Paddle Frenzy

More boats. The Oden back in sight after a rescue operation beyond the ice edge where the fuel tanker Gianella was caught in drifting sea ice. The research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer (pictured) berthed yesterday afternoon then reembarked today. Gianella comes in tomorrow at eight am. Currently it's about a mile off station struggling through winds. As it was described, “When the winds get too high that superstructure acts like a giant sail. Thing can't go anywhere, maneuver worth anything right now.”

The Palmer is the primary research vessel contracted by the NSF. On the tour today, a tour directed toward post-docs, a tour on which I tagged along, the guide talked frequently about various capacities within labs. He used the term fluorometry quite often. I remember four facts well.

1) The contraption pictured here is called a CTD, as it was originally designed to measure water conductivity and temperature at various depths. Today more complex attachments provide numerous other data. Each cylinder is connected to a central cable which draws up to a lab where depth is monitored on computer. At predetermined depths a button is pressed – the controls are still manual – and hatches on both ends of the chosen cylinder pop open. When the cylinder fills they pop close and seal. This particular CTD has 24 cylinders, so 24 different depths can be sampled. On the trip down here there were a number of drops between six and eight thousand meters. I don't know when results will be in.

2) Also on the trip down a fire broke out in a safe full of flammable chemicals. At first mention this seemed pretty banal. Further discussion among the scientists and post-docs, most of it hushed, made the potential ramifications quite jarring “They think it was caused because a bottle of Acetone wasn't placed in its secondary containment. The importance of chemical safety,” our guide noted facetiously. “On rough seas the bottle probably broke open, saturated the interior of the safe, and then a spark—fwoom.” Others on the tour prodded charred ceiling tiles yet to be replaced, ran their hands along the blistered wall placards. “I'm glad I wasn't on-board for the full trip. Imagine sinking somewhere off the Antarctic Peninsula. Didn't mind missing that adventure.” One of the scientists who had been on board raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

3) Through the Drake Passage south of Punta Arenas, Chile “the seas were rough,” according to one scientist. She described standing on the bridge as the prow of the boat dug into a wave trough and the cresting wave before them splashed across the bridge windows. The first picture here is taken from the bridge. The second picture shows the bridge, the protruding, rectangular, windowed section off the starboard bow, a group of people walking below.

Yeah, rough seas.

4) Ye Olde Fashion'd Defroster: when the weather is really nasty and cold, the bridge windows freeze over faster than they can be cleared, at least safely. These devices, Clear-Vus, are failsafe assurance of a small view. They are cranked around by hand and the forming ice, by centrifugal or centripetal force (depending on your level of formality), is spun off. As the bridge was clearing, the tour at an end, I said aloud to no one in particular, “Seems like an antiquated way of defrosting.” A man on board leaning his back against the windows with arms crossed, a mate of some sort who, by appearance alone, I judged full of invaluable and perhaps incommunicable folk wisdom, shrugged and said also to no one in particular, “It's old and simple so you know it's gowna work.”

The Icy Malpais

A farmer from New Hampshire is whittling on a porch with a farmer from Texas, and the Texan says, “You know, I could wake up with the rising sun and drive across my farm all day, all night, and all the following day and still not get to the end of my farm.” The New Hampshire man stops what he's doing and says, “Yup, I had a truck like that once."

You could go for hours and not move at all when traversing the Ross Ice Shelf. I rented cross country skis and made my way out from Scott Base toward Willie Field where the C-130s depart for Pole and Christchurch, fine views of Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror and southeast up the endless anviltop of the shelf. There is a rugby field out there where the annual US v. New Zealand match is held. The US was defeated this year, again, for the fortieth or fiftieth year in a row. I stopped frequently along the trail and the only sound was the roadflags snapping in wind – the only sensations, really, that snapping, the cold of the wind, and the heat of the sun, nothing else. It's odd how desolation like that consumes thought and feeling. I leaned on the tops of my poles and looked around then stared straight out over the shelf and must have hung that way like a scarecrow for five or ten minutes, turned around before reaching the airstrip and skied back to land, hiked from Scott Base back to McMurdo then took dinner. At night I watched a lecture on one of Antarctica's earliest explorers, a British Navy captain named Crozier. He discovered Ross Island, where McMurdo sits. He also spent a fair amount of time, and died, exploring the Arctic in search of the northwest passage and the magnetic north pole.

Last night I saw the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch. The movie looks at how a creature functions when its purpose is lost, or even nonexistent; how a creature in an alien environment adapts to the unfamiliar. It's a good question, and the movie provides a good answer, but I'm not sure if it's a satisfactory answer. Maybe. The lecture tonight looked at a somewhat similar question, though veiled. Crozier's co-captain on a number of voyages, Franklin, was uncle to Alfred Tennyson, and the professor, on one slide, quoted from "The Charge of the Light Brigade." A soldier marches to battle.

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die...

Baby Steps

Almost nothing of note happened over the week, a lot of inventorying. But there was one moment, small and short.

I met a friend at the gymnasium at nine pm yesterday. It was open gym basketball, and we were the only two there. It has been warm the past few days, in the low- to mid-forties, and last night I wore only a t-shirt over long underwear. The base settles down on nightshift, most people asleep or at the bars. It's quiet. There was no wind and a thin scrim of mist settled across the sea ice. All I could hear were my footsteps on gravel, and all I could see was the iridescent glare of a low night sun on the sunk mist, and that subtle setting stuck with me the rest of the night and through most of today.

It was like being in a cavern underground and sitting down in silence with the headlamp switched off, time effaced, thoughts rising and you forced to the realization that you're a small, fragile, living thing, and that's it. The sun was too bright, and pictures, unfortunately, wouldn't have turned out.

Yosh Control to Major Tom

Halfway to Lunar Habitat
NASA is working on, I believe, four different projects down here. Most recently a NASA group in collaboration with ILC Dover and the NSF arrived to test a new portable shelter for remote Antarctic field sites. In essence, the project has developed a durable tent intended to supersede Jamesways.

Jamesways, a vestige from the Korean War, are buildings in a box. Crates can be airdropped. Inside of the crates are canvas, some straps, some screws and nails, a bit of lumber. The crate itself is then broken down. The base serves as a floor (slightly elevated), and other pieces of wood serve as a frame. The canvas is stretched taut over this frame, and fin. Most ingeniously, a single Jamesway can stand alone - a half-cylinder about fifteen feet long, nine feet high - or it can be lengthened with other Jamesways. The sky is the limit.

So here is NASA with a lighter version, inflatable, similarly adaptable. The Antarctic version serves as a prototype for potential lunar habitation. I have learned that NASA intends to establish a lunar station by 2024. More information is available online, I'm sure, but I can't vouch for its trustworthiness. (Nor do I vouch for my own.) The Antarctic habitat takes six minutes to inflate, six to deflate. There are two layers of material, and between them the air is pressurized. This supports the structure. It is designed to withstand 100 knot (~110mph) winds from any direction. It is cozy inside. Free-floating space stations inspired by this design, another possibility under consideration, would be full cylinders. In space, no one can hear you scream. But also, in space, there is no up or down.

Swedish Infiltration
On Friday evening the ice breaker Oden docked and the crew came ashore. Monday morning it disembarked to break more ice and widen the channel.

Saturday night as I walked from the cafeteria to my room I passed the ATM. Four Swedish men from the Oden wearing bright blue jumpsuits with yellow reflective stripes - deck suits - huddled around the machine and spoke rapidly over each other: "Yash yash yosh yash--"Yash yash--"Yosh yash yosh."

That's how it sounded, anyway.

Ten minutes later I walked from the store to my room and in front of the same ATM was a new group of Swedish men. One of them wore short shorts and a red t-shirt designed like a sports jersey on back:

de puta madre
69

On Sunday I took a tour of the Oden. We started outside of the gift shop, walked down a hall to the bar and dining room, across the hall to a recreation and exercise room, up a spiral staircase to the sauna (cushions, a table, a cutting board with cheese knife), up farther to an open cabin - plush - and up finally six more stories to room 600, the Styrhytt, where the captain and first mates navigate and where the scientists on-board for research rendezvous to discuss new findings and new tacks. Room 600 is the bridge, and it is a stunning space about 20m above water level. The Oden is a heavily modernized ice breaker with radar designed to analyze the ice, computerized GPS charts, a multi-beam scanner that measures underwater topography in real-time (a swath twice as wide as the depth, the information displayed visually, a 3D model), water jets below the bow to decrease friction on the ice top, and a bunch of other stuff I didn't understand, forget, or both. What I do remember, and what I consider most impressive, are the keeling tanks, one on port side and one on starboard toward the stern of the boat. Each tank can hold 80 tons of water - something like 20,000 gallons. The tanks are used both as ballast as fuel burns off and as added weight during ice breaking. (The sides of the hull, it seems, come into play just as much as the front.) The two tanks are connected by a massive pipe, and centered in the pipe is a massive propeller that can move this water - all eighty tons - from one tank to the other in fifteen seconds.

Yash Yosh!

Straight from the Top of My Dome
This evening after work a coworker and I got a tour of the NASA radar dome up on the hill, a big white mylar hulk described by one engineer as the golf ball in the sky. One of NASA's central concerns down here is monitoring polar satellites - satellites that orbit around both poles. These are used primarily to measure meteorological data and map out the continent. (NASA was the first to map Antarctica and is now working on finer and finer detail, often in collaboration with other groups.) The dish tracks satellites from when they come into view on one horizon until they disappear over the other horizon. It currently follows eight satellites, but has the capacity to follow twenty. Each satellite completes a full orbit in about 90 minutes. (That's at least - at least - 100mph.) While the dish is focused on the satellite it is receiving an almost continuous stream of data gathered over the last orbit. This is then sent to Fairbanks, Alaska where the University analyzes the data with a supercomputer cluster. Eventually, the information makes its way back to the NASA center on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The dish is ten meters across and doesn't photograph well. But I don't photograph well, either. I prefer to be out of focus, and mysterious, like a satellite. Victoria and I were up top with Rex; his partner, Nik, operated the dish from down below and spun it around for us. It moves with impressive, scary quickness. Before moving a horn sounds twice and a yellow siren starts flashing. After the display of motion we drove back down to the control center and Rex showed us how to move the dish around. All he did was drag a bar with the mouse cursor. Above the computer monitor is a live feed from the dome, and, there, sure enough, the dish spun about, dipped, rose. Amazing stuff. The tour ended in the server room where all of the information is recorded and backed-up. The server room is also where those NASA employees keep their humidor, replete.

One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress.

Sometimes, Antarctica is a distant place and there are other things closer. You could say I lost my sense of direction. You could say all of this and worse.

I have heard a range of figures for the ratio of support staff to scientists at McMurdo, from 5:1 to 8:1, perhaps higher. That is, for every scientist there are five people like me, or eight people like me, mostly kids on an adventure. Money comes from the NSF to Raytheon Polar Services to us.

There is another figure to consider: the public school system must have a classroom ratio near 30:1. Thirty students, one teacher.

I know a person, and this person will know who he is, and he once wrote this to me:

When I took over at my job I sat down and figured how much money I would need at that moment to get through the remainder of the project. It came to about $7M. Within a day or two, a nice man on the radio informed me that the folks in the former Yugoslavia who were entering a bitter winter would need about $7M for fuel. My job; their lives. Not the same pool of money, but still...

I don't know if they got it. I didn't. That didn't make me feel any better about anything.

On Friday I ate lunch with two scientists preparing to leave for the Dry Valleys where they were setting up four research probes for the approaching winter. They were both geophysical scientists and they study the movement of sediment. "We're going to be measuring windspeed, temperature, and pressure data, then capturing blown sediment and analyzing how much sediment, and what kind, is moving around during the winter." The other one said in summary, "Lookin at dirt," then chuckled. I'm not sure I get the joke.

Stardate

It's been storming the past 72 hours, but the storm let up and the sun came out. This morning I volunteered to be a line handler. When the boats come in to the ice pier – a bunch of dirt piled on top of ice – then I may get called down to help secure the tow lines. It sounds interesting, though the safety briefing was presented rather stoically by two official Navy line handlers who provide help every January and February. That's when all the boats dock—science vessels, the ice breaker (pictured), the cargo vessel, the fuel tanker. I learned that if a line is under too much pressure it smokes; this is indication it's about to “part,” and that means you need to move away.

This afternoon I sat at a computer and a special treat was delivered to me. A woman in Crary named Panina – you guessed it, the feminine version of a sandwich, like Croque Madame – gave to the supply department a few Erebus crystals. Right now I know two facts about Erebus crystals:
1) This particular type of crystal has only been found around Mt. Erebus and Mt. Kenya.
2) They originate in the magma chambers of these two volcanoes. When the chamber bursts the crystals are projected.

You may reference other Antarctica blogs for, I'm sure, far more thorough descriptions of the Erebus crystal. There is another rock around here, much more abundant, called dunite. This rock constitutes part of the earth's crust and is composed mostly of olivine, a crystal named for its green color. Does it taste salty? You be the judge. Chunks of dunite often split off into magma chambers and are then launched out of lava vents. I collected a small token on Monday and most days I roll it about in the pocket of my parka.

I ate dinner while watching Star Trek, then I lay down and napped for twenty minutes—it is the details that make this real—and finally rose for a short hike out to Scott Hut (foreground), built in 1902 by Robert Scott, Kiwi explorer, and his men. The nights are gaining a cooler, softer, vesper light. The ice breaker is around town, breaking ice for the tanker and the vessel. A channel runs out seven miles to the ice edge. The wind blew terrible on the small hooking promontory where a cross is erected in memory of Scott and his men. Up above a short way is a statue of the Virgin Mary inside of a roll-cage, a statue erected in honor of a heavy machine operator who, with his D8 tractor, sank 350 fathoms below the sea ice in 1956, Operation Deep Freeze, the construction of McMurdo Station. He remains there, purportedly in perfect condition. (The water hovers around 28 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly below freezing due to salinity.) Walking down from roll-cage Mary, as she's called, there was a Skua chick with a parent, eating scrapfood from the cafeteria. Skuas are notoriously aggressive scavengers around town. They harass people carrying food between buildings, dive headlong into handheld plates and bowls. They are big and seem to resemble, only slightly, Golden Eagles. But I'm no ornithologist. The chick tweeted and hobbled around behind its parent, pecking at food, stumbling over rocks. The parents took turns watching the chick, alternately soaring overhead on the winds with utter precision and calm, hanging there like cut-outs, tipping wings, strafing, circling. I hiked down and the ice breaker, the Oden, a Swedish ship with Swedish crew scheduled to dock on Monday, had completed one run widening the last mile or so of the channel. It turned around and began a second circuit. Apparently, the Oden clears out most of the ice in front of McMurdo; the wind carries the ice out the channel to open water.

As I was turning to leave I looked across the ice and a group of Adelie penguins, eleven in all, appeared in the distance charging across the ice on their bellies, speeding like mad. (I've heard it pronounced “a deli.”) They arrived below the bluff on which I stood, huddled on the unstable pressure-ridged ice, circled about, made themselves comfortable, and settled in for the night. Some lay on bellies, others stood with necks curved and heads nestled into chests. A lone Adelie, more curious than the others, explored the surroundings a bit, walked south, returned to the group, walked east, returned, and finally, after flapping its wings, bent its head down and stilled. They are funny little guys. Three other people were out there and, through a borrowed pair of binoculars, I saw the Adelies' intense light-blue eyes, embedded like sapphire in jet, the ice breaker chugging silently in the distance, and even farther the massive dome of Mt. Discovery.

The Lasagna Was Good That Night

About a week ago I moved some boxes from the Waste Water Treatment Plant to a warehouse up the hill. It turns out much of what we moved may have been exposed to partially treated sewage. One of the treatment tanks overflowed around Christmas. Consequently, it was my job today to wipe down these potentially contaminated boxes and objects with a bleach cocktail. At least I got to wear a white Tyvek suit, big green polyvinyl chloride gloves, blue booties, gray goggles, and a black respirator.

But that's not what I came to tell you. NASA is working on replacing the processors and basic software in its lunar and Mars rovers. When they run tests, often they run tests down here in the Dry Valleys, as the landscape is quite similar, and the harshness of climate somewhat similar, to martian landscapes. Before dinner, right outside the dining hall, the Ice Cube Team, as it's called, was displaying a prototypical rover. They were explaining the basics of the navigational software and demonstrating its ladar unit - essentially sonar with a laser. Behind the dark black plastic in the image to the right is where the laser is housed. Ladar works like this: the laser starts pointing more or less straight down. A mirror spins around the laser; the black plastic in front offers a 180-degree field of vision. (So if the robot is looking directly north it can capture a 180-degree sweep, from due west on the left to dues east on the right, with all points in-between.) The laser shoots out, bounces off a surface, and returns to the unit where it is detected by a sensor. Because the speed of light is known, this sensor can calulate the distance to whatever object the laser returns from. Information is received in an almost continuous arc across the 180-degree field of vision, giving a very thin line of information. Next, the laser shifts up a degree, repeats the scan, shifts up a degree, repeats the scan, etc. Eventually, the robot has scanned from the ground at its base to an angle about thirty degrees above straight forward. These data are then fed into an interpreter which produces an image delineating a groundlevel view of topography with horizontal distances keyed by color. (That is, different colors correspond to different distances from the sensor. I was told each pixel is registered as a distance, and that the rover could quite precisely tell you the distance of your lip from your teeth.) What's amazing is that this bot can scan the same area from different angles and extrapolate an incredibly accurate overhead topographical map, like the hiking maps you might find in a store. Based on this information, the bot then decides whether or not it is safe to proceed.

Ridonculous.

With the shameless excitement of a tourist, I asked the NASA computer engineer if his ladar bot could take my picture. And it did. I'm on the stairs, Streaks are people passing through the image on their ways to or from dinner.

The lasagna was good that night, but it didn't satisfy me like Ladar.

Bushmills Tales

Last night my roommate, a kid my age with a thick Boston accent, told me we were going to the bar. He had had a long week. He works as a lineman, maintaining and repairing the high-tension, high-voltage power lines around town. A dump truck malfunctioned early last week: the bucket lifted without the driving knowing it, caught on a power and telecom line, tore down two poles. Power and communication was lost across much of base. He put in eight days of work averaging 14 hours a day. He's not done yet, but getting there.

There are two bars on base, Gallagher's, non-smoking, and Southern Exposure, smoking. We walked to Gallagher's, building 108. His drink of choice was two shots of Bushmills on the rocks, add lukewarm tap water from a clear plastic pitcher. The music inside was loud, there was hardly another soul. Seven people? The profanity is not mine. It is his.

The Lineman's Sister
When he was finishing high school his eleven year-old sister had to complete a science project. He agreed to help her, and they decided to construct a generator. “It's simple, really. I took some 11mm copper cable we had. This is big cable,” he held his fingers apart to approximate eleven millimeters. “We had a whole coil of it, maybe yea around, but after my sis and I tightened it in a vise it was half the size, or a quarter the size. Really fuckin tight. I attached that to a rubber base, right, and then glued that to a fiberglass sheet. Then I put this crank from a bike on and that attaches to a track around the coil where there's a magnet, so when I turn the crank the magnet spins. Oh, and there's a magnetic rod inside the coil too.” He cranks his hand. “So I start spinning it with my sis right there. That's it. Through the induction between magnets a charge gets going. Now I really went at it, and before too long I start seeing these arcs of electricity jumping off the coil. I'm thinking, 'Holy shit.' My bro comes down and I say to him, 'Hey Jeremy, get my charge meter,' so he goes back up and comes down with it and when he takes the measurement it's 670 volts.” He pauses. I ask him if that's a lot and he looks at me with eyes half-drunk and melancholy. “670 volts? 480 is enough to blow a hole in a person. Say you got 480 volts going in here.” He extended his index finger. “And your elbow or whatever is touching a wall. Well, the charge'll jump from here,” wiggling his index, “to here,” pointing at his elbow, “and it'll blow a hole right outta the back. It'll kill all the fuckin tissue in between.” He looked over his shoulder. “I had 670 volts right. I was like, 'Gah!' so I put on my rubber line gloves real quick and I take the damn thing apart. It was outta control. Next thing I do I get this tiny thin piece of copper cable make a single loop and crank it up. 2 volts. That's what it measures. I give it to my sis, 'Here.' ”

Dirt Nap
“Did I tell you about the mousetrap I made?” We are two drinks in. The Cure is playing. A cook steps out of the kitchen playing air guitar and lip synching. I shake my head. “Oh man. I was four or six months into my apprenticeship then, thought I was hot shit, ready to do all sorts of things with electricity. We had this shed out back and I decided to set up a mousetrap. I took one piece of copper wire and bent it like this.” He draws esses along the table, like the curves of a snake. “And then I took another wire the same length and bent it the same way and set it so they just overlapped. Then I attached them to little blocks of fiberglass so the wire was maybe an inch off the ground. I took a wire and stripped one end and wrapped the cable around the copper, then plugged the other end direct into the main switch of the breaker. It had a direct line to outside, right? I sprinkled a bunch of food and shit on the wires and below. Then I forgot about it for, like, three days, or a week. Completely forgot about it. My mom asks me one day if I can get something out of the shed and I go back there and have this bad feeling, and when I open the door there's maybe five or six dead mice on the floor, and two cats. The cats must have followed the mice, dug under the walls or the door or something. But I swear there were six dead mice and two dead cats. Now my mom is one of those animal lovers. Don't get me wrong, I love animals too. I really like cats. So when my mom looks out the window and sees me in the yard digging with a shovel, naturally she comes out. 'Sean, what are you doing?' 'Nothin ma,' I say. 'What are you doing.' 'Nothing.' She comes over and grabs the bag while I'm holding it and I'm saying, 'No, no,' and then she pulls it outta my hand and opens it and jumps back. 'My God, Sean. What have you done?'

The third story will have to wait. But the other day two coworkers and I dropped a package off at NASA's satellite ops building, and were given in exchange a pile of stickers. I'm hoarding them.

366 Questions

I have only two:

1) What is a New Year's party without Nacho Cheese Doritos and Zodiac, the movie?

2) What is a New Year's party but Nacho Cheese Doritos and Zodiac, the movie?

On the 30^th was Icestock, an outdoor concert running from 10:45am until just after 6pm, thirteen bands, a chili cook-off ongoing in the cargo containers surrounding the crowd space – one team per container, free samples throughout the day. Hula hoops broke out about two in the afternoon. From the window of my room I could throw a shotput onstage, and so I shuttled in and out when I heard bands turn over. It was cold outside and the musicians, between songs, stuffed their hands into pockets, or blew rapidly into their cupped hands. Wind and snow pressed on the performers. One man, lead singer of Phatass Bluegrass, said to us all: “You know, I've played festivals in the rain before, but this will be my first one in the snow."

If you like good music, then you may have been disappointed, but the show was free and a coffee hut by the grandstands offered cups to warm the chilled core. I stomped my feet, I clapped my hands. (Is it dance through action alone, or must we consider intention?) The snow eased as the day crested and sank toward evening. The crowd grew boisterous and dense, then spread into the cafeteria at 5:30, then disbanded to all corners of McMurdo for the holiday parties, doors open, glasses clinking. During the two days off for Christmas – December 24^th and 25^th – I heard $54,000 worth of alcohol was purchased. I don't yet know the New Year tally.

Brunch on Monday morning, the snow again, heavier than Sunday. We had the day off. I spent much of it loafing, purchasing Doritos, renting Zodiac, browsing the rest of the DVD collection. I hiked Ob Hill again, stood up top where to the north the power plant chugs along, its six generators sounding like a train huffing up steep rails, and to the south the whiteness of the storm. It's a mystery, where the cloud ends and the ice shelf begins. My roommate brushed his teeth pacing the room, readying for 2008 at Gallagher's, one of the bars on station. Impatient, he finally said half to himself half to me, “Well, those beers aren't gonna drink themselves,” and he swept out the door, closed it brusquely.

Simon told me a story about returning to his dorm one evening at nine o'clock. His roommate is in his sixties and goes to sleep near eight to wake at four-thirty, so Simon used the light of the closet through a door ajar for navigation. He stumbled around, changed into nightclothes, then began brushing his teeth. “And I thought as I was brushing, funny, me toothpaste ain't lathering. Walking down the hall thinkin about it, it wasn't until I got to the bathroom sink that I realized I'd used shaving cream instead.”

And now it's 2008. Remember we've got a leap day. One more than usual. A twenty-ninth where once a first. Looks like this year is a good year to chase down those dreams—new, old, escaped, fading. You've got one extra chance. The confetti's flying.