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.