More auroras from last week, because this week we got a 30 knot wind storm and we can't really see the sky anymore because of all the blowing snow.
It's difficult to explain what Auroras look like in person... they can move pretty quickly, like a sheet in the wind so sometimes you are too late to take a picture of a good set of auroras. Sometimes they are very faint and it looks like your eyes are playing a trick on you because it look like there might be a cloud but when you look at it more closely it is gone. Some of them are very bright a swirl around themselves and make fantastic ripples in the sky.
The snow that the wind to blowing across the plateau has made the
lidar lasers on top of ARO visible to the naked eye. Lidar lasers measure the heights of clouds as they pass overhead.
Today I did some work in the ice tunnels. We removed the wood debris from the torn down old warming shack in the tunnels and are making a large space to fit the new warming shack. Since ice is a fluid the tunnels tend to bulge in on all sides and get smaller as the ice moves to fill in the empty space of the tunnel. This means the tunnels has to be periodically widened and warming shacks will slowly get crushed (all of this happens over the span of years, I'm pretty sure the last warming shack was built about 12-15 year ago).
The process for opening the alcove in the tunnel for the warming shack has four steps. First you cut the ice into block shapes with a chain saw. This makes a fine dust like ice particles go everywhere.
Second you hit the blocks with a sledge hammer and they break off. Then you load the blocks into a banana sled.
Finally you drag the sled with the blocks down to a different tunnel that is no longer in use and stack the blocks to fill in the tunnel. The tunnels stay at a constant -55 to -60 F all year round, but it was nice to get out of the wind (-55 F actually feels quite nice compared to last weeks -90s F, I kept getting too warm). The ice blocks are pretty heavy and it was exhausting work but I had a lot of fun. It will take another few days to finish the job.
Bonus ice beards!
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