Where Do You Live? (Part 2)

Where Do You Live? (Part 2)

27 Feb 2017

It has just been brought to my attention that there' a new, really great video tour of the station up on the youtubes.  Kate is a high school teacher from Virginia who came down for a good chunk of the summer as part of an outreach program.  She spent her time mainly helping the IceCube neutrino astronomy project and doing lots of outreach to school kids back in the states.

If you'd like to see a full tour of where I spend my days, check her out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrPiVT23MhA

Station Close!

Station Close!

15 Feb 2017

The last members of the summer crew board the last passenger flight out of South Pole

Here we go.

The South Pole winter is too cold to operate aircraft.  Below temps of -45 C or so (typical these days, with a windchill around -60 C), engines are difficult to start and hydraulic fluid freezes in the lines.  The departure of the last plane is known here as "Station Close," and it marks the official beginning of winter.

There are 46 of us here for the 2017 season.  41 men, 5 women.  There's now no way in or out of the station until flights resume in the spring, around late Oct.  Only approximately 1500 people have spent the winter at south pole, fewer than have climbed Mt Everest.  The ultimate clearing house for stats and info about winter-overs is maintained by Bill Spindler.  His site is fascinating and you can dive way into minutiae there.

It is traditional for the last plane leaving to give the station a flyby and dip its wings in salute.  My NOAA counterpart, Gavin, is a video editing whiz and put together a short video of the event which you can download here.

A few of our photos are going to be featured on the homepage of noaa.gov on Tuesday* as part of a story about our mission down here an station close.  Be sure to check it out!  Apparently NOAA might also be sending a twittering or putting things on that facebook thing I hear so much about.  Not sure about the URLs for those things, but I trust you to find them if you're so inclined  :-)

Tonight (actually in about 15 minutes) we're celebrating another South Pole tradition with a marathon screening of all three versions of "The Thing."  The original 1950s version is set at the North Pole, but the other 2 (from 1982 and 2011) are set down here and all three have become cult classics among the Antarctica set.

I'm excited.  This is what I came here for.  We have about a month of daylight left, then 2-3 weeks of twilight, and then it will be complete darkness until mid-September.  There's no turning back now, and the only way home is through November.

EDIT:  *The story is now up at http://www.noaa.gov/stories/photo-last-flight-from-south-pole