very serious storm sleeping in her tent at night and hanging out in the research buildings during the day, she couldn’t even work to train the new scientists that were due to fly in by helicopter, but were on weather delay. Although I might not be ready to have that Antarctic experience, it is exciting to talk to people who get to do it. I found these websites which gives a great idea of what it is like up there.

http://www.60south.com/erebus/

http://erebus.nmt.edu/

There are more field camps than I first thought… at least half a dozen and some small, some up to about 40 people. Weather can change the schedule of the camp and sometimes people may be stuck out there for days if the planes can’t make it out there. All camps have shelters and are well equipped, so there is never really a safety concern, but just the frustration of not being able to get as much done in a season, etc. etc. People, besides scientists, who get to occasionally work out at these field camps are usually carpenters, vehicle mechanics, antenna riggers, and general assistants. Someone thought I might go out to a field camp for a few days later in the season to do some as-built drawings, but I don’t think I will have time and I hear things will be really busy when people are trying to wrap up their projects before winter. That’s fine. I should still go to Pole, but probably not until after mid-January.

Here is also a video of me taking a ride on a "Tucker" with Bryan. He works on a science team that sends an underwater robot to do research on the marine life and environment in McMurdo Sound. There are divers that do go into these waters, but the robot can go deeper than is allowable for humans. There are actually experiments left in the sound for decades and were installed by divers who in previous years dove deeper and did not have the durable dry diving suits of recent years. The robot has gone to check on some of these experiments that no one has been able to follow up on for years. You can check out the project here http://scini.mlml.calstate.edu/index.html. Bryan needed help to go out and re-fuel a generator that was drilling and melting a hole through the ice for the next day's robot dive (if someone asks you to do something fun like this, you say yes. Even at 11pm at night). This trip was only about 20 minutes from town and back when the ice was stable.

Cheers to everyone, have a great holiday!