Happy New Year!

31 Dec 2016

For New Year's 2000, tickets were sold for a flight aboard the Concorde that started with a midnight celebration in Paris.  Passengers then boarded the plane, which could beat the rotation of the earth, and landed in New York to see midnight again.

That's cute, but I can circumnavigate the planet on foot in less than a minute.  

As I write this, it is 2 hours to midnight on 31 Dec (New Zealand Time).  We'll be celebrating the New Year every hour down here.  Head out to the pole, and take one step further to the right and you're in the next time zone.

Cheers!

What would you say... ya do here?

1 Dec 2016

So what exactly does my job entail?  I am the station technician for NOAA's south pole climate observatory.  One of two NOAA staff members down here for the next year.  We have about 2 dozen instruments here devoted to monitoring the driving forces of earth's climate.  We monitor several atmospheric trace gases, some at sensitivities of parts per *trillion*.  We monitor the total radiation flux being delivered to the earth from the sun at multiple wavelengths, and quantify the amount of that radiation which is reflected back by the earth.  We measure the thickness of the ozone layer over the south pole daily, and we launch balloons to obtain spatially resolved ozone profiles from the ground up to altitudes of around 35 km.

That sounds very grandiose, but what do I actually do?  My office is in the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO, pronounced "arrow") about 500m from the station.  Seriously, check out that link.  Note that the floor plans are links to photos of the interior of ARO.  They're way out of date, but they'll serve.  We'll update them this year.  When things are going smoothly (which they do most of the time), I walk out to ARO every day and run through our daily checks.  We verify every instrument is running fine, that all the data has been transferred successfully the last time the satellites were up (overnight these days).  We have several large tanks of compressed gases, and we monitor them all daily to ensure the tanks are swapped out for full ones before they run out.

After the dailies are done, every day we need to do multiple measurements of the total column thickness of the ozone layer.  We use a Dobson differential spectrophotometer to do this.  The Dobson is a fascinating instrument, and will get its own post at some point.

On weekly and monthly periodicities, various instruments need to be recalibrated or have maintenance tasks performed.  Every two weeks, we collect literal samples of air in pressurized bottles.  These will be kept on station during the winter and mailed back to our collaborators in Australia, San Diego, and Boulder for further analysis.

Every 5 days, we launch a large balloon to an altitude of about 35km to obtain a spatially resolved profile of the ozone layer.  These measurements nicely complement the integrated column thickness measurements done using the Dobson from the ground.

All that is the normal, day to day stuff.  We're also on hand to repair anything that goes abnormally.  We're prepared to reconstruct data cables, reload the operating system on the computers, rebuild the plumbing connecting the gas cylinders, and hopefully save an experiment with a minimum of down time for any other issue.

In trivial news, a famous person came by the station today.  I had a brief opportunity to speak with him, but it was made very clear that he was not interested in a bunch of dirty nerds clamoring for photographic evidence of such a meeting.  The rumor is that video footage may appear on the BBC sometime in the next several months.

By the way, it should go without saying that this blog is completely my creation in my role as a private citizen.  It in no way is, or claims to be, a reflection of the opinions or views of any agency or department of the US government, the National Science Foundation, the US Antarctic Program, or the local Dairy Council.  All views and opinions stated herein are purely my own.  I hope that satisfies all the lawyers out there.

Where do you live?

13 Nov 2016

Just a very quick post, in the rare moment when Saturday night and internet access align.  It's 00:30 local right now, and I should probably go to bed soon.  My job down here is 7 days a week, since the various instruments and status checks we need to do must be done every day.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos of my room.  One doesn't come to the pole for a luxurious experience.  I'm an individual of simple tastes, so this is fine for my needs.  I have a chair to sit in for the times when we have internet, and when I'm unconscious I don't care how far away the wall is.  The penguin is a humidifier.  If you look closely in the upper right, you might see a clothesline.  The air here is so dry that I can hang a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and multiple wool shirts to dry at 9pm, and they are bone dry by 7am.

The astute amongst you will note the beer in the windowsill, or as I think of it, the refrigerator.  For some reason our window frames are metallic and stay about 5 C.  That means the window constitutes an ideal energy efficient refrigerator for any aluminum can/glass bottle making good contact against the sides and bottom.

My room

The cardboard window covering was there when I moved in.  It's essential since the sun doesn't set here.  There's a slight light leak in one corner and through a small hole.  They let in the perfect amount of light so that my room seems like it is lit by a bright full moon.  Just enough so that I don't fall when getting out of my very high bed, but plenty dark enough for sleep.

Just down my hall, right now

It's a well-known fact that the pole only has one sunrise and one sunset per year, but it's still an odd experience to actually live that.  This photo was taken at local midnight, from the window at the end of the hall outside my room.  The buildings you see are various support buildings, holding carpentry supplies, electronic equipment, etc.  It's exactly this bright all the time.  At my 7am wake-up, and my midnight bedtime.

Who works with you?

5 Nov 2016

My coworkers are a very interesting mix.  We have ultra-nerdy astrophysicists who sit about discussing what tweaks they've made to their custom compiled linux kernels (that's super nerdy even by my standards), but there are also a lot of blue collar heavy equipment drivers, cooks, dishwashers, plumbers and fuel techs.  There are folks here who have been coming down to one Antarctic station or another for 20 summers bulldozing out the snow drifts or hauling the trash.  I love the mix.  Apparently at McMurdo there’s a bit of contentious class divide between the laborers and some scientists, "beakers," who are too good to mingle.  I'm very happy that Pole tends to be too small to support that sort of thing, and we're much more one team.

We've got a 22 year old physicist who is going to start grad school when he gets off ice, and I had lunch yesterday with an awesome 73 year old utilities tech who is doing his first season down here, fulfilling a lifelong dream.  Our winter site manager is immediately impressive.  He's spent the last 30 years managing small isolated stations on remote Aleutian Islands or tiny coral atolls in the Pacific or Indian oceans.  He spends his vacation time doing overland traverses of Africa and remote pockets of New Guinea.  I have absolute confidence in his ability to manage our group of 50 winter overs.  Our head cook is a giant of a man from North Carolina who goes by "Big Country."  You don't even have to be here to know the food is amazing.  One of his production cooks usually lives in a town of 30 in rural Alaska, mostly living off subsistence hunting and gathering, but working as a chef at a local high end cruise ship resort.

Current station population is 108.  I don't know a precise M/F breakdown, but I would guess 15-20% female.

I know it's barely been a week, but I think I'm really going to like this experience.

Riebel Ninety South

29 Oct 2016

You'll notice there's a discrepancy between the stated date of this post and the posting date.  Due to the irregular internet down here, that's going to be pretty common.  Some of the below is now inaccurate, I finally got my luggage yesterday, 2 Nov.  I'm also feeling much better with the altitude.

Anyway, enjoy this slightly out of date description of the last leg of my journey to the best passport stamp ever.

I finally made it to 90 south on 29 Oct.  Arrival was a bit like a psychological crash landing.  We got word in McMurdo that our flight was a "go" for 07:30 at about 10pm.  We had to rush around the McMurdo bars (there are 3) to spread word of mouth to all our passengers.  We flew here on a Basler, which is a DC-3 (something like that, I'm not sure of the exact model number).  It's the plane Indiana Jones uses in all the travel cut sequences.  But wait you say, wasn't Indiana Jones set in the 1930's?  Yes, it was.  The flight was low, only about 2,000 ft above the ice, unpressurized, unheated, and with a nalgene bottle for a bathroom.  The seats were benches not large enough for my seatmate and I, both in full ECW.  We wedged ourselves in, and just endured for 5 hours. There were more than a few times during the flight I suddenly found myself very short of breath, just sitting in my seat.  We only got to take carry-on bags because the plane is so small.  When we landed, the pilot warned us it was -50 outside, and we stumbled out of the plane into the brilliant sunshine,  Our hoods block any peripheral vision, and we were greeted by most of the station staff, all of whom are bundled up just like you.  Then we all helped off load the plane, bucket brigade style and were ushered into the station, home for the next year.  It was dizzying.

Most of my belongings are still in McMurdo, hopefully arriving on a C-130 Herc tomorrow.  For the last three days, I'm living off my one shirt, one pair of pants and three pairs of underwear.  Actually come to think of it, I had to check my luggage when we first got to McMurdo.  I've been living off that for three days here plus two in McMurdo.  There's a reason we are known by the rest of the antarctic program as "dirty polies" I guess.

It's been -50 C (-60 F) since I arrived.  Before I got here, I admit I was a little intimidated by the prospect of temperatures like that, but I'm finding our ECW more than adequate for the task.  I'm quite comfortable on my walk to and from work each day.  The food is good.  My room is very small.  I'm restricted to very small messages on this account, so pictures will have to wait until the satellites are more convenient to my work schedule.  Team NOAA hit the ground running and on day 2 here we started our turnover process.  Both Sunday and today we did full 8-9 hour days.  With working a full day and dealing with the altitude, I can't stay up late for internet access right now.  Maybe this weekend.  I do notice the altitude, and find climbing even short stairs gets me a bit winded.  I'm sure that will pass eventually.

Stand by to Stand by

26 Oct 2016

I was told to expect this phase of the journey to change frequently.  Yesterday, we went over tot he headquarters of USAP for our Extreme Cold Weather gear (ECW) issue.  We then went back to the hotel, expecting a 05:45 shuttle this morning that would take us to the plane for a 06:30 check-in.  However, that was all canceled with a 04:45 phone call, so I'm now sitting through a 24-hour weather delay.  We'll try again tomorrow morning around 6ish.  I expect this to happen a few more times, both here and in McMurdo.

Until then, here's some pictures:

Here's the entryway to USAP's terminal.  If you're ever in Christchurch, there's an Antarctic Experience tourist destination.  The USAP HQ is right behind that building.  We spent about 3 hours here yesterday having our computers' anti-virus settings verified, trying on our ECW, and getting some safety briefs about life on the Ice.

Here's a wall display of one set of ECW gear.  I was issued more or less all of this for my year on Ice.  Starting from the left, we have our parka (known as "Big Red", which is an awesome name for pretty much anything).  There are two models of bibs, we take the version we prefer, a lighter carhartt jacket for summer wear, and a fleece jacket and pants.  We also get a small fleece hat, a fleece balaclava, a fleece neck gaiter, gloves, mittens, bigger mittens, and boots (only one pair.  Here you see the three models that are available).  The red jacket on the right (known as "little red") is too light for pole.

All of that fits surprisingly well into two orange bags:

When we first arrive at CDC, everything is packed away much like you see here.  We then open it up and try everything on, exchanging anything that doesn't fit.  We then pack it all back up, and leave it like this to be loaded on a pallet whenever our flight goes.

As I am also a gawking tourist, the staff let me into the general distribution center to get some behind the scenes shots:

And there is the first answer to the question, "What do you pack for Antarctica?" 

Christchurch!

24 Oct 2016

Ah, it feels good to be back!  I didn't send much time in Christchurch when I was last in NZ, but just being back in the country at all feels very nostalgic for me.  This is great.  I'm constantly fighting the urge to run over to the airport, hire a car and hit the road to visit the places I did spend a lot of time.

Tomorrow at 9am I'll head to the local headquarters of the US Antarctic Program (USAP) and be issued my Extreme Cold Weather gear (ECW).  After that, we begin the weather waiting game.  I'm staying at a hotel that is frequently used by USAP.  When the clerk checked me in, he said, "I have you for two nights right now, ready to stretch it to 10..."  Everything depends on the highly variable weather at McMurdo.  Ideally, I'll get there on Wednesday or Thursday, but delays of a week or more are not unprecedented.  Once I get to McMurdo, the flight to pole itself is equally uncertain.

We have no cell service at pole, so I got rid of my cell phone, but I've moved my number to google voice.  I believe this means that once I get to pole, I'll be able to receive phone calls using the same number I've had for 16 years.  We have phones in our room, and I think I'll be able to set that as a forwarding number for my google voice account (our phone numbers all have Denver area codes, because computers).  Txt messages will definitely go to my email.

I hope you all had a good 23 Oct, I didn't get one.  I left Dallas on the 22nd, and the next thing I knew it was the 24th in Sydney.

Here we go

22 Oct 2016

T-minus 7 hours as I write this.  At 16:30 today I board a plane here in Denver, ultimately bound for Christchurch.  I'll skip the 23rd entirely and land on the 24th.  And then things get uncertain.  Depending on the weather in McMurdo, I'll be in Christchurch for somewhere between a day and a week or so.  Then, depending on the weather at Pole, I'll be in McMurdo for somewhere between a day and a week or so.  All through that period, internet access will be uncertain and haphazard.

The last two weeks have been really great.  I met about half of the winter over crew in Estes Park Colorado for a three day team-building experience.  We did some fun activities like building cardboard boats and a geo-cache type of scavenger hunt.  We talked about communication and team work, but ultimately about 70% of our team building was really done in the cafeteria and the lounge over a couple of beers.  This week we spent attending the Aurora, CO fire academy covering basic firefighting and rescue.  There are no professional emergency services within 800km of the pole, so we have to become the fire department.  The instructors at the fire academy were great, and the whole experience was a lot of fun.  Of course, my real hope is that this week of firefighting training was the most useless waste of time I've ever had.  When you live in an isolated station in temperatures that reach the negative triple digits, the best fires are the ones that don't happen, not the ones you put out.

First Post

8 Oct 2016

Welcome to my blog!  I'm not yet sure what this will be.  It will certainly be a place for me to in some sense document my 1-year stay at the south pole.  It will include mundane daily details, random stream-of-consciousness ramblings, pictures, and maybe other things.  Updates will be random, as internet access is limited down there.  If you're reading this, you probably know me personally, so I won't spend much time on introductions.  Please feel free to email me with things you'd like me talk about, complaints that I talk too much about other things, or any other thoughts/feedback/ideas/requests you have.  So what to talk about first?

It's Saturday night.  On Monday I move into a hotel, for what I consider in many respects to be the real beginning of my south pole journey.

The 2017 South Pole winter-over crew is meeting in Denver for the first time on Monday evening.  We'll actually start on Tuesday morning, when we head up to Estes Park, CO, entry to Rocky Mountain National Park, for three days of team building (I've been mentally calling it "trust falls and talking about the Meyers-Briggs" in a bit of well-meaning fun.  INTP, if you're curious.).  The following week, 17-21 October, will be spent in Denver doing firefighting/emergency medical training.  As there are only 50 of us spending the winter at the pole, we have to be our own emergency services.  About half of us have been assigned to the trauma medical team, and I've been assigned to the firefighting team.

In some sense, I've been headed toward the south pole for several months now, but Monday represents a real psychological threshold.  This is the day when there ceases to be a separation between "work" and "home".  For the last few months I've been living in Boulder, preparing for the pole, but there has still been an "office" I go to 9-5, and a "home " I go to out of that time.  As of Monday, that's not quite the case anymore.  We'll have training during the day, but at night we will return to the same hotel/YMCA lodging (Ha, even my pronouns have switched from the singular to the plural).  Things will be much more completely about the team, and less about my contribution to an organization.  I'll no longer have a street address, and will only travel in team-managed vans.  When we get to the pole, there will be absolutely no separation between work and home.  My world will be the ~2km circle of the Amundsen-Scott station.  Important note:  all statements about what my life *will* be like are subject to complete reversal once I get there and see how wrong I was when I wrote this right now.

Immediately after firefighting training, at 16:30 Mountain time, I'll board a plane bound for Christchurch, New Zealand.  If all goes well with the weather, I'll be there for 3 days or so to be issued my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear, and then head to McMurdo, and then onto the pole itself.  That schedule is very weather dependent, and blogging will probably be very sporadic/unlikely as I make that transition.