Playing with Sun Dogs

 

We had the most amazing sun dog today. I was outside sweeping snow off of one of my experiments and you could see a slight fog rolling in on the horizon and as the ice crystals started to filter in the sun dog kept getting more and more interesting.

 It even had this second halo rainbow thing going on.

 

It was amazing, I've never seen anything like it, I wish I could do it more justice in the pictures. I spent about an hour and a half outside taking pictures and sweeping. And wishing I had my big camera and not just the little lab one I always carry incase things like this happen. I went inside to check on a computer and came out not even ten minutes later and the fog had rolled in and the sun dog was gone and visibility was down to about a mile. It was -19 F with wind chill making it around -38 F today, felt nice and warm.

Panorama and Skier Take Off

The view from the roof of ARO.

A skier take off from on top of ARO.

First Month at Pole

I've been at Pole for a month now and I love it! The people are awesome, the food is great and there is so much to do. I'm very excited for the next eleven-ish months.

 The sprouts are doing great, we've slowly been moving them to trays where they will have more room.

 The Sastrugi are still awesome.

Gauging distances is difficult. The white and red building to the right of the station is the ice core drill tent; it is about 3 km away from station. The thing in the right of the frame is two people on a snow machine. The buildings to the right of the station below are about a kilometer away. And in the picture below I'm standing on a roof a little more then half a kilometer away from the station.



Dark Sector

I drove a track van and  brought a DV (distinguished visitor) out for a tour of the dark sector. We saw MAPO, SPT, and Icecube. MAPO is the microwave telescope I already posted pictures of, SPT is the South Pole Telescope which is also microwave but they are looking at a certain dark section of the sky and mapping out what we can see that remains of the big bang. Icecube is a neutrino detector and cost more then the whole station to build.

 

 Inside the telescope!

 This is me with SPT.

Icecube is the building to the right. It has miles and miles of cables and detectors in one cubic kilometer around it almost to the bottom of the glacier.

This is a map of where all of the cables run. The small block in the middle is the Icecube building.

 This is the where the wires from the ice come out of the ground and into the computers that process the data that they are collecting. Icecube gets about a terabyte of data everyday.

 The view back to the three big telescopes and our van.

More sun dogs! I don't do any work in the dark sector but I will run some of the tours for DVs that show up over the summer. DVs could be anyone from NSF reps to congress members.



No Horizon

 Today the horizon disappeared! It's still pretty warm (-12 F) but with the wind it's still about -40 F.

 That's the station to the left of the second flag.  We tied the 2004 record for the windiest day in Decmeber! (26 knots!)

Same picture from the other day with all the blue sky missing, also my snow drift couch filled in because the wind is coming from a different direction. Most of the Sastrugi have been flattened out, moved or filled in. The ground is still really uneven and difficult to walk in because there are barely any shadows. Its hard to see when the ground is changing when everything is so white. I walked right into drift I had no idea was even there shortly after this picture!

Heat Wave Sun Halo

 Beautiful day today! It got all the way up to -16 F (-25 C)!!!! It was so warm I even wore normal people hiking boots and didn't even have to use a neck gator.

Styrofoam Snow Noise

 

The ice makes a funny sound when it hits the ground. We did this last week when the sun was out. Hopefully it works, youtube doesn't load videos here the internet is too slow, but I was able to upload this short one. Click here to watch it on youtube instead.

Windy Day

 

 We finally had some interesting weather that wasn't the normal -38degrees F. It warmed up to the mid -20s and got very windy!

No blue sky today!



 I watched my foot steps get erased by the drifting snow.

 You can barely see SuperDARN in the background!

 The wind got to about 25 knots.

This is the big drift behind the beer can. There is a person's feet standing the background which might help with the scale.

Traverse Tour

The traverse comes from McMurdo and brings us fuel. It takes about a month for them to get here and about two weeks to get back. It is a group of ten people that drive the tractors and ferry the fuel cargo to us.  

  This is their bed rooms. Five rooms, two to a room.

  Big giant sled that gets dragged.

 The kitchen.

The route, the place I’m pointing is called the “Sastrugi National Park” and the sastrugis get 5 to 6 feet tall. It is about 1000 miles to get from McMurdo to the South Pole by this route.

  One of the tractors.

This tractor goes in front and the inner tube looking thing is scanning the ice in front of them for possible crevasses.

 

This is what the fuel bladders looked like before they were emptied. The traverse will leave back to McMurdo this Thursday and the second traverse will get here around Christmas.

Thanksgiving at the Bottom of the World

 We had some thanksgiving foot ball in the backyard.

The galley was all fancied up, the windows are covered to make it more cozy with the candles.

 First we had appetizers in the hallway. There was a lot of meaty things but there was this awesome New Zealand Brie baked in fluffy pastry.

 Tasty tasty!

 I made the compass rose for that pie and I also helped make the apples pies. There was also pecan pie and New Zealand whipped cream. It was an awesome Thanksgiving!