What do you do for fun?

What Do You Do For Fun?

16 April 2017

Hi everyone, sorry for the very long silence.  We had several weeks of really bad internet connection (think 1 Kb/s, or literally hours to upload a single picture), and then I got lazy.  Right now our satellite window is in the middle of the day, and I feel a bit guilty about blogging during standard work hours.  Even though I can flex my schedule, old habits die hard.

So I thought I would talk a bit about social activities on the station.  I find boredom is rarely an issue, which is a pleasant surprise.  We're obviously a very small community, but a good one.  There is at least one organized activity every night of the week.  On Mondays folks play board games int he galley.  On Tuesday we're holding an astronomy class, followed by TV series night.  We started watching HBOs "West World" and are currently going through the BBC's "Sherlock."  Both are excellent if you haven't seen them.  I'm giving a few guest lectures for the Astronomy class which is really fun.  In fact I'm doing the next two weeks covering stellar evolution.  We have a resident astrophotgraphy expert who conducts classes on that.  Wednesday's feature volleyball and Unicycling classes, and Thursday's have a casual hangout/conversation group and a classic movie from the 40s-70s.  Fridays offer some sort of sportsball game in the gym, and on Saturdays our station manager shows an adventure film of some sort.

Of course, these are just the main options, and not everyone attends all of them.  You can usually find someone to hang out with by looking around the halls, or there's a pretty good book and movie library that you can always borrow from to just watch quietly in your room or one of the two TV lounges.  There's also a small but adequate gym which I've been using very regularly.  I also volunteer in our greenhouse a few days a week, so that we have *some* sort of fresh vegetables for salads, etc.

Overall, I manage to keep occupied and entertained.  Signing off for now, hopefully I'll be better about being regular here.

Oh, one more thing!  We had our first visible auroras of the season a few days ago!  The first I've seen in person, which has long been a goal of mine.  I didn't have my camera, so no pictures yet, but there should be even better shows to come as it gets darker.  I leave you with two pictures.  One shows another social option, two different groups which meet on Saturdays and Sundays.  They don't quite see eye to eye on things...

BYOTFH=Bring Your Own Tin Foil Hat

And the other day/night (there's really no difference), there was a great moon pillar.  I took a few pictures, and while this ine is a bit dark, I think the starburst pattern on the moon makes it one of the best

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

BBC story about my office

15 Jan 2017

Just a very quick post to share a story that one of the senior scientists in my office sent out to us:

https://www.channel4.com/news/climate-trump-threatens-to-cut-environmental-regulations

I know most of the NOAA scientists featured in the video personally, and a lot of it is filmed in the office in Boulder I trained in from July-October.

Marking the Pole

1 Jan 2017

Sorry this post is a bit late.

On New Year's day, we officially marked the new geographic south pole.  The station is built on top of a ~3000m thick ice sheet which slides about 10m/year.  All the buildings of the station slide along with the ice, but this means from our perspective the exact geographic pole seems to drift.  It is tradition at the station to update the location of the marker for the pole on New Years day.

The pole is marked by a metal rod topped with an ornament designed and fabricated by the winter over crew.  When I got here, the pole was marked as so:

The pole marker when I arrived.  Placed on 1 Jan 2016, it was designed by the winter over crew of 2015.

There are other photos of me with this marker elsewhere on this blog, and I have heard scurrilous rumors that perhaps other images are on something called the book of faces, or some such.

Professional surveyors come down to pole every December to verify the relative position of all our buildings and reorient our local coordinate system.  They also stake out the new location of the exact pole.  I got to the site early, and before the new marker is placed, had the opportunity to stand directly on the axis of the earth, and so for a while, yes, the world did in fact revolve around me.

The two poles behind me mark the location of the new big white sign, and the pole directly beneath me marks the axis of rotation for the entire planet.

First our station manager Wayne arrived with the new pole marker, shrouded in mystery:

We then all formed a semi-circle, with one end at the location of the old pole, and the other at the location of the new.  Our area director Bill touched the new marker to the old, and we passed it from one person to another, towards its new resting spot:

And Wayne did the honors, driving it home and unveiling the new design:

The new marker was designed by the winter crew who just left:

The engravings on top are of the station and some of the out-buildings.  The outer ring is tilted at what I presume is a 23 degree angle, for the annual path of the sun through the south pole sky.  At the top of the arc is the sign for the sun, at the bottom is the southern cross.  The dates of sunset and sunrise (20 March and 23 Sept) are engraved at the sides, where the solar ring meets the disc.  It's difficult to see from this angle, but all the winter over crew signed the post below the ornament.

After the ceremony, everybody had to act like a tourist and have their picture taken with the new marker:

The old marker is traditionally taken down and placed in a display case we have inside the station.  Unfortunately this year, some of the station's dodgy element were seen trying to make a break for it, with the ultimate souvenir

Watch out for this ruffian.  But check out that awesome beard frost.  Only the hardiest of Antarctic explorers can get that going on.