Week Three

I can't believe I'm already in week three, it has gone so fast and also feels like I've been here a lot longer then just two and a half weeks.  

 We had the first tourists or the season today. They pay tour companies around $80,000 to visit the pole for about an hour or two. Take a quick walk around the station, take a picture at the pole and get back on the their plane. We don't fuel their planes or give them food or supplies. There will be a few tourist trips and a few people who do expeditions across the ice. There will be a lady driving a tractor to pole later in the season. There will also be people who camp outside by the pole as well.

 Laundry room!

 I've been appointed head of the "Growth Chamber"(green house) for the winter so I will be spending the summer learning how to run all the systems. The green house needed to be drained and cleaned this year so we just started from scratch this past weekend.

 There is a little room with a couch in between the growth chamber and the main hallway, it's a nice place to hang out, plant seeds, read a book or just feel the humidity.

Yay, cute little sprouts!  We will move these sprouts into their own circulation trays so they can get nutrients and grow soon.

 This is my favorite experiment, the one where I can hear the electron precipitation from lighting, the antenna for this is outside in an ice vault. I have nine other experiments.

This one is coming from a large antenna array about 3 km off station which is measuring the shadow of the radio waves coming from the milky way. By doing this they can see what is happening in the ionosphere. I like to think of the milky way as the sun, the ionosphere as a tree, and what the antenna field sees is the shadow of the tree. By looking at the shadow you can tell how big the tree is, and if the wind is blowing and that kind of thing. There is a lot more to it then that but that's the general idea.