Wind Storm

We had a wind storm over the weekend that deposited a lot of snow drifts and carved up those snow drifts in to sastrugi. It was a moderate wind storm reached 24 mph/21 knots, the record wind speed for the south pole is 55 mph. (Record lowest temperature is -117 F/-82.8C, coldest months are June and July) The wind brings snow, cloudy skies and warmer weather. Now the storm has dissipated but we still have about 11 knots of wind but the sun is low and perfect for interesting snow pictures!



 Cosray and the escape hatch from the fuel storage arch.

 A super delicate piece of sastrugi moving in the wind. Snow here has such a weird consistency.

 These are foot steps that compressed parts of a big drift that was here yesterday but got blown away.

 I learned how to take air samples today out in the clean air sector (not part of my job but still cool to learn about). The rod sticking out is what the intake tube is mounted on.

 You have to step away so your breath doesn't contaminate the sample and hold your breath when you turn it on and off.

 So much untouched snow. It's amazing.

 A snow arch! The formations are so different and interesting and beautiful, I could take pictures of them all day, but my fingers get cold too fast now.

Pretty much have to warm them up after every picture. I can't use the camera with my big gloves on so I have to take my hand out of the big glove, stash the big glove in my jacket so it'll stay warm, take the camera out, turn it on, lens cap off, take a few pictures, lens cap on, turn it off, put the camera back inside jacket, put the big glove back on, and then warm up my fingers. It's a bit easier if I use a smaller camera, but if I want to take nice pictures it's a process. The gloves in the picture above are my glove liners that go inside the big glove.

 

 Sastrugi are awesome.

Another couple arches! And just incase anyone is getting bored with my excitement over cool snow formations, here are some giant bags of powdered milk.

I think the first week of winter went well, only ~37 more weeks to go (but I'm not counting, I love it here).

Flag Lines and Winter Quarters

Sunset is a month away and temperatures are still pretty warm so it's the perfect time to put up extra flag lines. It's important to put these lines in so when visibility is bad you won't get lost. My flags are placed between 10-15 steps apart, some people prefer them closer that that and others are fine with 40 feet apart. It all depends on the person and how necessary it is to be able to get to the end destination in bad weather.  Flag lines are a big team effort, it would take forever to lay a flag line on your own.

 I needed a flag line between to two buildings I walk to often (SuperDARN/ARO) and also from SuperDARN back to the station. Other people run experiments out at ARO so I didn't have to put the ARO-Station flag line in.

 The process for putting in a flag line is: someone walks the paces and keeps the straight line, someone drills the hole for the flag with a cordless drill (it's good to have a second warm battery, they die really quickly in the cold), someone pulling a banana sled with flags, someone pulling the flags from the banana sled and placing them in the line. The flag lines we put in are about 3/4 of a mile and it took about an hour and a half to complete.

 This is my new room for the winter! It's so big! I had to move rooms because in the winter we don't have enough people to fill all the berthing pods, so we turn the heat down to just above freezing in one pod (A-4) and use it as storage. I lived in A-4 for the summer, my new room is in A-1. When things get slow maybe I'll talk about the station layout with a map.

 And I have a window! I have binder clipped a towel to the frame and a sheet on top of that to block out the light (I like that better than the cardboard pieces that are normally used for blocking light).

 Giant desk! The map of Africa was a given to me by a really good summer friend who is now enjoying traveling around New Zealand.

This is my awesome view. You can see my flag line to SuperDARN (tiny building on the right) and the geographic south pole a little above the last flag on the left with the American flag. The vents in the snow are for the fuel storage arch and the power plant. I can also spy on the winter smoker's shack and an out house. We have several liquid only out houses around the backyard, they are all basically glorified funnels that run into steel drums, and (more importantly/unfortunately) are not heated.

Sastrugi Tsunami! There aren't too many cool snow formations left, we are in more of a snow accumulation phase right now, the sastrugi will be back again at the end of the winter.

 

If you have any questions, comments or ideas for something I should write about when things get slow (or just want to say hi) comment here, email me or text me, it's always nice to hear from people! 



Flight Deck Break Down

Today we took apart the flight deck, drained all the hoses and valves and put everything into the "Barn" for winter.

The flags on the ski way will also come down, the bamboo stays in the ground to mark where the skiway goes but the flags to come down to extend their life time and prevent drifting on the skiway.

Flight deck break down is a big team effort, the more people to lug the heavy hoses around and move fuel buckets/drums/tanks the better.

All the hoses are capped and plugged to stay clean over the winter. You need to put oil in the aviation hose connections to protect the O-rings.

The oil used for this at these temperatures has the consistency of honey(see below), making it necessary to spread it around with a finger (with your glove on still of course, it is cold enough that it’s possible to get contact frost nip/bite from touching metal).

 All the buildings and tanks were towed out to the end of the world for the winter. We do this so that the snow drifts the buildings make over winter are out where they don't matter and the buildings can be towed back to a flat, drift free area at the start of the summer season.

 The clouds were pretty awesome today.

We had a very warm day today, it was mid to low -40s F with a lighter breeze. Perfect for a sun bathing break to admire the clouds after walking out to SuperDARN.



 My shadow is getting noticeably longer! Winter is coming!

Green House Update:

The cucumbers are going crazy, the first cherry tomatoes are almost ready, the lettuce germination rate has not been very good lately, but I was able to get three cantaloupe seeds to sprout (the seeds are really old). I am also working on some mung bean sprouts.

 

Station Closing

The last flight of the season came today. The next one won't be until November. I was in charge of marshaling it in (hand signals, radio communications, counting passengers, and cool flight deck radio head phones) which was really awesome. The person working the nose is a friend of mine, I was marshaling at the wing.

The passenger door near the front that we normally use malfunctioned because it was too cold and the last seven people had to board the plane from the ramp in the back. It is -46C/-51F ambient, with 6 knots of wind today and it's still dropping fast. We broke the -80 F (with wind chill) mark yesterday. The limit for the LC-130's is -50 C.

 As per tradition the last "herc" does a station fly over to say "bye, see you in nine months." 

 We watched the three different thing movies this past weekend, station was supposed to close last Friday but the last flight got postpone to finish some last minute work on a generator, but we already had the gym set up and it was the weekend so we watched them the day station was supposed to close and the day before the last flight.

 

I'm working on moving into my winter room, which is a little bit bigger than my summer room and has a window!

 

Sundog

  We had the most amazing sundog of the season yesterday. The right side stretched across a quarter of the sky, there was a double halo and two top arcs. It was beautiful.





The pictures really don't do it justice.

It's pretty easy to forgot how awesome and beautiful the world is and how amazing it is to actually be living and working at the South Pole when it becomes the usual daily routine. But when you look out at the horizon or see an awesome sundog.... it's unexplainable.

Spoolhenge

This is spoolhenge. Spoolhenge is an interesting South Pole landmark. The spools came from the Icecube experiment. Icecube is a huge kilometer cubed neutrino detector made from strings of detectors two kilometers into the ice.

The tiny blue dot on top of the picture above is the lab building which runs the observatory. The detectors can see the light created by muons that are created when a neutrino interacts (shown by the colorful detectors). They can detect the direction that light was traveling in and use it to map where the neutrino came from.

The spools from the wires that were lowered into the ice were stacked here near the "end of the world" where the station's activity ends. It used to be three spools high but it has drifted in over the years.

It makes for a good destination for a sunday adventure around the backyard and the berms.

Just another lazy sunday on the plateau!

Altitude and a Vault

 This is the best way I can show the altitude of where the station is located. The station is at about 9,300 feet above sea level but with the fluctuations of air pressure the barometer reads at 10,433 feet today. I have pretty much acclimated to the altitude but certain stairwells I don't think will ever be easy.

This is one of the vaults that holds a receiver for one of the experiments I take care of. You can see my breath rising in the picture above. The shaft gets extensions put on it as the snow slowly accumulates around it, this is the deepest vault I've been in yet.

One Week Until Closing

 

It's been a pretty busy two weeks. Beautiful weather and sun, but summer is definitely waning, we are losing about a degree a day now. Currently at -40 (C/F).

 I have noticed a significant change in the height of the sun and the length of my shadow.

Little sun dog with the new pole marker!

Someone build a snow cave into a snow drift and the color created by the light filtering through the snow above is unreal.

Everyone has been very busy preparing for station closing. This year the scheduled closing date is the 13th of February. This is the day of the last flight until November 1st (the scheduled opening date). Most summer projects have been completed and the station population is dropping faster than the temperature. Supplies need to be brought up to the station while we still have the manpower, sunlight, and relative warmth to get things done quicker. Emergency back up systems that have been worked on and tested over the summer need to be ready, buildings are being winterized and last minute winter trainings are underway.

This is how fresh food, mail, and other supplies are brought up from storage/cargo into the station. I'm in the "tri-wall" box of store goods handing things to the chain of people leading to a cart inside.