Antarctic 2002/2003 Travelogue

Monday, 28 Oct 02, 10 PM, 10000m above the Pacific Ocean

Well, I suppose this is as good a time as any to start writing. I'm on the plane from LA to New Zealand. It's been pretty hectic lately, and this is the first time in months that I've had a few minutes to myself that aren't committed to meeting some deadline.

I had a wedding about a month ago. Kristin and I and about 75 family and friends gathered in Talkeetna for a weekend celebration. It was probably the best weekend of my life, and I could not ask for a more perfect celebration or a more perfect wife.

The several weeks preceding that weekend were filled will resolving last minute details that likely should have been dealt with months earlier. But other more pressing deadlines prevented it. The several weeks following the wedding were spent resolving last minute details with this trip to Antarctica, which likewise should probably have been dealt with months earlier. But that seems to have become the nature of my life in the last few years, hopping from one deadline to another. I suppose it's really been the story of my life, what I've been trained to do since I was little. In any case, it doesn't feel unusual, though the pace is perhaps quicker and the stakes much more impressive sounding.

As I packed for this trip, I recalled my first glacier trip. I spent weeks planning and packing. I had all of my stuff laid out on the bed two weeks before I left, and shopped and packed and repacked daily. That was for a one week trip not more than 20 miles outside of downtown Anchorage. Now I'm off for several months over 500 miles from the village of McMurdo, which is thousands of miles from anywhere. I began packing the night before my departure.

I don't mean that to sound cavalier, but just to mention something that I noticed about myself. When I left NJ 13 years ago to spend the summer in Alaska, I had never before gone camping. Before I left I had read stories of adventure in the Arctic and wondered who these people were and how they got there. I had even made some faint-hearted and failed attempts at getting involved in some of those trips. But now it seems I am one of those guys, I know who those guys are and how they got there, and it wasn't by writing faint-hearted letters.

All trips are different for their own reasons. This trip is different because I'm voluntarily separating myself from the most important and precious thing in my life - my wife. I've had my share of extended trips and girlfriends left behind, but I've never before experienced anything like this. Kristin and I are the perfect match for each other; or at least she for me. Being with her is like eating peanut butter ice cream, smoking dope, having sex, and watching Fletch all at the same time, and all the time. I could spend the whole day with her just lying in bed, or walking in the woods, or working on the house, for months and years on end, and never want for more. Unfortunately, I also feel compelled to screw things up by keeping the world safe from global warming and ignorance, though it's probably more a mixture of vanity and habit at this point. I think the real goal of this trip, for me, is determine whether I want to keep going on trips like this or get a 9 to 5 job in the post office.

The nominal goal of this trip is say something intelligent about the short-term future and recent history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the ice streams that drain it. Or something like that. I really don't know all that much about it. But I do know how to blow shit up and record the echoes, as well as how to have a good time in the middle of nowhere at 30something below, though I'm not sure which of those qualifications is more important.

See the pictures!

Wednesday, 30 Oct 02, 4PM, Christchurch, New Zealand

The plane trips were uneventful, though long. While waiting in the airports I bumped into a number of people I knew and met some of the people on our expedition. Raytheon, the contractor that handles logistics and support for the US Antarctic Program, issued everyone hot pink bag tags, so it's pretty easy to tell who's headed in the same direction. When we arrived in Christchurch (after about 24 hours of traveling for me), a group of about 20 scientists and support staff gathered at the Raytheon desk to receive their accommodation and deployment information.

I'm staying at the Windsor B&B, downtown. It's a nice place, with showers down the hall and only one electrical outlet in the room, but it's clean and the people are friendly. Once we got settled in, Bruce, Leo and I went for a walk about town to do some last minute shopping and sight seeing.

Bruce is an electronics engineer and Leo is a new graduate student, both of whom are part of the same project team that I'm in. Bruce built a bunch of the equipment we'll be using this season. He seems like a competent, knowledgeable and friendly guy. I think this is Leo's first big expedition and first ice seismic project. He also seems like he'll be fun to be around the next few months. While shopping we all ended up spending and buying more than we anticipated, but everything here is essentially half price due to the exchange rate, so it's hard not to get carried away. It's the kind of thing where if you think it might be useful, might as well get it because it's only a few bucks and there wont be a second chance. There do seem to be plenty of outdoor stores here, with great bargains to be found. So we stocked up on a few extras today, primarily gloves and hats and accessories. The kinds of things that turn a tolerable situation into a pleasant one.

It's all a little weird for me really. I've grown pretty accustomed to being in charge and handling all of the details, but on this trip I'm neither in charge nor barely aware of the details. This makes deciding what type of gear to bring difficult. The more people I talk to, the less confident I am about the issued gear. One of the awkward things I've noticed thus far is that we wont receive the clothing that we will be issued until tomorrow afternoon. If they don't have the type of stuff that I'm used to or feel I need, there is little time to shop afterwards because stores here seem to close at 5 PM and we leave 6AM the next day. My biggest concern I have at the moment is boots - will they have decent ones in my size?

Tonight we're going to get together at the Dux de Lux for a few beers then decide where to eat and continue drinking. Christchurch seems to be a beer drinking kind of town. The people all seem friendly, everything is cheap (to us), there are parks and sunshine, lot's of restaurants and pubs, and seemingly lot's ways to entertain oneself. So it could be worse.

See the pictures!

Friday, 1 November 02, 4PM, Christchurch

The Dux de Lux has turned into the default meeting location for everyone in our group. 'Our group' at this point consists of Bruce, Leo, Paul, Dave, Kurt, Jeff, and another grad student whose name I have momentarily forgotten. Leo and Paul are grad students working with Sridhar at Penn State. Dave is a PI at Univ of Texas Austin. I've known him for almost 10 years, and my funding to come here came through his part of the grant. He is nominally here to work on Taylor Glacier with Kurt and Jeff, and is struggling to avoid coming out with us afterwards. Taylor Glacier is in a much more scenic location than the ice streams we are going to, but not nearly as much fun, I'd say.

The first night in town we drank some good microbrews at Dux de Lux, then headed out to an Indian restaurant that Bruce had been to before. It turned out to be the worst (or best!) Indian food in town, as it was called the Monkey's Paw Thai House. Apparently Bruce enjoyed the microbrews a bit more than we did. The food was actually pretty reasonable and the beers kept flowing, so everyone was in pretty good spirits. By the end of the night, however, lack of sleep, jet lag, and BAC combined to make most of us pretty groggy on the way home. Always thinking ahead, however, I freshened up for the walk by first taking a nap on the cushy sofas that surrounded our table.

The next morning, Thursday, was another beautiful day. I actually made it up in time for the second B of the B&B and we plotted some strategy for the day, which largely consisted of filling time until catching a ride to the CDC (or Clothing Redistribution Center). Leo and Bruce went to the local museum, where an Antarctic exhibit was on display. I split off and did a little last minute shopping and emailing and saw some of the sights, before arriving back at the hotel just in time to miss the van to the CDC. Fortunately Bruce, Leo and Paul missed the bus too, so another was ordered and we arrived just a bit late.

Once there, a lecture was in progress on why it's important to wear clothes in the Antarctic. Actually, everyone working there was very friendly and the whole clothing ordeal turned out to be much less bureaucratic and fascist than I imagined it could be (or that it would be if run in the States). After the introduction, those who hadn't been down before watched a five-minute video, which largely emphasized the point to try everything on now, because this was our last chance to exchange anything. We were then led to a large warehouse-type room and given two bags of clothes that had already been pulled for us based on our sizes and project needs. The clothing system was better than I expected, and I was generally satisfied with everything. I also learned that being tall has its advantages, as most of the re-used clothes tend to shrink and thus to get the full size issue meant getting a brand new pair. They were also happy to let me take both bunny boots and their felt boots. I'm glad I brought my own hats and gloves, as well as extra long underwear, but I was later able fill a small box with my own stuff that I'll leave behind at the CDC while away.

On the way back, I sat in a van with a bunch of people I hadn't met before. Some were going on a snow machine traverse to the South Pole, looking for new ice coring locations and measuring snow properties along the way. Others were doing radar work elsewhere near Lake Vostok. It was neat to hear what was going on. One of the people there was a school teacher, who was also keeping a journal, and I thought it would be interesting to have a page full of links for everyone on the continent who was doing that.

Once back at the room I consolidated and repacked everything, so as not to have to do it at 4 AM. Our plane was scheduled to leave at 7AM, which meant arriving at CDC at 6AM. They require everyone to wear their issued expedition gear to get on the plane. It seems a little silly, but it's not a bad idea. We're signed up to travel on an C-141 cargo plane. This is no airline jet, but a noisy, cramped military plane where everyone sits facing each other in jump seats. It could be worse I suppose, but few people look forward to the experience. One of the joys of such travel is the fact that either the plane will land at McMurdo or it will turn around and come back to Christchurch, but this decision often isn't made until 4 to 6 hours into the flight. That is, one can basically spend all day flying and get nowhere. For days and weeks on end.

I headed down to the bar around 6 PM and met up with everyone. It's a nice place, with a large outdoor patio (typically filled with people) and many indoor rooms and bars. They serve mostly vegetarian and seafood there, which is not bad but not nearly as good as their beers. That night I ordered their Indian curry, feeling somewhat let down from the night before.

It being Halloween, we scoured our brains for something appropriate to do. New Zealanders aren't big on the tradition, but they are big on finding any excuse to party, so there were several options available from the local pubs and clubs. Unfortunately, most everyone opted for an early night to finish packing and get some sleep before our early flight. Paul, Leo and I decided a better strategy might be to simply stay up all night and sleep on the plane. We further theorized that the local nudie bar likely had the best costumes to offer, and I think that we were largely correct. Though sometime around 3 AM I'd say Leo won the costume and dancing competition hands down. It was his birthday after all.

The B&B we're staying at has about 40 rooms and is run by a friendly group of people who have owned it for 25 years. They are well used to the Antarctic crowd, and act as surrogate USAP personnel by providing us with lots of useful information about what we are supposed to be doing and when. For example, the CDC calls them in the morning and let's them know if the flight's been cancelled, and they then go to every room, wake us up, and tell us to go back to sleep. That is, of course, only if you're in your room at 4:30 AM when this happens.

In any event, there was no flight this morning, and we all had the day free to do as we please. Or sleep. Not having hotel reservations, however, proved slightly problematic as new guests were arriving. But the people here simply asked that we double up in our rooms to make some extra space. So, after making it to breakfast (second day in a row!), we consolidated and repacked ourselves. Then slept for a while.

I began aimlessly wandering around town about noon, and wound up in Cathedral Square, which is considered the heart of town. Even at this time of day, the square was packed with people and sideshows and vendors, as were the streets themselves. It felt like a holiday, and I wondered if Kiwis based their holidays not on a calendar but on the weather. What a better system that would be - just look outside and if its nice, blow off work and have a street festival. A highlight for me on the square this day was a small stage show, where a guy dressed in a bright yellow cowboy outfit was singing the theme song to the Love Boat. Despite the absurdity of it all, he had a large audience, which inadvertently prevented me from asking who his tailor was.

On the streets I bumped into Bruce and then Jeff who were likewise independently wandering about aimlessly. Jeff and I headed back to the park near our hotel to fly one of my kites, but the wind was too erratic to do much. Our first clue should have been the dust devils blinding us as we stood about or the fact that every tree was blowing in a different direction, but it seemed like we should be doing something outside. Afterwards I worked on trying to my satellite phone to work as a modem, but still couldn't make it work. Hopefully the techs in McMurdo can have a look at it and figure it out for me. Now I'm just killing a few minutes before dinner. There's been some noise being made about finding a bone fide Indian restaurant tonight, as well as perhaps another half-price Halloween celebration, but even the concrete plans are still pretty fluid at the moment…

See the pictures!
Love Boat Theme - MPG clip - 2.7 MB

Sunday, 03 November 02, 10:30PM, McMurdo

As we deplaned on the sea ice in front of McMurdo, we were told by our greeters not to fart around taking pictures of the plane but to get on the bus immediately because the Halloween party was about to start and they didn't want to miss any of it. Having been to that party now, I understand their concern.

The last night in Christchurch was fairly low energy and comparatively tame. The next morning's departure was not scheduled until 9AM, which gave us time for a decent night's sleep. As we filtered into the lobby and breakfast, word came down that there would be an hour delay, so we were able to eat a leisurely breakfast. Turns out in New Zealand they serve bacon slightly differently. The bacon is two pieces of regular bacon surrounding a piece of Canadian bacon. It tastes pretty good, though I think their pigs are still like ours and can't be turned entirely into bacon.

We eventually made it out to the CDC, where we got dressed in our ECW gear (Extra Cold Weather (?)), a requirement for boarding the plane. The plane was a C-141, which is small jet cargo plane. Unlike the LC-130s, it has no skis, so must land on a reasonably solid surface, in this case sea ice. We sat around while they palletized the cargo and loaded it on the plane, then watched a safety video on working in Antarctica. The seats on the plane were arranged along the length of the plane in four rows, perpendicular to normal seats, such that your knees bumped into the person directly across from you. If you worked things out correctly with your opposite neighbor, however, you could actually get more leg room than normal plane (which isn't saying much these days). Women sat towards the front, where the toilet facilities were slightly better than a bucket, and men towards the back, nearest the bucket.

The plane ride was relatively uneventful. There was only one window, and I was not near it, so for all I knew we were on our way to Poland. It is hard to describe the seating arrangements as comfortable, but I managed to sleep most of the way. The flight lasted about 5 ½ hours, and I was relieved to hear that we were actually going to land and not have to fly all the way back. Once on the ground (or sea ice), we were treated to views of blue skies, white mountains, and a grayish town. We boarded a very macho looking bus and headed for in for dinner.

Before turning us loose in McMurdo, we sat through an introductory briefing about do's and don't's, how to find our rooms, where we're supposed to be in the next few days, etc. It didn't last too long, as the staff wanted to get some dinner before the galley closed, perhaps in anticipation of not wanting to drink on an empty stomach.

Halloween is the first big party of the year here. As I soon learned, all holidays occur on Saturdays here, as Sunday is the only day that most people have off. I think I like the Kiwi system better, but I'm not in charge. Yet. Anyway, on the way to our rooms ghosts, goblins, and Wonder Women scurried back and forth making last minute house calls. We were fortunate enough to arrive in time to stock up at the liquor store before it closed, so we relaxed in our room in building 155 for a while, watching the activity in the hallways.

About 9PM we went up the hill to find our bags, and I dug out costumes for Dave and I. I donned cowboy attire and slung a loaded bottle of Glenlivet in lieu of a handgun. Dave wore a hat leftover from our wedding's costume party and went as DaveHelga. We headed for the gymnasium to be greeted by hundreds of very happy trick or treaters.

The weight limit for personal baggage to McMurdo is supposed to be 75 pounds. However, someone managed to get a serious sound system down there. This was no oversized boom box, but a professional speaker system likely drawing more than 50 amps (and judging from the number of times the circuit breaker tripped, probably more than that). The entire gym (slightly bigger than a basketball court) was jammed with party goers dressed in a wide variety of costumes, all writhing to the music (possibly because the floor was shaking from the speakers). To say the situation was somewhat surreal would probably be an understatement, and the few pictures I took do not do the event justice. Here we were at the bottom of the planet, and a fully-equipped rave was going on in full force.

I felt a bit as though I was in high school and had just snuck into a fraternity party. Not having the chance to have met anyone beforehand, I had no reference for how they had changed from normal appearance. I could only imagine that the vast majority of the group were camp staff, and I tried to imagine who filled what positions. Here were the runway groomers, the aircraft schedulers, computer networkers, the carpenters, and firemen that kept the place going. There are lot of pretty serious and high stress jobs here, and clearly some steam needed to be released. Fortunately Sunday breakfast begins at 10AM.

At breakfast I met up with the rest of the group that rounds out the team. Sridhar and Andy I had talked with briefly at dinner the night before. But here was Peter, a Kiwi mountaineer living in Ohio, and Bob, a seismic guy, and Ash, another mountaineer with 23 field seasons on the continent. We made plans to leave for a snow machine excursion at 11AM. Our project received 8 brand new snow machines, which needed to be broken in. Some might call breaking them in by traveling up the coast to the old explorers huts and penguin rookeries a boondoggle, but I would call such people simply jealous. In any case, it was a beautiful sunny day, with air temps just below freezing, and we headed out in search of important new scientific discoveries.

Along the way we encountered a solitary penguin, obviously late for an important date on the other side of the island, and a few seals, obviously hungover from the night before. We passed by Scott's hut and headed straight for Cape Royds, were Shackleton built a hut next to a penguin rookery. Along the way we were treated to nice views of Mt Erebus and passed by glaciers descending its flanks and entering the now frozen ocean. After a few hours of this we arrived at the rookery to find several hundred penguins having a cocktail party. They busily chatted away, taking little notice of us, except for the occasional stray that wandered up to ask where the bathroom was.

Another group, who took advantage of the sunny day to also conduct some important scientific business, already unlocked the hut. Inside we found original boxes of crackers, cookies, and the like from Shackleton's 1910 (?) expedition. The place was well maintained and perhaps the best museum one could hope to find. Here 20 or so men spent the winter, with no satellite phones linking them to the outside world, no LC-130s resupplying them with fresh fruit, and no diesel generators shaking 1 meter woofers to the beat of MC Hammer. But they could also eat the penguins and seals, which is currently frowned upon.

There's no doubt, we have a pretty cushy life compared to them. But I wonder what they would think of us. On the one hand, our cushy lifestyle comes with the price tag of reduced freedoms (like not being able to make penguin stew), but on the other hand it comes with the increased freedoms of turning what would have been a major expedition for them into a pleasant Sunday outing with no fear of calamity for us. Could be worse.

After dinner, Sridhar and I went to the Crary lab where he had commandeered a bit of work space to check out the seismic gear I had brought. This is a marine seismic system that I adapted for use on ice. The plan was to try it out on some lakes in the Dry Valleys, where we'd like to measure sediment thickness and distribution, in relation to some coring efforts. Unfortunately, I can't tag along on the project until after I go through the local snow survival school that ensures that I know how to zip up my sleeping bag. That process takes two days, followed by a one-day crevasse rescue class. In the meantime, Sridhar, Andy and Don are going to spend a two days on the lakes, weather permitting. Once I'm done with snow school and if the system works and if we stuck in town for a while, we'll take another trip to the Dry Valleys with some of the more sophisticated equipment to try again. The lakes are about an hour from here by helicopter.

After that we took a trip to the coffee house, which is the mellowest of the local bars, serving hot drinks, wine and port. Like any coffee house around the world these days, one can connect to the Internet. Not that connecting up is difficult here as there are dozens of connections and terminal clusters, but it did seem a bit like technology out of control. Andy and Peter joined us after a while, but we called it an early night and I got my first full nights' sleep in a while. And missed breakfast.

Thursday, 7 Nov 02, 7:30PM, McMurdo

I've learned a lot about the US Antarctic Program over the past few days, as well as had a chance to explore beautiful downtown McMurdo.

All people traveling into the field from McMurdo are supposed to take a class called Snowcraft 1, aka Happy Camper School. The purpose of the class is to help ensure that people know how to set up a tent, build an igloo or snow fort, operate a stove, and use the radios. It's a two day class with an overnight in between. There were 18 happy campers in our group, most of whom had never been winter camping before and at least one who perhaps had never made a snowball before.

The class was actually reasonably well run. The instructors were actually pretty down to earth and weren't painful to listen to. They perhaps also realize that everyone working here for the first time must take the class, regardless of how much experience they already have.

That last point is one of the limitations of the USAP, seems to me. Many of rules and requirements here are not for my benefit, but for the benefit of the staff. For example, all personnel getting on the planes or helicopters are required to wear their issued parkas, boots, and pants. That is, you can't just wear any old warm clothes, but only the issued gear. More importantly, the reason for this is not that the issued gear is better than your personal gear, but that it only takes the staff milliseconds to determine that you are adequately dressed. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it says something characteristic about the place. And I'm continuing to learn many other characteristics as well.

The expeditions I'm used to are closer to the climbing trip end of the outdoor spectrum, where everything that you really need can fit into a back pack and that when the chips are down you can walk or ski as a self-sufficient unit. Things work differently here. Everyone in Antarctica goes car camping. Or camping via skidoo, helicopter or LC-130. That is, your issued gear cannot be carried on your back and is intended to be carried by vehicle to your destination. If you have a problem, you're not supposed to walk home, but use the radio to call for help and a vehicle will come get you. That is, field work here is more like city life than the field work I'm used to. When in trouble, don't deal with it yourself, call 911.

So that was my biggest revelation during Happy Camper School - don't worry, big brother is here to help you, and in fact insists upon it. Again, I'm not complaining, but it is such a huge difference from working in Siberia that I'm still having difficulty understanding and accepting it.

The class itself was actually pretty fun. After some introductory remarks, we boarded a large tracked vehicle and headed to the ice shelf on the other side of Scott base (the Kiwi base). We played in the snow and built snow forts, set up some tents I had never seen before (and hope I never have to carry!), and had some time to fly kites. The other campers were all a lot of fun and I think everyone had a good time. Perhaps the most exciting part of the trip was when one of our stoves exploded and nearly burned down one of the nice tents.

I wanted to sleep in the Scott tent because I had never done so before. This worked out well because most people wanted to sleep in the igloos and little tents. So I climbed in first and started heating water on the stoves as a means to surreptitiously claim some space in there. I set up two of the little back pack stove (only found in the emergency survival bag, not for typical use in the field) and got some water going. I noticed that one of the stoves wasn't holding pressure and tried to go out several times. Rather than try to fix it, I shut it off and gave it to someone outside the tent and asked for the third stove as a replacement. Some time went by and asked for the third stove again. I set up the new stove next to the first one, pumped it up, and started it up. A few seconds later, the main gasket blew and a vigorous aerosol stream of gas shot out, and began spraying fuel all over that side of the tent. As luck would have it, the stream was pointed away from the other stove, else a flame-thrower would have been borne. I politely asked everyone else in the tent to get the fuck out immediately, turned off the fuel supply to the other stove, and put my finger over the hole, hoping that the flame on the other stove would go out before my hand caught on fire. Fortunately it did and we ended up with a slightly smelly tent instead of a very breezy one. The incident was caused by three factors: miscommunication (some one handed me back the same stove I handed out), carelessness (I didn't look closely enough to figure that out), and a curious feature of the USAP.

Millions if not billions go into the program, but most of the money goes into dorms, labs, other city life accoutrements, and the support thereof. The field gears is often marginal and usually hit or miss. These were some manky stoves that should have been thrown in a crevasse years ago, but this is not where the big money goes. Some of the field gear is first rate, but the survival kits are marginal. The big red parkas are warm and great for going from one building to another, but they're not very functional for field use in crevassed areas. My sleeping bag is rated to -40, but it's old enough that the fibers no longer have loft and would perhaps today be rated at 0 or -10F. And so it goes on. I haven't met any experienced people that aren't aware of the deficiencies, but that does not seem to have helped solve the problem. What I have found, though, is that everyone is pretty helpful and friendly. Just like at CDC, the BFC (Berg Field Center) was happy to swap out gear when asked. Their unwritten policies makes some sense - issue your bottom of the line gear first, then those who don't know better will take it, and those that do will ask for better. Except for perhaps the stoves, none of the gear is inadequate; it's mostly a matter of comfort, utility and efficiency. No sense serving your beer drinking company your finest port if they find a cheap one tasty.

Once back in the city, I met up with some of the Christchurch crew and we had dinner and drinks. A new plane load of people had arrive that day, and I knew several of them. Twit is a Kiwi living in Seattle who I've known since my earliest glacier field work in Alaska. He's joining Dave, Jeff, Kurt and Andy on Taylor glacier. Hajo showed up from Fairbanks to do some sea ice research. It was his first trip too, and we shared some of our mutual impressions of the differences between Arctic and Antarctic research. Later that night we visited one of the three local bars. This was a pretty large one, and when we arrived a very crowded and animated bingo game was in progress. We stuck by the bar like kids in a candy store. Alcohol is cheap here.

This night we also learned that the diameter of a vein in Leo's forehead is proportional to his BAC. We came close to making it explode, but stopped short because we would then have to clean up the mess. We also learned that there is a late night dinner program here - mid rats - that is intended for the late shift workers. Unfortunately someone stands guard making sure that actual late nighters eat first, but we found there was still plenty of food left afterwards. No sense waking up for breakfast after that.

Costs here are pretty impressive and similar to New Zealand - basically everything is half price and your dollar goes a long way. The flip side of that is that drinking on the job is simply not tolerated. I haven't gotten much exposure to the staff side of McMurdo, but I'm increasingly getting the impression that a pretty tight ship is run here. Several people have been politely asked to leave the continent since I've been here for various reasons. Luckily I have only a few more days in town before going into the field, where big brother's grip is slightly less constricting. Not that it's really slowed us down much, but it's the principle of thing really. Speaking of going into the field, we had our first official group meeting today.

At this meeting I gained a much greater appreciation for the shitpile I've stepped into. Sridhar began the meeting with an overview of our game plan while pointing at a map: "We are hee-ah. The enemy is hee-ah. And the tea biscuits, are hee-ah". That about summed it up, until I asked him what the spatial scale of the map was.

There is another group out here who are traveling from Byrd camp to the South Pole, a journey of about 1100 km. I thought that sounded pretty impressive until I learned that our trip would be about 2500 km. This is roughly like driving from NJ to Florida, and back, on a highway with potholes the size of the Washington monument, while driving a motorcycle in a blizzard. But on the upside, there's no traffic or drive by shootings. I knew that we were working on both Ice Streams D and C, but I assumed that we were working somewhere near the divide and that our traveling would be somewhat like day or weekend trips. On the contrary, once sorting and caching our gear at the main camp at Onset D, we will be going on a month-long gypsy caravan trek with 10 snow machines towing about 20 sleds, blowing up as much shit up along the way as we can. The longest legs are about 250 km, which is a two or three day journey, if we're lucky. This is going to be an impressive journey to say the least, and not one likely to be repeated any time soon.

The meeting itself was pretty good. We discussed a lot of the logistics, safety and camp life issues and I think everyone came away with an improved sense of what the next few months will have in store. Perhaps most importantly, we each received an order list for booze. An officially printed form listed all of the alcohol available on base, along with prices per CASE. I believe that there may be a number of important scientific research questions on this continent that I should begin writing proposals for.

After the meeting, we adjourned to the lounge outside the conference room. Here, on the upper floor of the Crary lab, we are treated to some of the best views from McMurdo in perhaps the most civilized environment. We made tea, ate biscuits, and reclined into the sofas and cushy chairs that filled the room to discuss matters of highly intellectual scientific significance - at least when anyone else was within earshot.

Afterwards we broke off to take care of minor pressing concerns (at least in my case), had lunch, and then met again as a group for some crevasse rescue refreshers. Here we tried on our harnesses, assembled our slings and prussiks, and climbed up and down ropes. Peter and Ash ran the show. It was all the standard stuff, but always a good idea to brush up on the techniques and shake down the gear and tailor it to our individual needs. Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll find ourselves some holes and fall into them.

See the pictures!
Crevasse training - MPG clip - 1.5 MB
Nodwell - MPG clip - 2.7 MB
SnowVolleyball - MPG clip - 2.9 MB

Sunday, 10 November 02, 7:15PM, McMurdo

The weather over the next few days was marginal. Temperatures here are fairly warm, always above 0F and occasionally perhaps above freezing. The wind seems to be the biggest variable to comfort. Thursday night the wind picked up pretty well, such that it seemed like a blizzard at times. Apparently around the corner towards Scott Base, the winds were much stronger. Hajo was out there going through snow school that night, and apparently they got hammered pretty hard. We decided to put off our crevasse rescue practice until the weather improved, which turned out to be today.

It was a beautiful, sunny day with little to no wind. We returned to the ice shelf near happy camper school, where someone had used a bulldozer to dig a large trench to simulate a crevasse. Mt Erebus and Mt Terror shone brilliantly in the sunshine behind us, with wisps of vapor emanating from Erebus’ active crater. We had a good time jumping into the hole and having our partners hoist us back up. After a while of that, we tossed an old snowmachine into the hole and hoisted it up too. I’ve never traveled roped on snowmachines before, but Peter and Ash are the mans with the plans (or men with the plen?). The combined glacier travel experience of our group is pretty high and everyone is very safety conscious, so I think we all feel pretty reassured about our collective ability to deal with any problems in the field. I spent some time relaxing and reflecting in the lounge of the Crary lab over the past few days, and I realized that this was the first time in over six months when I’ve had several consecutive days of no deadlines or commitments to deal with; several days now stretching into weeks. I think that may explain the feeling of exhaustion I’ve had lately and my ambivalence towards doing anything productive, like write papers and proposals in my free time. I get the impression that even though I’m awake, my brain has slowed down to a minimum functioning level to recharge my batteries. And I guess I’ve had some steam of my own to blow off. Fortunately Christchurch and McMurdo have offered plenty of opportunities for that.

Friday night was a wine tasting event at the coffeehouse. Several well dressed volunteers stood behind tables set up with a variety of wines, and for five bucks you could have a glass of six of them, and even get your glass rinsed in between. One woman ran the vehicle pool, another worked in the water plant, one dealt with surplus equipment exchange and reuse, another in the Crary lab. I never made it over to the whites. By the end of the event, quite a large crowd had gathered and much pleasant conversation was made. It’s nice when you can have a party where the music isn’t so loud that you have to shout.

Saturday night was a beach party at Gallaghers, the non-smoking bar. Not having a hawaiin print shirt, I fashioned a lei from duct tape, zipped the pant legs off my nylon pants, and donned my beach hat for the occasion. The bars are about 20 meters from the dorm I’m in, so it’s pretty convenient and no need to dress warmly. The costumes inside were not nearly as creative as for the Halloween party, but most in attendance found something worthy of the theme. I was slightly disappointed that there were no drinks with umbrellas available, but again it was a fun crowd, with opportunities to both dance or talk or watch people pass out. The place reminds me somewhat of the Russian towns I’ve been to. The physical setting is similar, with low rolling hills covered with snow. The buildings are largely the industrial-looking type, either as a barracks or mining shacks. The alcohol is copious and cheap. The people are largely the same types you find everywhere, except these speak English so you can actually carry on a conversation. And because our backgrounds are so different, there is usually something to talk about. I find many people here I already now, or that know someone I know. Our snow school instructor lives in Haines, many of the construction guys have worked in Alaska, and many of the scientists are from UAF.

Other than that, I don’t really have to much to say about McMurdo, except perhaps that it’s way overkill for the actual scientific support it is nominally intended to provide. McMurdo is a fully functioning city, with its own physical plant, oil reserves, waste-water treatment plant, and air traffic control tower. It is filled with carpenters, plumbers, welders, divers, administrators, engineers, janitors, barbers, cooks, and the like. Most of the people in town know very little about glaciers and have no direct role in scientific research. While all of these services and personnel are required to run a fully functioning city in a responsible manner, what is not at all clear to me is whether such a city is required to support the science going on here. It’s all great and wonderful to have, but if you divide the amount of money and resources spent here by the number of science projects, it is sobering. And here that’s no minor feat, though useful in the morning.

Several large cardboard boxes arrived in the main hallway yesterday, filled with copies of a telephone book-sized document that contained newspaper clippings related to the NSF’s role in Antarctica. They ranged from science descriptions, to stories of small-town schoolteachers who tagged along with an expedition, to stories of independent travelers running into conflicts with the bases. My favorite article described an outfit called Adventure Networks Inc (ANI). They are the only commercial company landing planes on the continent. They take in tourists, climbers, photographers, etc, as well as provide logistical support (like radio comms and emergency landings) to other private groups, such as those skiing to the pole or climbing mountains. They get substantial and open grief from the USAP’s higher ups, who apparently feel that no Americans should be here unless they are under their protection. They make a valid point that they don’t want to divert resources to the search and rescue missions of non-participants, but at this stage of investment here, it might be that they should rethink their mission. I mean, if they opened the place up to cash-paying tourists, they could further justify their existence and offset our tax burden. The Kiwis are apparently much friendlier to those who just skied across the continent without support, and I can’t imagine that a little friendliness from the USAP is going to break the bank. When you consider how much food is thrown out every day, how much fuel goes towards luxury showers, and how many planes go out with space available, I find it hard to believe that helping out a few skiers occasionally is going to set some precedent that is going to hurt the program. And providing moral and perhaps shared logistical support to groups like ANI will help ensure that NSF isn’t the only group around that can provide search and rescue or housing for adventurers. I mean, we memorialize the huts of people just like that from 100 years ago, why shouldn’t we give their modern equivalents some credit?

It’s no big secret that the money spent here is not for science but to maintain a large presence, and a fully functioning science city could be converted into a fully functioning military city in the space of a week. My fear, though, is that because the science façade exists, that scientists will be held accountable for the luxuries that are essentially forced upon us. I’ve talked with several researchers who’ve said that this is indeed the case you get a proposal funded, then USAP logistics rewrites your proposal based on the support they want to provide that year, then you get hung out to dry for doing a different project that cost millions more than your initial estimate. Getting hung out to dry in this case may not be fatal for a career, but conducting research in the Antarctic is difficult enough without being made to feel like a slimeball in exchange for your hard work.

I thought about what it would be like to run a science expedition through ANI, and guessed that it would probably cost at least 10 times less than through McMurdo and the USAP, perhaps even 100. Of course the services are substantially less too. Still, I think it would be a kick to snub the USAP once and carry out a project through ANI, just to make the point clear the USAP’s approach is great, but it does not have to be done like this to be successful, and it could be done much more efficiently in other ways. On the other hand, there would be little point in doing this, because the savings would not be passed on to the science community to fund new projects, but rather into some other US boondoggle to maintain global military and economic superiority. But it would likely be fun nonetheless.

I can hardly complain though. The food is great, the buildings are warm (or hot!), and there’s little to worry about physically. We can take showers whenever we please, eat or drink to excess, and let the staff take care of most everything related to living without lifting a finger. The rooms are perhaps a bit crowded (four bunks to about 250 sq ft, in our case), but indoor space is at a premium, and its much more spacious than any tent we would have set up. It’s somewhat like being a freshman in college again, with new people to meet in the hallways, parties to go to, gossip to liven things up, and of course science to learn.

They have many activities scheduled to keep people busy here, including a lecture series. Several times a week, visiting scientists will give a lecture on what they’re doing here. Tonight’s talk was given by Twit on research closely related to ours on the West Antarctic ice streams. It was given in the galley, which is much like a large, modern cafeteria. They have a rear-projection screen set into the wall and a speaker system. The place was packed 20 minutes before the talk started. It was neat to see that everyone was so interested. The originally scheduled talk was to be given by someone else, but bad weather prevented last week’s Christchurch plane from arriving until later tonight, and the speaker was onboard.

Other things to do include watch TV. I don’t have one in my room, so I’m not really sure how many channels are available, but I watched the end of a science fiction movie on one of the TVs in the hallway after the lecture. They have stations which continuously broadcast camp information, such as weather, flight information, and the like, and TVs are set about that relay this information. It is also available on the internet at www.mcmurdo.gov, along with lots of other information. There are a number of computer clusters located around town, though finding an open terminal that works is challenging, and the speed is hit or miss. There are also phones in every room and in the hallways that can access outside lines, though again actually getting an open line can take an hour.

It’s still a beautiful day outside, even though is after 10PM now. I took a little walk after the end of the movie in just a thermal top and a shirt with no hat or gloves, and felt fine. I understand that most people at the New Years party last year were just in T-shirts. My understanding is that though the weather is warmer then, that the town actually gets much grimier due to the volcanic dirt that blows in the wind and that rather than track snow inside everyone tracks grit. So we are perhaps seeing the town at its best now. At the moment we’re scheduled for a Wednesday departure. We’ve got one or two more flights of our gear scheduled ahead of us, and once they’re in, we’re next. The trip feels more and more real, and I think once we get out on the snow I’ll be ready to put a spring back into my step and regain that clarity of purpose that I rarely achieve outside of field work.

See the pictures!
Rescue Training - Andy Falling - MPG clip - 2.1 MB
Rescue Training - Don falling - MPG Clip - 3.2 MB
Rescue Training - Leo holding - MPG Clip - 1.6 MB
Penguin Colony - MPG Clip - 1.8 MB
Walrus - MPG Clip - 2.6 MB
Pistenbully - MPG Clip - 1.5 MB

Wednesday, 13 November 02, McMurdo

We’ve basically been on hold for the past three days, and likely the next several. On Monday, with good weather, it seemed that a Wednesday flight was a pretty good possibility. Most of the cargo had been already packed, so there really wasn’t much to do. Sridhar and Don seemed to keep busy with minor matters, but the rest of us began seeking out busy work. Something I’ve found pretty much endemic about being on hold for an airplane in the field is that most people will not use that time very productively. There just seems to be some sort of inertia that develops that makes your bags hard to unpack and your other projects seem too distant to deal with. I started catching up on some papers to read, but found myself dozing off. The more intelligent members of the group just went directly to bed, or didn’t even get out. It still being a nice day, I took a walk up the nearby Observation Hill.

Ob Hill is one of the few places you can walk to outside of town without telling big brother (though he likely knows). It is great place to get a view of town, Erebus, Scott Base, the sea ice and the ice shelf. I had the place to myself for a few hours, and was glad for the exercise. A motivated person could probably climb it in 10 minutes, but I was in no hurry and took pictures along the way. I took a map of town as well to get a better sense of where everything was. That night was pretty uneventful. The bars were closed and my liquor closet empty, and it was good to get some sleep.

The next day our group made the bag drag list. If it seems out of hand to check in to the airlines 2 hours before your flight, try checking in the day before. That’s bag drag. You bring all of your stuff to cargo, where it is weighed, then you take back your carry on bag containing what you need overnight. If you’re flight gets put off a day, then you’re without your stuff for a day. And so on. Our check in was 7PM. I spent the latter part of the day packing up, organizing gear into stuff sacks labeled Month One and Month Two and stuff I’d like to have if the plane gets delayed. I’m still not sure where the confusion came from, but in any case our flight got moved from flight 5 to flight 8, meaning that two more cargo flights to our location were still preceding us. Poor weather Tuesday night meant that both would have to leave Wednesday, meaning that if we did get out it would not be until the evening, and only if we were lucky as the weather seemed to be deteriorating. So rather than take our stuff away indefinitely, our bag drag was rescheduled until the next day. This seemed to be some cause for celebration, as the coffeehouse was packed that night.

The next day, today, brought more ground blizzard and a cancellation of all flights and our bag drag was then postponed indefinitely. Everyone seemed to use this fact to catch up on sleep. After a late breakfast, I explored town a little further and came across the exercise room. There were few people there, but plenty of hi-tech equipment. It felt good getting some exercise. I burned 384 calories. Another curious thing about not having much to do is how very long it takes to do small things. Everything that I have accomplished here thus far could probably have been done in a single day, if that was all the time that I had. Simple things like sending an email or making a phone call can turn into an hour’s work for inexplicable reasons. I think I’m just going to stop checking my regular account because it seems to lead to more frustration than its worth.

The lack of anything productive to do means also that there is also more time for screwing around. Since everyone has the same clothing here, there is real danger of inadvertently swapping clothes. Each red parka, therefore, comes with a Velcro name tag. At least when you’re outside, it’s like being at a conference where everyone is wearing a tag: “Hello, my name is …”. After a while it gets a little much. I therefore made good use of the Crary lab facilities to print out some new name tags for my jacket. My favorite is the one that says “I’m with stupid-”. This was good for hours of fun, taking pictures of friends standing on my left. The popularity of programs like photoshop, however, can lead to the joke backfiring.

See the pictures!
Shad Kite-Flying - MPG Clip - 1.8 MB
Shad Dragged - MPG Clip - 1.5 MB

Friday, 15 November 2002, McMurdo, 1PM

We’re still here, and likely will be throughout the weekend. I think I hit bottom sometime around Wednesday.

I’ve fallen into a routine now that actually feels pretty comfortable. I sleep through breakfast, wake around 9, get some juice, check the weather and flight boards to see what’s happening, head to the exercise room for an hour or so, shower, sauna, then eat lunch. After that it varies, but I’ve actually been getting some work done.

I think every once in a while I need to just experience intense boredom. It’s not that there is nothing to do around here, it just something about visiting the dark side for a while to remember to put the rest of life into context. Having been through that, I feel like I’m ready to get back into action and start working again. I got a small proposal out yesterday, wrote some text for an application for work in ANWR next year, corresponded with a few prospective graduate students, etc. Today I hope to flesh out a new proposal for work on Lake E.

Mostly I work in the 2nd floor of the Crary Lab, where there are cozy chairs and other scientists hanging out. Today I’ve been talking with some of the drilling guys about ice coring and how screwed up the ice coring office is. Every five years the NSF contract comes up for an ice coring organization, and each time the resulting organization manages to become buried in controversy and inefficiency. Apparently the current contract is not much different. One of things I find most amusing about it all is that whichever university gets the contract, they always seem to end up hiring the same people to actually get the work done in the field. The problem may result from the fact that these contracts are so large that the main players involved care more about getting the contract than actually doing the work. I think it would be a kick to see the people who actually care about the work actually be in charge.

I’ve also had the chance over the past few days to also hang out with people that I would otherwise never talk with. In small camps, like less than 10 people, you somewhat automatically include everyone in the same group and get to know them, whether they are the lead PI or the camp cook or the guy that makes the machinery work. This is one of the nice parts of field work. In Fairbanks, which is a pretty friendly place, I don’t often have Fred Meyer’s check out clerks over for dinner. I never felt like a particular prejudiced person, but when it comes down to it I tend to associate with a pretty narrow group of well-educated and like minded people. In McMurdo, the situation is somewhat in the middle. The place is just large enough that you’re tempted to simply politely smile at the kitchen staff as you get some food, but just small enough that you run into these same people at your dinner table or in the bar or in the adjacent dorm room or even as a roommate. That is, you cant really be anonymous here. More often than not, the person next to you is not a scientist but a support staff and the facilities are not segregated. It’s kind of like being in college, where everyone eats, lives and studies in close proximity, but people are divided into different majors, including vocational ed. Most of the people here are largely not sure what to think about global warming, have never actually camped on a glacier, and don’t typically associate with scientists. It may sound funny to read about, but it is definitely an unusual circumstance for me.

I’ve yet to meet anyone here that I didn’t like and that doesn’t have some personal commitment to doing a good job. I’ve talked with plumbers, electricians, metal workers, janitors, cargo handlers, and carpenters, and have had many enjoyable conversations. At first it seemed like I was mostly meeting younger people that were here for the fun of it and the opportunity to save money and travel, but I’ve also gotten to know older people with families for whom this is a real job. I haven’t yet started to feel guilty about taking advantage of the what town has to offer without productively contributing to it, but I think I would feel guilty about not doing the best job I could on the science itself, should we ever get to do any.

The weather here hasn’t been too terribly bad, but bad enough that the planes have been grounded. We haven’t been posted for bag drag the rest of the week, and today our two cargo flights didn’t even make it onto the hopeful list. That likely means that we are likely here until Monday at the earliest, since Sunday is largely a day off for most people. Shad and I went down the transition between land and sea ice yesterday and flew kites for a while. It was a pretty strong wind and had the tendency to drag us around, but it was fun nonetheless. Wind chills were likely in the 30 to 40F range, but if all goes well our backs are to the wind most of the time. These temps may sound cold, but for just walking from building to building I typically don’t put on a hat or gloves and am only wearing thin nylon pants. The actually air temp is probably between 10 and 20 F and if you’re out of the wind it’s actually fairly pleasant.

Last night Dave and I went down to Scott Base, the New Zealand station. It is significantly smaller than McMurdo and has a much different feel to it. They’re buildings are all connected by hallways, and it is requested that everyone take off their shoes in the entryway. I got the feeling like I was walking around in an aquarium and when I looked through the windows I expected to see fish swimming by. I don’t know how many projects they have going there, but the size of the camp seemed to be more what I was expecting or seems appropriate. I am of course ignorant of most of the details of either camp, but clearly there are some efficiencies that come with running a smaller program. Thursday night was American night, and the only time when Americans can come hang out without an invitation. When we walked into the bar and asked for three beers, the cost was $1.20US. We handed the guy $2, but he couldn’t make change, so he handed a dollar back. Our total bill was less than the usual tip, and tipping isn’t standard in New Zealand. There was little doubt at this point why Americans are only allowed in once a week.

Saturday, 16 Nov 02, McMurdo

Last night I attended a meeting of McMurdo citizens concerned about constitutional rights in Antarctica. Apparently a small anti-war protest was held about a month ago, where about 70 people walked through town carrying a banner that said ‘Not in my name’, asking Bush not to wage war with Iraq in their names. A day or two later, the camp manager held a meeting with a few of the organizers and told them that any future protests or demonstrations would lead to the removal of those participating from the continent. The local weekly newspaper wrote an article about this protest march, and this article never made it to press. Many of the people participating in the march are part of a political discussion group, in which many other issues are discussed. They store their files, pictures, and schedules on the common hard drive here which all can access, as do many other groups and individuals. Apparently the IT manager was directed to have those files removed and asked one of the technicians to do so. This technician refused, as it was not in violation of USAP policy to have personal files stored on the common drive, and it was in fact encouraged. He was told that if the files were not removed by a certain date, a few days later, that his employment would be terminated. In a similar event, someone tried to post information on how to properly send in write-in votes for the November election. Despite their being no political bias or even political information, these files were also not allowed on the common drive. Apparently the only files allowed are pictures of drunk or half-naked Halloween party-goers. In any case, these events brought to a boil many issues that had apparently been simmering for years regarding the constitutional rights employees in Antarctica.

Several days ago several employees later had another meeting with the camp manager (who may actually just be the lead Raytheon boss, I’m not sure about titles), where more clarification was requested on these issues. No new information was made available, except perhaps a reiteration of the consequences of non-compliance with Raytheon policy. The employees suggested that while a small anti-war protest may not make national news, that a larger protest claiming that the NSF denies the right to free speech and lawful assembly in Antarctica probably would. This consideration apparently prompted a number of phone calls between McMurdo, Washington and Denver (Raytheon’s base).

I thought the meeting was very well run. There were no inflammatory types like me trying to stir up trouble, but a number of well-intentioned people voicing their concerns and wanting to determine the truth in a non-confrontational way. Those at the smaller meetings also made it very clear that these were not confrontational or antagonistic meetings, just a clarification and delivery of Raytheon policy. One of the many problems with this situation is that we seem to be in a pretty unique situation. NSF is nominally in charge of everything here, and they keep an NSF representative on base at all times. But NSF contracts with Raytheon to do everything. Raytheon then hires employees to actually do the work, but most of these people are paid by the hour. So the question becomes, who’s life is it after 5PM? The USAP program declares that it will provide recreational and computer facilities for personal use to both employees and grantees, and clearly provides them with housing, food, etc without cost. So do employees become just citizens abroad after work? What about grantees who have signed no Raytheon paperwork?

There were only a few researchers at the meeting, and those more or less running the meeting made it clear that they did not want to involve the scientists and let this issue disrupt the work here. But besides having a low tolerance for bullies, this issue really strikes a cord with me and perhaps most scientists. As a huge defence-oriented company, I have little to no trust in Raytheon and expect no less from them. I hold the NSF to a much higher standard however. I mean, these are the people funding science, which is nominally about discovering and disseminating the truth about things. This means we are supposed to speak the truth as we see it even if the truth is uncomfortable or makes bad press spin. If I want stand-up in the courtyard (which by International treaty belongs to no one) and voice my opinions on the quality of the scrambled eggs at breakfast, will I be forcibly removed from the continent? What if I voice my disagreement to NSF policy over the internet? Should they have the right to read my emails? Where does the NSF in Antarctica draw the line between freedom of speech and freedom to work in Antarctica? Apparently some decisions are due to be announced today, so I’ll know more then.

In other news, Ash was flown out to Christchurch this morning. Apparently he had some chest pains yesterday and the local medical staff decided it would be good for him to get some extra tests from a large hospital. It is currently unclear to me how this, and our current delays, will affect our trip.

Sunday, 17 November 02, McMurdo, 9PM

This morning after brunch we drove a pick-up truck across sea ice, ice shelves, and glaciers, halfway up to the steaming crater of Mt Erebus. Well, it may not have been halfway, but it seemed pretty close. There is an overlook locally known as Room with a View, which is on the shoulders of Mt Erebus. To get there, we borrowed a pickup truck that had been modified with snowmachine tracks instead of wheels. It handles pretty nicely and had no trouble getting us to our destination. One of the nice things about being a glaciologist is that trips like this are work as well as play. From this location you could see the Erebus Ice Tongue, a glacier that stretches out into the sea ice. You could also see many ice falls and large crevasses, and have a great view of the volcanoes. I gave Kristin a call on my satellite phone to tell her I wished she was here. On the way back we swung past the Pegasus runway, which wont be in operation until after the sea ice runway becomes unstable. This runway was apparently named after Pegasus the plane, which is slowly being covered with snow since a crash in the 1960s (no one was killed), though pieces of it are still protruding above the surface.

After our excursion we packed and made ready for our latest bag drag. Here we take all of our stuff to get weighed, and leave everything except our carry on bag. If we’re lucky, tomorrow we’ll be at Onset D. But there is still a lot that can change. The current plan is that Don, Shad, Peter, and Andy will go in tomorrow on a twin Otter, a much smaller plane that has a wider window of operation than the LC-130 that the rest of us will go in on. That way they can begin unpacking and getting some of the GPS work started. Our flight depends on a Pole flight getting cancelled tomorrow. Paul is hoping that the Pole flight goes and bad weather sets in at Onset D, because his girlfriend is coming in from Christchurch on tomorrow and he would like some overlap with her. There is also no guarantee that the Otter will make it all the way and might get weathered in at an intermediate point, and that the LC-130 might pass over it such that we would get there first. It seems likely that in any event, our group will be split into at least 3 parties tomorrow.

We also heard from Ash in New Zealand today. The current theory is that his chest pains were precipitated by some high blood pressure medication prescribed to him by doctors in McMurdo. He went into the hospital with the sniffles and they routinely check blood pressure. Finding his a bit high, they gave him some pills. A day later he has chest pains and they fly him out. Not only this, but they insisted he be strapped to a stretcher for the 8 hour flight. When he arrived, he got up to pee and returned to find an ambulance stretcher waiting for him. These people also insisted he be strapped down, and nearly dropped him trying to load him into the ambulance. He is still going to have a few more tests tomorrow, but it looks like he will be returning on one of the next flights, hopefully in time to catch the last of our cargo flights.

A number of us have also got the sniffles. With everyone eating out of the same cafeteria, it’s not hard to imagine that germs spread fast. A number of people have been diagnosed with bronchitis, but given Ash’s experience, this diagnosis may be questionable. If we don’t fly first thing tomorrow, I may go get checked out. At the moment I’m sitting in the laundry room. Apparently Sunday is laundry for most people and I could have picked a better time. On the bright side, it’s all free, including the soap.

See the pictures!
Trac Pickup - MPG Clip - 1.5 MB

Thursday, 21 November 02, Onset Delta, 8PM

We arrived at the blinding white hell of Onset D about 1PM on Wednesday.

I got the call from Sridhar about 5:30AM, saying to get our shit together in two hours. Fortunately most of our gear had been loaded two days before. That Tuesday I was actually getting into a work groove, with one proposal and half of a paper finished. Unfortunately I seem to have caught the McMurdo crud the week before, and had a pretty sore throat and congested head, otherwise I might have finished the paper. After a last call on the cheap phone to my wife, I headed towards the bus that drove us to the sea ice runway.

Things proceeded smoothly and we were airborne quickly and without a hitch. On board was our group, still minus Ash, plus two riggers working on the camp's communication systems, plus a bunch of cargo. The flight lasted about 3 hours and was uneventful. After landing, the rear cargo door was opened and the pallets allowed to roll out the back of the plane onto the snow. We deplaned and got our first view of the ice stream and the camp.

Onset D, the region where Ice Stream D begins, is a fairly flat, featureless plain of bright white snow. Except for the camp, every direction looks like the others. The camp itself is pretty deluxe. There are two jamesways set-up. The larger one is about 16 feet wide and 50 feet long and is used as the galley. It has tables, chairs, oil stoves, propane water heaters, electric water heaters, a toaster, a microwave, blenders, and more. The camp staff includes, among others, a mechanic and a cook. The food here is even better than McMurdo and once off the plane we were treated to brunch, then discussed some plans for the next few days.

The first project was finding our tents and sleep kits and getting our accommodations set up. It was a nice day, though the wind was steady with occasional snow. Air temperature was about 15F. Once everything was tied down, we began unloading the pallets and sorting our science gear.

Because everything is shipped on the LC-130 cargo planes, all of our boxes are arranged on large pallets that fit tightly into the fuselage. While some prioritization of gear is possible, the pallets themselves are filled by the loadies behind the scenes. So an important part of getting started is to make sure that everything has arrived before the last plane shows up. We've had about 8 flights already, and at least two more are coming. At least a few of these flights are camp materials and gear for the team that will be drilling our shot holes at OnD. Fuel was another sizeable contribution to the loads. Because there are no gas stations out here, we have to create our own. We need gasoline for generators and snowmachines, diesel for heaters and planes, and white gas for stoves. Eight new snowmachines took up a fair amount of space. And the science gear itself, an impressive set of piles, composed the rest.

Gear offloaded from the planes is arranged in lines that are more or less in the direction of the prevailing winds. Blowing snow, rather than falling snow, is the biggest threat to things getting buried. Arranging pallets and boxes in lines ensures that you have a fighting chance of finding things that get buried, and also helps keeps blowing snow from finding a place to land. We have quite a few long lines of gear. After a few more hours of sorting gear followed by a great dinner, we headed for bed. Though temperatures were about 0F outside, I think we all stayed warm and comfortable through the night.

The next morning we finished dinner about 7:30AM and headed out for a day of sorting gear. It was sunny and warmed up throughout the day. Our clock time is several hours behind sun time, so the sun was already fairly high in the sky by the time we began. I spent the morning with Don and Andy moving barrels of fuel into groups that will be flown out ahead of our traverse and cached at our future camps. Then I basically just wandered around the cargo lines the rest of the day, helping out whoever was needing a hand. Not having packed any of boxes, I couldn't really do much in the way of planning or management, and often there wasn't much to do as Don, Peter and Sridhar needed time to think about what needed to be done next. By the end of the day, however, we had resorted most of the gear, charged most of the batteries, gotten some of the GPS work started, and found almost everything that we were expecting.

Tonight we had a fantastic dinner. I think I had three platefuls. We're expecting another plane to land within the hour. This one will have most of our remaining gear, plus a crew of 6 people from the Ice Core Drilling Service, which used to be PICO. Once we survey in all of the shot holes here, they will drill the holes while we travel away to Ice Stream C. We will have two caches of food, fuel and equipment on Ice Stream C, where we will spend about a month. Here we will have our own drill for shot holes, though it will not go as deep, and we will do all of the seismic work while we travel. Once we return, hopefully most of the deeper shot holes will be complete here so we can complete the work on our return.

I thought a bit about the differences between the Arctic and Antarctic programs while schlepping boxes around today. My experiences in Arctic projects has been that the PIs and students do essentially everything, from making cargo boxes, to scheduling flights, to cooking the meals. This is slowly changing, but it is essentially still the case that there is no centralized infrastructure that even remotely resembles McMurdo in function. When I go from place to place, I lift my own boxes and when one is missing I can tell pretty quickly. In the Antarctic program, if my boxes aren't labeled properly, they can easily get lost. Here, the division of labor requires a full on tracking system for every detail. Flights and support needs are scheduled a year in advance, and their progress is tracked through time. Some type of system like this is clearly needed, as literally hundreds of people are involved with handling dozens of science projects. But each person handles only a small piece of the puzzle, and significant coordination therefore must accompany the process.

Perhaps most interestingly, something much less obvious must accompany the process as well. Much of what gets done in the Arctic gets done after hours by graduate students and faculty. These people have a personal investment and interest in the outcomes and pretty limited budgets, so we all do what we have to get the job done. When budgets are less limited and an infrastructure takes over everything except the science itself, these new cogs in the wheel don't have the same level of commitment to an individual project. That is not to say they are unprofessional, in fact far from it in the case of the USAP. But it does mean that people expect to have a life outside of work, and rightly so. However, having this life means that if a job takes 100 hours a week to complete, then you typically need two people instead of one. And that means that you need twice as much food, twice as much entertainment, twice as much bunkspace, etc. And this is perhaps what largely leads to the huge infrastructure - not only do we need all those people to do the best job possible, but we need to keep all those people happy too.

I've already described many of the comforts that can be found in McMurdo, though perhaps just scratching the surface, but the trend continues even in the field camps. I was talking with someone earlier in the season who said that camp set-up had been slowed down because the weather delays prevented the electrician from getting out there. I couldn't imagine why an electrician was needed just to run a few extension cords from a generator. Then I walked into the jamesway and saw all of the appliances and equipment. Not only kitchen stuff, but loads of radio equipment, satellite equipment, bulldozers and snowcats. The generators run full time and the lights don't flicker when you turn on the toaster. While people are fairly conservation minded here, the fuel supply is essentially limitless compared to even these high loads. This is my first time here, so there are all just preliminary hypotheses, but my impression is that these camps are largely designed by the staff for the staff, and it just works out conveniently that it makes the scientists comfortable too. None of this is meant as complaint. If the money that went into the logistics was being taken out of the science budget, then it might be a complaint. But I get the feeling that any money saved in logistics here wouldn't go into more science but into some other government boondoggle, so may as well go with the flow and make the best of it. So despite all of its bureaucracy, hand holding, and big brother aspects, I have to admit that working in Antarctica is pretty deluxe.

Friday, 22 November 02, 8PM, OnD

I woke up this morning feeling like I had been run over by a Tucker.

Somewhere along the line in McMurdo I picked up some sort of virus that doesn't seem to want to leave. Must be they don't like the cold and prefer my throat. In any case, when I woke up my throat felt so thick and dry that a tootpick couldn't pass through it and my back made me aware of every vertebra. Unfortunately the night before I had left my water bottle in the galley, so I couldn't take any pills while in bed so that I could wait until they kicked in before getting up. I stumbled into the galley and sat in a corner drinking my tea and popping pills, wishing everyone else was as miserable as I was. After breakfast we began sorting gear again. After an hour or so of this, I felt pretty reasonable. It was cloudy and snowy, but the exercise, human contact, and motrin made my less aware of my aches and pains. Don, Sridhar and I rearranged the last of our fuel drums for various caches in the morning, then we split up into different tasks.

I tried to take it easy the rest of the day by dealing with electronics in the jamesway. We have some iridium modems that should allow us to talk with various instruments remotely, but I couldn't figure them out. I think my com port must have died along with my fan (which is always on now) and my CD drive (which only works occasionally). Sridhar, Andy, Bob, and Paul took off after lunch to install some passive seismometers a few kilometers away. There's seems to be some suggestion that earthquakes may shake things loose under the ice that relate to speed, as well as looking at ice-related noise to see where it is coming from and how it relates to ice motion. Anatoly, who showed up at the last minute to replace another member of our group that couldn't make it at the last minute, spent the day working with his radar system. Bruce spent the day making cables for people and replacing chips in his shot boxes. Apparently a minor programming error in the chips caused them to cease working between 0-1AM, 10-11AM, and 8-9PM, an intermittment error that took a fair amount of head scratching to figure out. Shad and Leo spent the day marking shot hole locations with the GPS. This is the only real work we have to do here before we leave. Today was the first day when the GPS system was fully functional, and they got about 8 out of 60 kilometers of lines done. In the next few days, we can get the other receivers working and split into teams to finish things more quickly.

It turned out to be a beautiful sunny day in the afternoon, with temperatures above -10C and no wind. This is warm enough to walk between tents with no jacket or hat. I took advantage of the lack of wind and warm temps to sort out my personal gear and consolidate it into handy sized units for our traverse, now that I have an idea of how we will be traveling. After that I helped Don move more boxes around for the Twin Otter loads. The Otter made about 5 trips today, hauling mostly fuel to our ice stream C caches, but also starting in on some of the food and science gear. The plane can haul about six drums of fuel at a time, and we probably have 30 or so. We found out today that Ash was on his way back to McMurdo finally, and he should hopefully show up here tomorrow.

It was a pretty mellow day for me today after the rough start. But all thoughts of McMurdo are now distant memories and we are finally under way and firmly in the field. Things have settled down enough now that the evenings can be spent relaxing with a few drinks, but my throat is still sore enough that I decided to head to bed early and rest up. I typing away in my Scott tent now and might fire up my Russian language program after I'm done so that I can practice with Anatoly.

See the pictures!

Saturday, 23 November 02, 8:15PM, OnD

It was another productive day.

Shad and Leo continue to be the heroes as they are completing actual science tasks by surveying in shot holes. They've got about 1/3 of the holes surveyed so far. Tomorrow they and two other (TBA) will go on an overnight trip to survey another ½ or so of the total, leaving the remaining bit for Tuesday back in this area. Bruce and Anatoly each got most of their radars put together today and will likely be able to test them tomorrow. The hot water drills seem functional and will likely get tested tomorrow as well. After generally helping out in the morning, I spent the afternoon reassembling the powered parachute I brought along. If the weather is good tomorrow and I'm not out surveying, I hope to start testing and tweaking it.

My health has improved a bit I think, but it's tough to tell whether it's just the drugs. I went to bed early last night and am trying to do the same tonight. I think sleep and liquids are likely the best cure. It's tough not to want to push as hard as everyone else, especially since we've never worked together before, but everyone seems pretty understanding and feels its better to get healthy now as we have a long season ahead.

We heard from Ash tonight. He's stuck in McMurdo. He got so far as taxiing out on the Twin Otters before they cancelled the flight due to weather. Though this was likely the case, there are hidden dynamics with aircraft scheduling here as well. Generally speaking, there are no flights on Sundays, as that's the general day off, and the Twin Otter guys have a reputation of not wanting to spend their Sundays stuck in the field. So even though the was a weather cancellation for the flight leaving McMurdo coming to here, the Otter that was here decided to fly back to McMurdo tonight 'before the really bad weather hit here'. It was snowy with marginal visibility today, but still a couple of cache flights were completed. It doesn't really set us back too far to have a delay, but it would be nice to have that over with. We're still waiting for some more fuel from the LC130 anyway.

The reason for the two different aircraft is related both to aircraft performance and aircraft politics. The Air National Guard flies the LC130s. Though they can land almost anyway, they only want to land on groomed runways that are marked with flags along their length. The Twin Otters are a much smaller plane and the pilots are willing to land in ungroomed areas. So, for a camp like ours, it means that vehicles and people need to fly out on the Twin Otters first, groom a runway, and get the LC130s in with the rest of the gear. These runways are 2 miles long. Else, the LC130s could have carried palletized loads and made most of our caches in one or two flights, dropping a pallet or two at each site. The current method is likely puts the LC130s at less risk, but adds a significant delay and cost to the program.

Sunday, 24 November 02, 5:15PM, OnD

I'm house mouse tonight.

Sundays, though not truly a day of rest, are treated at least as a slower moving day. I went to bed early last night and slept late tonight, still trying to shake my cold. It was a pretty windy and snowy morning and not much was actively going on by the time I got to the galley. Shad, Leo, Sridhar, and Paul were preparing for an overnight trip to one of our more distant lines, though the weather threatened to put their departure off by a day. I spent the morning making sure our radio and phone gear arrived in one piece and that the batteries were charged, in the comfort of the galley. I spent some of the afternoon messing around with the powered parachute. I attached the buggy to one of our nansen sleds and hooked the kite onto it so that I could adjust the kite strings. I've got the batteries on charge now, and might give it a go after dinner. We take turns helping out the cook and keeping the place from decaying into a muck pile, and tonight it's my turn. Fortunately, it's the cook's day off, so there's not much to do except stay warm and write emails.

Our email system here is a GOES satellite hookup that is functional for about 4 hours a day. There are a couple of laptops hooked up to it, and it's funny to see the galley temporarily transformed into an internet café on top of 2000 m of ice in the middle of nowhere. Transmission rates are pretty slow, but it's handy enough for text. While nobody's looking tomorrow I'm going to try to send some pictures. I think the movies will have to wait until I get back to McMurdo.

See the pictures!

Monday, 25 November 02, 9:30AM, OnD

It's been a slow day for me so far. I spent the morning washing dishes and cleaning up the galley, and thinking that I'd rather be at home. I've been gone close to a month now. I don't regret coming out here. It's a great opportunity to do some research that builds on my prior expertise and a great chance to see how USAP operates from the inside before getting my own projects going. Still, I wish it were only for a month, as I'd be on my way home now. I probably shouldn't dwell on it much as we really haven't gotten started yet, but I haven't yet felt the rush that comes with getting stuff done in the field. Part of it is not having the prior investment or responsibility to succeed, part of it is being sick, but part of it is likely my life in general. On other trips, I guess I felt like I had nothing to lose by being away and that part of the reason for going was to keep from being bored, and to keep from dwelling on the fact that I had nothing to lose by being away. Now, I feel like being here is keeping me away from my home and my wife, where I could stay contented forever.

The past few days has certainly given me a greater respect for the staff people. They work really hard without ever really seeing or understanding what it is we're doing; people don't work that hard unless they believe in what they're doing, but it's something of a blind faith for them. I understand what we're doing pretty well, and at the moment I don't feel as motivated as they do. I must not be drinking enough. An undocumented side effect of having an especially sore throat and cloudy head.

As for group dynamics, everyone gets along fine and there is essentially no friction. While there are different subcomponents of the project, basically everyone is here for Sridhar and there is little source for competing goals. I'll add more on people and projects later. Now it's time for a little work.

Tuesday, 26 November 02, 6PM, OnD

I slept about 12 hours last night and woke to a blizzard.

As blizzards go, this one was pretty mellow. Temperatures were around 20F, but the winds were around 20mph, kicking up snow and reducing visibility. But with a wind shell, it was actually fairly comfortable working outside. My cold seems to have become substantially diminished over the night. In morning I mostly helped Don and Peter move stuff around. We're getting the last of our stuff out of the cargo lines and into our sleds. We've got 20 sleds that we're pulling with 10 snow machines.

Four of the sleds carry only our two hot water drills. Andy and Ash worked on constructing a floor board system to help hold the drill pieces in place on the sleds. These pieces include a couple of hot water heaters, fueled by diesel, along with a gasoline powered pump, a water tub, and a bunch of tubing. To run it, we keep throwing snow in the tub, melting it into the water that's already in it, then heat it further before it goes into the tubing that gets stuck into the snow, melting its way downward. The idea is to drill down about 20 m like this, then drop some dynamite in and run. In the afternoon, Don, Andy and I fired one up to test it out. I mostly stood there holding the hoses to keep them from spraying hot water or glycol everywhere, but at least my hands stayed warm.

After lunch I helped Bruce rig up his radar. He's still got a ways to go, but it's coming along. He's mounted a large cage made from PVC piping on top of a nansen sled. The cage holds out his antennaes on the bottom, and on the top contains a wire mesh that resembles a clothes drying rack that reflects the energy downward, increasing the signal strength. The cage is about 3 m on a side. It's a little floppy, so should be interesting to in operation. His radar is designed to penetrate through the entire ice thickness and reflect of the bed below.

Anatoly also has a radar. His is higher resolution but does not penetrate as deeply. He has also has mounted it to a nansen sled. Nansens are a wooden sled with all of the parts lashed together with string and ropes. The idea is that almost anything that breaks can be repaired in the field, and the sled itself is flexible, bending over the snow rather than rigidly bashing over it. Anatoly is Russian. I talk to him in Russian as best I can, but he always replies in English. So I don't think he realizes how poor my Russian is yet.

Sridhar, Paul, Leo, and Shad came back from their trip today. They spent the last two nights out surveying in the upper seismic line that runs transverse to ice stream flow. Things seem to go pretty well and they got all 35 km or so finished. Because the sky and snow are white, it's pretty tough to figure out where you are and which way to go when it's snowing. Fortunately GPS navigation is pretty slick, as long as you know what coordinates to head to. The snow machines guzzled a lot more fuel than was expected, and there was some concern they would run out before making it back. The real story seemed to be the food though. Apparently they let Leo pack the food, and he doesn't have much snow camping experience. So it was one pack of oatmeal for breakfast, candy bars for lunch, and one dehydrated meal for dinner, leading to some grumpy campers. Fortunately, Peter and Ash were in charge of food for the trip, so hopefully we'll stay a little fuller. If camp life here is any indication, I suspect we're all going to go on diets once back in New Zealand.

Worked seemed to end a bit early today. Mostly now its testing stuff out and loading up to go. So Bruce and Anatoly have the most to do as they are the farthest behind. Testing the seismic equipment to determine the optimum shot hole depth is the last major equipment task for the rest of us. It seems that we are shooting for an early morning Friday departure, giving us a day and a half or so. This date might have something to do with Thanksgiving being on Thursday, a20# turkey in the freezer, and Flora being the cook here.

Wednesday, 27 November 02, 10:30AM, OnD

After another 11 hour nap, I awoke to find my cold largely gone, the wind very strong, and the entire group assembled at breakfast for the first time.

With Ash back among us and the survey group back at camp, we are all together for the first time. The decision to leave on Friday morning now seems final, and today we are trying to consolidate all of our gear into various sled loads. The wind is pretty strong, reducing visibility to a few hundred meters, but it is pretty warm so it's not really uncomfortable outside as much as annoying. The seismic testing has been cancelled, as strong wind introduces too much noise into the system. Anatoly, Peter and Ash just left to for the final testing of Anatoly GPR. Bruce is still working on getting his system going. It turns out that he will not make it on our traverse. We are about a week behind schedule, and he was going to leave in early December from the beginning. So he will stay here until Monday or so and continue to mess with the radar, hopefully leaving it behind in working condition. I think it will probably be a slow day for the rest of us, as much of the remaining work has to wait until the wind slows down. I may fool with the powered parachute in the smaller jamesway today if nothing much else happens.

It is a remarkable thing really how much getting rid of a cold can improve one's disposition. I feel a 1000 times better and much more lively. Not having worked with anyone here before, I'm sure many of them were beginning to wonder whether it really was my health or whether I am just a load in general. Probably both, but at least I can hide it better when I'm healthy.

See the pictures!

Friday, 29 November 02, 11PM, Ridge CD

After a sunny Thanksgiving and a little powered parachuting, we hit D road.

For the first time in several days, I awoke to the sound of no tent pieces going flap in the wind. As I walked from the tent to the galley, it became clear that this would be a good day to test the powered parachute. Unfortunately I had already signed up to help Shad install some GPS stations, so the flying would have to wait until the afternoon.

One way to figure out how fast ice moves is to stick a pole in the snow, put a GPS antenna on top of it, and let it sit there for a few weeks recording position. This also requires a fancy GPS receiver, some batteries, and some solar panels. Shad had everything ready to go except the solar panel mounts, which I helped with. The general idea is to have them face North, not let them get covered with snow, and not let them blow away. So after a little fiddling with poles and mounts, we set one station up at camp, which is on the fast moving ice of the ice stream, and left to set another up about 15 km away on the ice sheet, which moves considerably slower. How much slower is what we're trying to find out. It didn't really occur to me until we had gotten underway, but this was the first time I had left camp since we arrived a week before. It might seem funny, but I really didn't have a sense of remoteness and vastness of the place until that side trip. Something about being in a camp, albeit small, with lots of tents, cargo, and small buildings just made the place seem like a snow covered parking lot on the edge of town. But once out of view of all that, where all there was to see was snow to the horizon and a blue sky, I felt like I had finally entered Antarctica. That is until we came across the line of survey poles Shad and Leo had set up the day before, bisecting the wilderness for miles in every direction.

At the end of that line we set up the receiver. I didnt feel like we were moving any slower, but that's allegedly story. Unlike the lower parts of the ice streams, the interface between ice stream and ice sheet here was basically undetectable. Lower down, huge shear margin with gaping wide crevasse separate the two. The onset regions are different, presumably because they are moving slower. Crevasses do exist though. Shortly after Shad and Leo finished for the evening while creating the first survey line, which runs down the length of the ice stream, the Twin Otter pilots noticed that the flags were getting fairly close to what looked like some crevasses. Rather than continue that line, Shad, Leo, Paul and Sridhar took off on their several day trip for an upstream line. In the meantime, Peter, Don and Andy went to examine the remainder of the intended line where the crevasses may be. They got about 150 m further before a snow bridge gave way beneath Peter's snowmachine. Fortunately he had enough momentum to carry him across, but now all three were on the wrong side of the hole. They roped up and began crossing at another location where the bridge was firmer, intended to charge across it. Unfortunately they had trouble working up any speed. With all three machines roped together, it wasnt really clear until later that Don's machine was out of gear and that Peter was actually towing him. But these were not the monster crevasses shown in Imax movies, so it was more of a joke than a problem. Nonetheless, the experimental plan was adjusted so as not to need extending the line any further.

Anyway, once Shad and I were back at camp, Sridhar gave the nod to get the parachute flying. By this time, the sun was out in full force and it actually became quite hot. This caused the snow texture to change considerably. I had hoped to groom a runway by dragging an air force pallet loaded with fuel drums behind the Tucker, but the tank treads sunk in so deep now that the pallet didn't smooth them out. These pallets are solid smooth metal. So smooth in fact that they are a hazard to walk across; but normally they make a great grooming device. Fortunately Spore and Al, two of the camp staff, were able to improvise and in the end I got a huge, smooth surface from which to work.

The reason I was so concerned about smoothness was based on my experience in Fairbanks. I had installed skiis on the landing gear to reduce friction. Unfortunately, when the buggy was given full throttle it became impossible to steer, as small perturbations caused by bumps in the surface would divert the buggy faster than it could be steered back. At full throttle on skiis on a smooth surface, this thing is going 50 mph within several feet. This time I decided to just use a ski on the nose gear and let the rear gear remain as wheels, hoping that it would track better. After a few tests it became clear that this worked. As Shad and I attached the parachute to try a flight test, all work stopped at camp as everyone crowded around the runway with their cameras. The first (and only) test flight in Fairbanks had the buggy airborne with 10 meters, and I expected roughly the same here. So we go the engine started, held open the parachute, and gave it full throttle. The chute inflated, the buggy tracked straight, and all systems looked good. Unfortunately, it did not go airborne. Instead, it ran straight through the crowd at the far side, causing people to jump for cover. Fortunately no one dove down hoping it would fly over them.

We tried several more times, with similar results. We even tried flipping the propeller over, thinking that perhaps I had it on backwards, which is easier to do than it probably sounds. In the end I decided to install the rear skiis, thinking that it simply wasn't going fast enough to lift off. Unfortunately for whatever the reasons, we couldn't get the engine started again once the skiis were on. So I temporarily gave up, brought the buggy into the warm jamesway and put the batteries on charge, hoping that the heat and amp hours would solve the problem. By this point we were all down to single layers and no hat or gloves, and it was hard to be upset on such a nice day.

The atmosphere was somewhat festive above and beyond the nice weather. It was Thanksgiving, and we were all looking forward to more of Flora's great cooking and many good toasts. It was also our last day in camp, and the first day in several that we were able to work outside without being grumpy about it. Finally all of the sleds were being filled up and loads tied down, giving shape to the previously irregular piles of gear. The last unclaimed snowmachines finally found owners and began being customized to suit driver preferences. It was also a good opportunity to do some last minute packing, so that the evening could be enjoyed to the fullest and bedtime could be stretched to the longest.

Thanksgiving dinner proved to live up to the anticipation placed on it. I snagged a huge turkey drumstick, and there were all the fixings one could hope for. Everyone brought out their best bottles and there was plenty to go around. For desert, we had our choice of at least 6 different types of pies, and essentially all we could eat of them as they were duplicates of each.

After dinner, the weather remained nice, though colder, and I decided to give the powered parachute one last try. I got the engine started, attached the parachute, and let her rip. This time a much smaller crowd was in attendance, and all stood behind me. To my pleasant surprise, the buggy tracked very well on the skiis. Unfortunately, that's all it did. This time I let it run off the runway and continued to apply full power. As it vanished into the distance, we could occasionally see it catch some air as it hopped over sastrugi. The nose wheel remained largely off the ground, so I could only steer it by turning the kite. I got it about halfway around when all of a sudden it rolled up into a ball and stopped moving. Spore and I chased it down on a snow machine and discovered that one of the servo steering arms had caught on the snow, broken off, and run into the prop. This buggy is of poor design and mediocre quality. It's a long story, but essentially the person I bought it from screwed us over pretty royally in many ways on this project. In any case, this crash, though perhaps not fatal, put an end to further testing until our return from ice stream C near Christmas.

Morning brought more good weather and a bustle of activity. By the time I got to the galley, most had finished breakfast and were packing away bits of turkey and pie for lunch. Soon tents were coming down, bamboo tent stakes gathered and boxed, and final sled loads arranged and hooked up with drivers. I got fitted with one of our two gypsy wagons. These are 6' x 10' units on sleds, that resemble the old conestoga wagons of the west because of their arched fabric roofs. We use them for mobile work rooms, as well as storage and anything else we can think of. Other sled loads consisted of hot water drills, fuel drums, crates of food, etc. Everyone began by towing two sleds, though later Sridar and I, both towing wagons, pawned our rear sleds off on others because they towed so poorly and we could not see them behind the wagons.

Eleven of us are making the trip, riding 8 brand new Scandics and 2 older Alpines, leaving one person to ride on the sleds. Before we left we organized some group photos. I was disappointed because I wanted to arrange the snowmachines behind us such that we could get both the people and the gear in the shots, but Sridhar didn't seem to be interested in going through the maneuvering effort, so we just sat on a sled as Doug from the camp took a picture with all of our cameras. This set me off in a pissy mood for the first part of the trip, for really no good reason. Sometimes things like that make me think that I'm a total control freak. Sometimes they make me think that I just need to change my socks.

Though not as warm as the day before, it was a great day for driving. The snow was nearly perfect as well. We headed off at about 10 mph and drove for about 10 minutes before stopping and checking our loads. More or less everything seemed fine and we were all in good spirits, or were at least faking it well. We continue on in a ragged, strung out fashion, with several lanes of traffic at irregular intervals. As we became more familiar with our loads and more comfortable with the terrain, we gradually began increasing our speeds. We stopped every so often to snack, pee, and let everyone catch up. As the day wore on, and the temperatures dropped, our breaks became shorter and less frequent, and our speeds increased. We were burning gas at a faster rate than anticipated, about 5 mpg, and I think were all secretly grateful we talked Peter into bringing the extra drum of fuel. After our last fill up, Peter, who led the way, didn't stop again until our tanks were nearly empty and we had arrived at the halfway point. By this point we were pretty much wearing everything we had with us and all were chilled to the bone.

Because our next fill up required pulling barrels off the sleds and filling up our jerry cans as well, we decided to camp here and put up tents while the refueling was going on. The group spontaneously self-organized into work groups to get everything going at once. Several people fueled the machines, several set up our sleeping tents, and several set up our kitchen and outhouse tents. Within about an hour and a half, we had finished most of the work tasks and we all settled into the kitchen tent for some hot drinks and dinner. The kitchen tent is an interesting design that sets up quickly and is large enough for all of us to sit comfortably within it while cooking food. By this time we had all warmed up from the exercise and the heat from the cookstoves had us all roasting in no time. It was several hours by the time we all had some cocoa and tea and finished dinner. We passed the time telling stories and picking on Leo, and looked forward to a good night's sleep. It's midnight now, and I'm really looking forward to it, as breakfast starts at 6:30AM, with another full day of traveling after that. Hopefully both the weather and our fuel will hold out long enough for us to have a camp set up next to our cache of food, fuel, and explosives on ice stream C.

See the pictures!

Sunday, 01 December 02, 9:45PM, CT2

On D road again and poking holes..

The second day of travel was much like the first, flat and white. We had made good time the day before and I think everyone was in good spirits knowing that barring any catastrophes we would arrive at our destination late that afternoon. I started off the trip somewhat grumpy again, though for different reasons. I was a little concerned the night before that we were getting spread out too thinly and expressed that concern. Many of the guys here have been preparing of this project for years and have been around here before, so have good reason to believe that there are no crevasses along our route. But I don't have the same background as they do and so apparently have a somewhat more cautious attitude. Anyway, during the course of this discussion, immediately before our departure, I learned that all of the ropes and rescue gear were wrapped tightly inside one of the sled bags, not distributed among the group and easily at hand, and the subsequent ridicule suggested it was felt I had no business even asking the question. This got me somewhat irked and I decided to bite my tongue rather than make scene. In retrospect, I wish I would not have gotten so easily flustered and made my case.

Perhaps because of my mood, which is easy to hide under a facemask going 20 mph, I still really didn't feel as much in awe of my surroundings as I thought I might. It was a pleasant enough drive, but I didn't really feel any particular isolation or remoteness. It didn't feel too much different than driving around on the north slope of Alaska, except that there was even less topographic and certainly less vegetative variation. I think I've felt more isolation and thrill there, simply because they have been with many fewer people and I didn't have a huge safety net surrounding me. Same with even hiking trips in Alaska. But it was fun nonetheless. At times it felt like we could be part of some Road Warrior sequel, dragging our sleds and wagons to invade the next outpost and take their fuel. But considering how far we were going and how much we were dragging, it was a remarkably uneventful trip. The occasional sled popping out the hitch or the load ties loosening up, but nothing serious. It says something for the considerable planning that has gone into the trip.

In the end, GPS guided us straight to our cached food and fuel without a hitch. GPS has been around for a while now, so it shouldn't seem like much of a surprise, but I found myself more amazed by that than anything else about the trip. These tiny handheld devices are like magic, for $100 navigating you to within feet of wherever you want to be. We set up camp, refueled the machines, dug out the cache, and ate some dinner. By the time we were done it was close to 10PM. I had been looking forward to sleeping late and a mellow morning, it being Sunday, but Sridhar announced that breakfast would be at 6:30, just like a normal day. That irked me a little too, not only because I was looking forward to sleeping in but also because I expected decisions like that to be by consensus, not command. So I was again a little grumpy the next morning, especially considering that there was no action plan announced until after 8. But once we got working, it felt pretty good and I was glad to actually be doing something productive, rather than just anticipating and preparing for it.

Don, Andy, Ash, and I were put in charge of the hot water drilling. Sridhar, Leo, Peter and Shad got going first on the survey line, marking our drill hole locations, and were almost done with it by the time we started our first hole. The drill is composed of several heaters, a pump, a water tank, and some hoses. It's really pretty simple in design, but it takes a little while to figure out and get comfortable with. One of the tricky parts is that fact that none of this equipment is designed to withstand the water within it freezing. But the water cannot easily be drained out, causing a dilemma. The solution is to pump glycol through the lines, displacing the water. Glycol has a much lower freezing temperature, so is fine to let sit in the lines overnight here. But we only have so much glycol, so when we replace the glycol with water, we must recapture the glycol. To do this, we colored the glycol red, so that when the output turns clear we know that we have gotten most of it out. We end up losing a little every time, but hopefully that shouldnt matter in the end. To make water, we keep shoveling snow into the tank. There is a recirculation line from the heaters that keeps sucking water from the tank and returning it hot, helping to melt the snow. There is a second line that is attached to a drilling bit with a spray nozzle at the end of it. This sits in the tank as a recirculation line too, until there is enough hot water to drill a hole. The bit is then removed from the tank, hung over a pulley suspended from a tripod over the hole location, and lowered down. Hose is then let out, allowing the bit to melt a hole in front of it. We only go down about 20 m. At this depth, it is all snow, though there are hard layers that take longer to get through. After some practice, we were able to get about four holes an hour done.

Today we drilled 12 holes, and tomorrow we will hopefully finish the other 23. It may take a little longer though, as we now have to screw around with making sure the dynamite will make it done the hole without getting hung up in tight spots, and that our stemming device will fill the hole. A tricky part with hot water drilling is that the diameter of the hole is proportional to the speed at which the drill is lowered - the slower the speed, the wider the hole. Don built a contraption that is lowered down after the dynamite which inflates to seal the upper part of the hole from the explosion. This sends more energy down the hole, which is good for seismic work. Tomorrow we're going to test it out.

We returned about 7PM and were greeted with a hot meal. We enjoyed the food, telling stories and making fun of the BFC. Everyone gets along well with each other and it is a very sociable time. Still, I feel somewhat out of place. Sridhar, Don, Andy, Peter and Ash are all good friends and pretty much run the show. Paul and Leo are graduate students who seem content to kind of do what they are told and go with the flow. Anatoly is a crazy Russian who reminds me a lot of Pavel, but he is kind of on independent study here. Bob was supposed to have left already, but decided to stay on and help out. He came with the seismic equipment, similar to the way Shad came with the GPS equipment. I'm really not sure what I'm doing here, and I'd bet no one else is either. So there are already too many cooks in the kitchen and I'm not one to simply do what I'm told without some discussion, leaving me in my own somewhat awkward feeling space.

It was fun drilling today though. I could figure out on my own most of the system and process because I had done it all already, so I was able to help troubleshoot and anticipate without being consulted. I suspect that after a few days or weeks of this that I'll feel more like part of the group, as the group feels more like they know what my skills are and how useful I can be. So far I really haven't been able to contribute very much, as most of the work was already done in McMurdo and I was pretty sick the first week at OnD. It does drag at me at times though. I really wish we could have been at this point a month ago so that we could be almost done now. I've never felt so homesick before, and I hope I never do again. I suspect that much of the reason for my feelings of exhaustion, sickness, drinking, and mood swings is because I'm depressed more than I realize. This trip has yet to really grab hold of me and get my full attention. I'm hoping that the once the real research begins that that will change. Else I may be sneaking on the next Herc at OnD while no one's looking.

Wednesday, 04 December 02, 9PM, CT1

Yesterday was proclaimed Nolan day.

Tuesday was another day much like Monday. Don, Andy, Ash, and I started the day hot water drilling. Not longer afterwards, Don left to start working on his shot hole stemming device, affectionately known as the Voigt-wurst (named after Don Voigt, the inventer, and the sausage like shape of the thing). The three of us made a pretty good team and the time was passed pleasantly. It was the first time I had worked closely with Ash, and I really enjoyed his company. He is a soft spoken New Zealand bloke living in England. He, like all of us, doesn't look particular intelligent or strong, but not like most of us, he really is. I first realized his strength when I saw him going to set up his tent a few days before. He strode past the sled and slung a Scott tent over his shoulder without breaking a stride. I can barely lift one of these things. By the time I had gotten mine off the sled and over to the camping area, he had already managed to get his out of the bag and set up by himself. It took Shad and I over 15 minutes to do that. He's also got a very sharp wit. When it was first his turn to drill a hole, after watching us do it for two days, Andy asked him if he knew what to do. Ash responded by saying, 'yeah, you joost lowa' it down and stoop at twenee punt fo', the joke being that Andy and I strove to drill to exactly 20 meters, but always overshot by a little. When I finished my romance novel, I handed it to Ash to see if he wanted to read it next. He read the back cover and began laughing. "Clearly writtun buy n' 'merican. The name of this cas'l is Scottish, the town its nex' to 's Ir'sh, and the heroine's name is Welsh. It's all just England to 'mericans in' it?" In the end, we didn't finish all of the holes that day, leaving us a few to do on Wednesday, which was fortuitous.

Wednesday brought more good weather and good working conditions. The wind had picked up a little bit, but if you could find a place to get out of it and in the sun, it was fairly comfortable. Working near the drill, there were also plenty of hot things to get warm next to. We finished the drilling by noon, and headed back to camp. I was in a pretty good mood, partly because I knew what came next. Rather than put the drill to bed by embalming it with glycol, we left the water in and dragged it back to camp. Here we set up a wind screen and set it up for bathing. By the time it was ready, Andy had bumped into Don and decided to go blow stuff up with him. I asked Ash if we should flip a coin, and replied "wot, you want to go furst? Go fo' it", so I did. I went back to my tent, stripped down into my bunny boots, bathrobe and fur hat and headed for the hot tub. It was glorious. I probably spent 15 minutes in there and felt wonderful. I even tried to call Kristin on the satellite phone to share the joy, but she wasn't home. Afterwards I changed into clean clothes, brushed my hair, and felt like a million dollar bill. After Ash went in and came out, he said simply "I'm a convurt". Drilling projects are in both of our futures.

We decided to spend the rest of the day at camp and make some modifications. I was glad to learn that Ash was just as confused as I was about some of the arrangements here, and we set to work rearranging things to our liking while everyone else was away working. I started with our shitter. The original arrangement was a tent with no floor that covered a small box with a foam seat on it. The box was so small that after a few people used it, you worried about wiping. Don tried unsuccessfully to remove the bag liner from it in the morning and made quite a nasty mess. So I used the drill to make a fairly deep hole, then placed bamboo stakes over it for the seat to rest on, then moved the tent over that. I dug the area out so that you could actually stand up inside the tent, and reinforced the steps with more bamboo so that you wouldn't blow them out by continued use. It turned out pretty deluxe, and I received compliments on it from almost everyone that night and the next day. Ash set about rearranging and cleaning the cook tent, making things easier to find and use. We set about making dinner as well.

As people drifted in and out of camp through the afternoon, I ran the drill so that they could all take baths. Work on the seismic line ended a little early as there were some problems with the Voigt-wursts that slowed down progress, so people were a little grumpy. But by the time everyone had soaked, camp mood became noticeably festive. Bottles were broken out as everyone basked in the sun waiting for dinner. I fried halibut steaks in loads of butter, and served out plates (rather than buffet style) to everyone. Sridhar declared it Nolan day (there had already been a few other 'days' for other people), though it really should have been 'Driller day' as it was a group effort. The merriment lasted well into the evening. Shad and I stayed up a few hours in our tent talking about the meaning of life, and we and everyone else fell asleep eventually in a really good mood. I fell asleep feeling like I really a part of things here, and that all of our minor problems (like running out of food) were something I could simply deal with without pointing fingers or getting upset about.

The next morning, today, we were all part of the seismic team. Bouncing sound waves off the bottom of the ice is really why we are all here. The general idea is that we set up a bunch of receivers on the surface, blow up some dynamite, and record the echoes. The amplitude of these echos, and the time it takes them to bounce back, can give us a lot of information about what is down there, which hopefully will then tell us something about the ice streams. The receiver line is 1.2 kilometers long and consists of 120 geophones. Because our transect is 10 km long, these geophones must be moved after every shot (actually several shots), so that we image the entire transect. So much of the time is spent digging out phones, moving the cables, and replanting them. This takes about 45 minutes of rapid, but not too strenuous, effort. Then it takes about another 30 minutes to get the seismographs turned on, the shots to be fired, and everything double checked. Then we do it all again.

Things went pretty well for me until the afternoon. Since we've got here, I've been continually hungry. Working outside in the cold doubles your appetite easily, and 11 hungry people consume a lot of food. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be enough food to go around. Lunches are the worst. All that was brought apparently was salami and cheese, plus a bunch of candy bars and gorp. There are a few jars of jam, but no bread. I knew that lunches would largely be on the go, as we would be working far from camp most days, but I assumed that there would be a variety of easy-to-travel options. I simply cant choke down enough salami and cheese to keep my fires burning, at least not on a regular basis. Both of them are edible, but the taste isn't palatable enough for me to eat pounds of it per day. I started gnawing on sticks of butter, which tastes much better than it may sound, but there is simply not enough butter either. Likewise with dinner, though having variety, there is usually not enough to satisfy everyone. And there are no deserts. Typically we break into the cookies or candy bars again to make up, but I can only eat so many candy bars per day without making myself sick. So by the late afternoon today I was out of energy and getting crankier.

Around 5PM, I was very much looking forward to dinner, as were a lot of people. Sridhar, however, decided to do two more setups, which took us until 7PM, rather than the 6PM that we had set as the standard stop time. I know he really wants to get things moving as we are already behind schedule and I understand his desire to catch up, but it definitely wore on me, increasingly through the evening. As the line was approaching camp, I took a side trip to get more water and food, but when I got there I realized all I could snack on was what I already had, which was more salami, cheese and candy, and I just couldn't do it. By the time we were finished, I was a zombie in a bad mood, and didn't talk with anyone. Shad had got dinner started earlier, but had to leave as the Otter came in to drop off more fuel for us and that was his ride home, as he was only tagging along this far to get the GPS running. I had wanted to give him a few things to mail out, but we ended up working until the minute he left. Dinner was another 45 minutes away by the time we got back. Fortunately, he had a major meal underway, and for the first time since arriving I actually left the tent feeling full.

I perseverated on a few things while moving phones in a famished state that probably aren't worth writing about, largely about differences between my expectations of involvement in this project and what seems to be the reality. I'm bad enough at being tactful when I'm in a good mood, but when I'm hungry and cranky it's bound to be much worse. So I bit my tongue and hoped that I would get enough to eat to make me feel more comfortable. Fortunately that worked pretty well, but I also was exhausted and in food coma by that point, and just went to bed rather than mention them. I hoped that by working on my journal I might feel a little more chipper just by thinking about yesterday again, and that seems to have worked too. I think I need to find an opportunity to pull Sridhar aside tomorrow and let him know what's on my mind. He's a smart guy, and I think he realized tonight that I wasn't the only one feeling a little oppressed, as he tried to spend a few minutes in conversation with everyone individually at dinner and made a point of asking Andy in front of everyone if he could run the seismograph tomorrow so that he could plant geophones with the guys. At this point, I still have high hopes that all that's needed is a little time for settling into the group dynamics that I'm sure we all look forward to, and it's just a matter of increasing communication between us all so that nobody's needs get unintentionally overlooked. But now it's time for catching up on some sleep. Shad's gone now, and I've got the whole tent to myself. As enjoyable as our late night conversations have been, and as much as would have liked more of them, they did take away from much needed sleep and I'm glad to get some extra tonight.

Thursday, 05 December 02, 8:30PM, CT2

We are a lean mean seismic machine.

As might be expected, I woke up grumpy and it just got worse from there, for a while anyway. I usually get up a little later than the early morning crowd, to get a little more sleep and avoid the rush, but I'm usually ready about the same time as everyone else. Usually most people linger in the cook tent until about 7:30, but this morning by about 7 the first wave was gone. I made myself a big bowl of cereal and got my water bottles ready for filling while the water got hot. Unfortunately by the time I was done, most of the water had been taken and nobody refilled the pots with snow. To make matters worse, Fucking Don Voight (or FDV as he affectionately referred to) turned off the burners once he filled his bottles and left the tent, as if to say, "I'm ready, and so should you slackers"; this was 7:15. I got up and refired the burners, only to find that all of the snow blocks were gone and the cooler was empty. So I had to get more snow and sit there for 30 minutes guarding both the water and the burners. By this time, most people had left camp, except for the few of us waiting to fill our bottles. Today I was determined not to go hungry or thirsty during the day, so I waited until I had four full hot water bottles and loaded up on as much food as I could scrape together, including half a box of cereal. By the time I arrived on the line, things were just getting started, so I hadn't missed much.

I worked in the lead wagon with Andy today. He had learned to run the seismograph yesterday, and was teaching me today. As the food settled in my stomach, I began to feel much better and we had quite an enjoyable time during the day. We run two seismographs, each recording 60 geophones. Each seismograph is housed in its own wagon, with the second one halfway back. The jugheads moving the phones typically hang out by the rear wagon, as it is the rear phones that get leapfrogged to the front end, so we spent most of the day on our own. Now that we had a system worked out though, there wasn't a lot of free time. About a kilometer in front of us were FDV, Ash and Peter, who load the shots and set one off. The second shot occurs directly beneath us, and is set off by a shot box in our wagon. So we do two shots, then move the phones. The entire process is now taking us approximately half an hour. About 10 minutes get spent coordinating everything over the radio, making sure that when the shots go off that the seismographs are turned on and no one is moving. Then a mad scramble occurs to dig up the rear 30 geophones, drag the cables the front of the line, move the wagons, replant the phones, and get ready for the next two shots. Andy moved the wagon while I helped the other four move the phones. At every instance we were in the wagon coordinating things, I jammed as much food and water into my mouth as I could. One thing I learned during this process is that half a bag of dried apricots are a pretty serious laxative.

Things went very well and it turned out to be a beautiful day. The wind had died down, so that you could sit outside without a hat and gloves and be quite comfortable. I pulled Sridhar aside at one point and began to tell him about a few of my concerns on the trip and was glad I did. We didn't have that much time to talk, as things were proceeding so quickly, but hopefully in the next few days we can talk more about it. It felt pretty good to get things off my chest, and I was in a pretty good mood at the time so I don't think I sounded too cranky.

As we neared the end of the line, I'm sure everyone began to do the mental calculations of how late it would be if we finished it all off. I figured it would take until about 8PM. I was pleasantly surprised when Sridhar announced that he thought we should finish the next shot and call it a day, at about 5PM. By 5:30, we were back at camp and everyone was in a good mood. I found it noticeable that Shad was no longer around, as he tends to brighten things up a bit, but we sat around in the sunshine having a few drinks and not doing much of anything for the rest of the evening. It was the first time I really felt relaxed being social at camp since we got here, as the other evening I was running around quite a bit cooking dinner and running the hot tub. Leo cooked up some steaks and I was happy to get another full stomach, and I think keeping a full stomach during the day help a lot. I polished off the leftovers as we hooked up Paul with comms to his girlfriend. She is at another camp far from here. Before Iridium phones, the only way for personal communications was on a discontinued frequency on the HF radios; we use these radios to report in to MacOps every morning. Because this channel exists on the radio but is not used for official business, it is locally known as the Love Line. Of course, every camp with an HF radio can listen in, and this line subsequently substitutes for TV soap operas. Unfortunately for Paul, we cannot reach TamCamp directly, so we convinced him that he should relay his traffic through MacOps, who often have little to do in the evening. Unfortunately for us, TamCamp didn't have their radio on, and MacOps provided Paul with their Iridium phone number. So we didn't get much entertainment ourselves, as Paul wandered off into the blinding white hell for an hour or two, out of earshot. Iridium to Iridium calls are allegedly free, but I guess we'll find out for sure when the bill comes.

I had a good time working with Paul today. He is a grad student working for Sridhar, and seems always to be in a good mood. He was running phones today, and was always the first to arrive up to the wagon where I was waiting to help plant them again. Each time he showed up he had a different line. One time he had an unusually large number of phones slung around his neck (they have about two foot cords between the receiver and the clip on connector), and when he turned off his snowmachine he grabbed both ends and shook them, saying in a deep voice "I um the leada of my peepul". Another time, he cruised down the line, tossing off a phone near each take-out on the cable, saying, "I feel like I'm in a seismic parade, tossing geophysical candy to the children of Antarctica".

Barring some instrumentational catastrophes, it seems pretty likely we'll finish up early tomorrow and begin packing for a move on Saturday. This time we're only going about 30 km, so that will also be a short day, but short enough that we'll likely get the surveying started the same day. This line is a little longer than the one we're working on now. Again, barring any problems, the surveying will only take half a day, the drilling about 3 days, with the seismic work starting while the drilling is finishing and taking about three days as well. So in about a week, we should be passing back through here on our way upstream to the onset regions of ice stream C. We have potentially several lines to do there, some of them much longer than here. So we'll probably have about two weeks of work there. The plan is still to get back to OnD by Christmas, which is about three weeks away, so it will be pretty close. I suspect we'll miss it, but the OnD camp agreed that Christmas dinner would occur on whatever day we returned. I'm hoping that at least there'll be some space between Christmas and New Years' dinner. Once there, work should go pretty quickly as the shot holes should already be drilling and all we have to do is the seismic. I'm hoping to get out of here by Jan 7, so that I have enough time to get out of McMurdo for the Jan 14 flight North. But that's a long ways away, perhaps too far away to even dwell on. In any case, I remain hopeful that if I continue finding alternatives to salami and cheese and dried apricots that this will continue to be fun and productive experience.

Friday, 06 December 02, 8:30PM, CT2

Today I began seriously considering leaving this expedition early.

It started out a fine enough day. I got plenty of breakfast, had a great attitude and headed for the seismic line. It was a beautiful day, sunny with little wind, warm enough that we could work without gloves on. The work proceeded quickly and within a few hours we had finished the line, packed up, and were back at camp by lunchtime. We drifted back at different times based on what we were packing up, but after an hour or so of everyone being back, most of the group had congregated in front of the kitchen tent to hang out in the sun. Then Sridhar put me on the spot.

I had begun a conversation with him yesterday that I had several concerns about the trip. We didn't really get very far in it, and though there was ample opportunity to continue it throughout the day, we did not. I started now by suggesting a new system for morning water making, where everyone leaves there thermoses and water bottles in the tent the night before, and one of us gets put in charge each morning of filling them with hot water and making sure there is enough for breakfast use, then recounted my story about filling up the day before. Shad had basically made the same suggestion independently a few days before. Sridhar stated that he didn't want things to get any more complicated than they had to be and basically everyone else fell silent. I suggested that at the least the people cooking dinner or doing the dishes should fill the cooler before going to bed, and it came out that basically Ash had been doing that all along, leading to a proclamation that the rest of us were slacking off, and that was the end of it.

Some other joking started up which I cant remember, and I made a crack asking when was the rest of the lunchmeat was going to show up. All I could find to this point was salami. This prompted Peter to immediately chime in about the state of our food, as he had basically organized it. Here I learned that salami not only was the only lunchmeat, but I would not have to worry about having to force it and cheese down my throat to stay full, because he only brought enough for one slice of each per person per day. He explained that when he first picked up the food that it seemed like a lot, but when it gets divided between 10 hungry people working in the cold, it doesn't go very far. The way I understood the story, he knew that there was not enough salami or cheese before we left, and he told me several days ago before the last Otter arrived that we did not have enough. Peter apologized for the inconvenience, but said that he didn't want to hear any grief about it when things began to run out. There does seem to be plenty of food here, so there is no danger of starvation, it's mostly a matter of convenience and edibility. But eating on the run in marginal weather with gloves on can be a pain, so it's really nice to be able to get most of your calories in a few mouthfuls, rather than having to continually take gloves off and eat low calorie food in the wind. It's also nice for moral (at least my moral) not to have to worry about whether you can scrounge enough random food items together in the morning to stay full during the day, and whether things like the breakfast food will hold out because people (like me) are hitting it harder because there is no lunch food.

Sridhar then stated that he was getting enough food and Andy jumped in immediately after that saying he also was getting enough and saw no reason to get more. I found this particularly odd as these are the two people that knew most intimately that I felt like I was not getting enough, and Sridhar had even indicated yesterday that getting more from OnD would not be too big of a deal. No one else spoke up. What irks me most here is not that a mistake was made, but that rather than fix it by getting more food, the old timers would apparently rather live with it than admit it to the outside world; I find it hard to believe that everyone believes that one slice of salami per day is a rational amount of food. At least in McMurdo, I never saw anyone here with only a slice of salami and cheese on their plate, rather they were always heaped high and seconds were common. It's tough to relate the mood here, but I certainly felt like I was alone in thinking that this was nuts. If there is one single most important thing to staying healthy and happy in the outdoors, its eating enough, any book on the outdoors will start off by saying that. And here we are with the most extensive science support infrastructure in the world a phone call away, and we're 'happy' with our one slice of salami, one slice of cheese, and all of the low fat Wheat Thins we can eat. At least all jokes about Leo's substandard food packing skills ended after this conversation.

Conversation lulled, and I brought up the point that I would like to have some rescue ropes out during our next traverse and not have them be bondage tied into an anonymous nansen bag. This brought out an uproar from Peter and Sridhar that was just about hostile. Peter told me that he had been spent 22 seasons in an Antarctica and he knew what he was doing. He told me literally that he was 100% sure that there was no danger along our route. Then he told me that if we are not wearing our harnesses already when we fall into a crevasse that it would be extremely painful to be pulled out by just a rope, as if somehow suggesting that it would be better to stay down there! He did state that in retrospect my earlier suggestion that we stay grouped closer together was a good one, rather than being as unnecessary as he first told me. Sridhar then exasperatedly turned to me and with a loud voice questioned How many times would he have to tell me that there was no danger here and that people have been driving back and forth here for 15 years without a problem. (So far, that was the second time). I'm sure that these statements were meant to be reassuring, but to me at the time, they seemed to be the epitome of arrogance, and particularly shocking as neither Peter nor Sridhar normally come off as being particularly arrogant. Perhaps I'm not the only one not getting enough to eat after all…

One of the funny things is, I think that they are generally speaking probably correct, that there likely are no crevasses worth mentioning along our route. But to not allow for even the possibility that a stray one exists seems like folly to me, especially since we have all the gear in tow. The glaciers that I study in Alaska can go from smooth to serac-ed virtually overnight during a surge, and there is no reason to believe it impossible that some part of the stagnant ice stream that we were standing on could not have done the same over the past winter, at least along the two shear margins we crossed to get here. And I, and almost everyone I know that is into climbing, have had friends fall into crevasses on glaciers "that don't have any" (as stated by people with more experience than our group put together), and some of them did not make it out. Perhaps it is just the Antarctic mindset is characteristically different and doesn't see change happening on that scale. Then it came out that Peter and Ash do have ropes handy in their machines, contrary to what was said during our last traverse, which is all that I was suggesting anyway. I did not pursue the obvious question of if they were so god damned sure of themselves then why did they even have those out, or why did we tow any rescue equipment along at all, but I probably should have.

At this point, to my regret, I gave up. I had other concerns as well, such as that I'd like to have input into more of the logistical and scientific decisions being made, but I felt like I was in third grade on the playground, where the couple of cool kids got to make up any rules for the game they wanted, but when I suggested one I was scoffed at, so there was little point. Anatoly, whom I sure didn't get the full translation right, made a comment to Peter that some people should not be glaciologists, and that was enough for me. The conversation ended, and all of the cool kids began joking with themselves about other things as they walked away.

Surprisingly to me, I was not particularly ticked off and still felt in a good mood, just not like making any more comments or suggestions. I don't think that anyone else took the conversation very seriously, but I really don't know yet. I wandered around and tried to help pack, but there wasn't much for me to do. None of the equipment was mine, and I never saw how it was packed in the first place, and at this point I was in no mood to do anything that might rock the boat, which struck me at the time as being damned near anything. So I went back to my tent and took a nap.

I woke up about 5PM and began wandering around again trying to help out. This time it was a little easier to find something to do, as many boxes had been packed, and now they just needed to be arranged on sleds. I stayed within station and did not suggest how to do this, I just grabbed the other end of whatever someone else was trying to move. I'm being a bit facetious here, but that's the way I feel about it, and I can feel it starting to get worse. At one point I was straddling a sled that was being loaded while Don and Paul loaded another box. Don said to watch out for my private parts and Paul jokingly added "because they weren't going to", as it was a heavy box that they wanted to drop quickly. I bit my tongue as I almost said 'I realize that now', but just barely. The ideas in my head come out one way or another, if not by suggestions beforehand, then by acidic comments after. I really don't like being grumpy, and being facetious is the only way I seem to know how to avoid that but still get things off my chest. I gave the family meeting approach an honest try, but see no reason to try again.

Another funny thing is that I basically like everyone here. They're all a little crazy, but I would have no problem hanging out with any of them. Before dinner, we played Frisbee and joked around, and though I suspect many were wondering whether I was feeling outcast, there was no particular outward tension. But I have serious questions about how far I'm willing to trust most of them with anything important, and I have never seen anyone stand up to Sridhar. Take Peter for example. He's a friendly guy, means well, and I'm sure is very competent, and had I known him as long as many of the others I'm sure I'd have a different impression. However, if I just take the facts at face value, since I've met him, he underestimated our snowmachine fuel needs, our coleman fuel needs, and our food needs. Should I simply trust this man I've never met before to then accurately estimate our safety needs? And do so without question? This is the same guy who "found" the crevasses near OnD by driving over one of them and collapsing the snow bridge. I questioned him on both the fuel estimates, and he assured me confidently (in a way that says don't ask again) that he had been very conservative and we would have more than enough and that there was no need to take more. When Sridhar suggested we take another barrel just in case, he said sure no problem without another word. Had we not taken that barrel, we would have had to make camp early and have some one fetch more fuel from our cache. And when he says he's been here 22 times, he's only been to West Antartica once as I recall, which means that he's largely relying on Sridhar's judgment of this particular area. Which is not to say I think that judgment is wrong and I'm not just trying to pick on him by listing these things, but I feel I have a legitimate concern that there may not be enough independent assessment here and that the small group making the decisions for the big group may be a little inbred and defensive in their thinking. I mean, all I asked for was to keep some of the ropes that we already have somewhere easily accessible, and I got my head bitten off. Twice. (Albeit in a way which I assume was meant to be well-intentioned, but for no real reason, as what I was suggesting was already happening). Just about the same with the food, that for an underling like me to even mention a resupply is to make an accusation punishable by dirty looks and short-tempered replies. I feel like the joke we often make is not so much of a joke - what would Scott have done in this situation? He would have kept a stiff upper lip while eating his Wheat Thins and one slice of salami, rather than making a phone call and asking for 50 pounds of lunchmeat to be brought out on any of the next several planes passing by us. I doubt there have been but few occasions that anyone can recall when I complained about something without offering a solution, but here I'm starting to feel like making a suggestion is almost worse than complaining itself. If these guys were jerks, the picture would make more sense, but they're not, so I have to hold out hope that I'm extrapolating too few data points into the wrong direction.

Nevertheless I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I thought a bit about my role here, and it seems to me that if I left the scene, the work would be completed just fine, albeit a bit slower. As it is, there is some excess manpower, so one less mouth to feed might actually improve things. And I suspect that I have already gotten about 90% of the experience. But this is not my first choice yet, as although I have not put in a fraction of the effort into this trip as many of the others, I still have invested a lot and still have a lot to look forward to. This is the type of work that I'm familiar with and know a lot about, and I find it pretty interesting and would like to have more such projects in the future. And I also don't want to piss anybody off. I guess part of it comes down to whether I will piss them off more by taking a wise ass approach to their approach, or by calling in an unscheduled flight.

Perhaps the real problem at this point is that I'm not convinced I want to be involved. If everyone is happy except me, then maybe I should just keep my mouth shut and fizzle out of the scene at my earliest opportunity. I know that many of my concerns are shared by others, and Shad and I saw eye to eye on almost everything, but no one seems to feel strongly enough to comment openly on it. I came here to have fun and learn something, not to start a rebellion, so if I'm alone then I may as well take off. Tomorrow we're sleeping in, as our move is not a far one. Had I the chance to make a comment, I would have suggested working late last night to finish the work, and taking the day off today. But in the end, it's all the same I guess, and I suppose I should just let it go and still give it my best effort. There is something to learn from every trip, and I can always focus on that as a positive result despite however weird it may seem at the time. I've no reason to believe that they don't think I'm as nuts as I think them. I suppose you have to be a little crazy to voluntarily do this sort of work.

Sunday, 08 December 02, 8:50PM, CT1

Today I learned why they call it a HOT water drill.

We're now at a new location as of yesterday. I got a good night's sleep, lingering in my bag until about 9AM, which was the agreed upon linger time. However, when I got out of my tent I learned that most people had been up for a while and had already broken down many of the tents. Suckered again. But I got a good breakfast of granola, oatmeal, powered milk, and cocoa mixed together, filled my water bottles (there was plenty on the stove), and put my slice of salami into a bagel and headed out for work. The preparations continued and by 11AM we were all packed and ready to go. The trip only took about 2 hours, and a within a few hours after that we had reassembled everything into virtually the same camp as before, but with fewer snowmachine tracks.

My typically set-up role is setting up the Scott tents. These are the yellow pyramid shaped ones that have four poles built into the double-walled fabric cover. It has a separate floor, such that if you wanted to make a midnight rendevous with your cute neighbor, you could tunnel downwards and up into hers (there not being any 'hers' or 'cutes' here, I don't believe anyone has tried this yet). I've got one to myself now that Shad has left. Sridhar and Don share one, and Ash and Andy share the other. Everyone else is on their own in nylon mountain tents, which are much lower and not as spacious, but weigh considerably less. We also have two Endurance tents, which are large enough to contain everyone and go up remarkably quickly. They seem fairly strong too.

There wasn't much of a plan for the rest of the afternoon. Sridhar and Leo went out surveying so that the drilling could start right away in the morning while they finished surveying. I decided to fire up the hot water drill that afternoon, both so that it would be ready in the morning and so that I could drill a new hole for the shitter rather than go back to the box. It was a bold solo decision on my part, but it seemed easier just to do it than to ask. The drill gets embalmed with glycol every night, but when we travel we dump the water which we store in an insulated tank. So before the drill can be used, we need to have enough liquid water to displace the glycol in the lines, with enough left over that it can be heated and used to start melting the snow that will fill the rest of the tank. With the current system, this is a process that can take a few hours. But shortly before dinner the drill and the throne tent were fully functional. Paul helped me get it all going and put it to bed.

After dinner, Paul and I went back to my tent for some black Russians and a movie night. We had decided that an action adventure was in order, and settled on Mission Impossible II. Unfortunately, my computer, which has been deteriorating in functionality over the past few months, could only manage the horsepower to play the audio track with an occasional update of the picture. We tried a few more movies, all with the same result. However, a DVD with the complete set of The Simpsons seemed to work fine, so we settled for some action adventure episodes involving Homer and the fam.

I had resolved to wake up early the next morning, because I knew that just outside my tent lurked a tank full of hot water. We get the water up to about 150F when done for the day, and by morning it is still warm and unfrozen. I got up about 6:30AM and checked the water, and it was still toasty warm. So I returned to my tent, stripped down to my bunny boots, bathrobe and fur hat, and headed back out. It was a beautiful morning with no wind, warm enough for no hat or gloves. The water was still a bit hot once inside, so I added a bucket of snow and made it perfect. I thought for sure the others would here me splashing around, but apparently not. As I later emerged from the cook tent, I saw Andy replacing the cover to the tub with a perplexed look on his face, like how could the water have stayed this warm all night without the cover? But it was a great way to start the day, and I highly encourage it in the future.

Andy, Ash and I spent the rest of the day drilling holes. The part of the ice stream we are at now was the old UpC camp where much work has been done in the past. There are flags marking old boreholes, instruments, etc littered everywhere. As we drove down to find the start of our line, we even passed on old runway, still marked with flags stretching two miles. As we got started on the work, the weather changed abruptly, with low clouds reducing our visibility to a few hundred meters and pretty, delicate snowflakes began landing on us. Here for a while I felt like I really was in Antarctica. There were just the three of us working in this bubble of visibility, surrounded by ghosts of projects past. Ash added to the ambiance. He covers his fair skin with so much sunscreen that his face is literally white, and his white beard and mustache quickly form icicles, making him appear as if he's an apparition that travels with the fog, wondering where his friend Scott has got off to.

We made pretty good progress, but the going is pretty slow. In between more bowls of cereal and my single-slice sandwich, I got in a few chapters on my latest romance novel. We took turns with the tasks, which consist of the guy that lowers the hose down the hole, the guy that feed the hose to the guy that lowers the hose down the hole, and the guy that watches the gauges on the equipment that the hose is attached to because he has nothing better to do. It was all pretty uneventful, until we got towards camp.

Our fuel caches were placed in the center of our lines to minimize travel, and of course our camp gets set up next to the fuel barrels. This means that our camp gets set up in the middle of our seismic line. We started drilling at one end of the line and worked back towards camp. This part of the glacier has a lot of small hills and valleys, so it was until we were almost back at camp that I saw it again. Since we had begun in the morning, the surveying had been completed, so we could now see that indeed the line ran straight through our tents. As we worked our way closer, we strained our eyes to see whether a shot hole needed to be drilled under anyone's tent, and sure enough a flag had been placed up through Andy's tent. This turned out to be a joke, but the real flag was dangerously close to the shitter, and several comments were made about my foresight in drilling the hole the night before. I had thought to leave the drill in camp that night so that people could take baths, but the clouds, snow and wind were accompanied by a general chill, and there didn't seem to be any takers. So we moved the drill out to the next flag, which was not far away and called it quits for the day as dinner was almost ready.

I wanted to leave the tank without glycol, though, in case anyone wanted to try the morning bath option. This requires using a small trash can as the glycol receptacle. Just before the glycol emerged from the tube, I had Andy shut off the pump so that I could pour the water back into the tank, in this way not diluting the glycol resevoir too much. Unfortunately as I dumped the fairly heavy bucket of 150F water into the tank, I was still holding the hose and somehow managed to get my arm in the way of the water as it entered the tank. I was wearing plastic gloves and a coat, so I didn't think too much of it, but it got around my glove and soaked into the wristband on my coat. Had I dropped the bucket and retracted my arm quickly up my sleeve, it would have been fine, but I continued on, letting the scalding water soak into my sleeve. I quickly learned that I am allergic to boiling water.

It just stung a little bit, so stuck some snow under my sleeve and continued working. A few minutes later back in the cook tent, I had a closer look and saw that I had caused a few blisters and large red blotches. I kept ice on it, and after dinner Ash and Peter broke out the medical kits. Had a stranger walked in at that moment, he wouldn't have been able to tell that we hadn't know each other for years. We had a good time poking fun at the BFC and trying to figure out what much of the kit was supposed to be used for. There wasn't much for burns, but there was some wound stuff, so a suggestion was made to turn the burns into a wound so that we could fix it properly. In the end, some gauze was found, though about a yard longer than it needed to be, resulting in what looks to be a cast on my arm to cushion a couple of tiny blisters.

Tomorrow we'll hopefully get most of the drilling finished, as the others start the seismic work. This line travels over several boreholes from previous work where we know some interesting things about the ice bed. Hopefully we can connect the dots between those holes by deriving bed properties with our echoes. The seismic will go a lot slower tomorrow, as half the manpower to move phones will be drilling, so hopefully we'll stay ahead of them. So we'll probably have three days of work here, one and half for drilling, and one and a half to finish the seismics once we return to full manpower there. Then it's a 2-3 day trek upstream to the next line, provided we still have enough fuel to make it to that cache.

See the pictures!

Tuesday, 10 December 02, 8:30PM, CT1

Today I drank deeply from the book of knowledge, then went to bed in a blizzard.

Trying to stretch out my last romance novel, I spent free time yesterday and today reading through a collection of journal reprints, affectionately known as the 'book of knowledge' (or B.O.N.). Sridhar had compiled many of the papers written about ice streams C and D and bound them, and the proposal for our current research, in a three ring binder. So while waiting for the hot water to heat up between holes, I have been catching up on the literature.

The wind picked up yesterday. This didn't slow us down too much, but when we weren't actually drilling we were hunkered down behind our snowmachines or fuel barrels to get out of the wind. Once out, the air temperature was actually quite comfortable. We wear these plastic gloves that keep the slush and hot water from hitting our hands, but they trap sweat from the inside, so after a few minutes not holding something warm (like hoses), then tend to freeze up. So while reading I also practiced turning pages with frozen gloves. Most of the papers were pretty interesting and ones I had not read before. Now I feel like I know a bit about the glaciology here. There were also many papers of Sridhar's and Andy's discussing seismic techniques in addition to the glaciology. I've been getting friendly grief from both of them for asking too many questions about work they did too long ago. I think I'll stop reading papers in front of the people who wrote them because I think it generally makes them nervous. I couldn't say for sure as I'm not sure anyone has ever read any of mine, let alone in front of me.

So now it all seems a bit more interesting. And the more time away from McMurdo and OnD camp, the more it seems like I'm actually on an expedition and not some guided tour. When standing outside drilling holes, you can watch the clouds move overhead from horizon to horizon, often in big sweeping arms of clouds. It would be neat to see a satellite weather image and look down on it at the same time. In any case, these cloud fronts seem to have brought wind and cooler weather. Yesterday the seismic team had to end early, as when the wind is strong enough to blow snow around, the snow bonks into the geophones and cables and creates noise. The same happened today, although the winds became substantially stronger and carried new snow as well. After we finished drilling, we went to help move geophones, but had to quit after a few hours because of this. By dinner time, camp was in the midst of a full-on blizzard with drifts piling up around the tents. Unfortunately most of us put our doors facing what we thought would be the least likely wind direction, directly into the current storm.

The Scott tents hold up pretty well in the wind. But I'm finding out now that new blowing snow can easily get in through the upper vent, as pretty 6 sided snowflakes land on me and the computer. Leo has decided that the mountain tents are not big enough for him, and has spent all his free time digging a snow cave. I haven't gone to look at it yet, but it sounds pretty deluxe. There is essentially no bottom to the snow, so you can make as large a cavern or set of rooms as you please (or have the energy for). At this point it sounds like he has at least one room large enough for all of us, including built in benches. Perhaps we'll make that the movie theater, as it is likely the darkest and quietest place in camp.

We have about two days of work to finish up this line, so now its just a matter of waiting for good weather. We got word from OnD that the drillers there have fixed their drills and have completed two of the three lines that we left for them. Once we get back, the seismic work there should proceed quickly as there is no need to wait for surveying or drilling. Some of the lines are fairly long though, so it will take a while. There will also be some GPS surveying to do, measuring the motion of stakes planted in previous seasons to figure out how fast the ice is moving. So there will still be plenty to do, and I suspect the only free time we'll have will be during storms.

I just reread my journal starting about the time we got to OnD. Sridhar and Don told a story tonight another Antarctic PI who freaked out when he learned that someone in his group had a web page of the project and didn't include a picture of him or a link to his official project page, going so far as to call the NSF program manager and kick this guy off the project. I felt glad that I wasn't part of that group as I suspect I wouldn't have lasted a week, but then I got to thinking about how my page might be received. I found it valuable to read back through it, and am glad I have been making the effort to do it. I hope that it is not poorly received by the rest of the group, should they ever come across it. It's tempting to revise things to take out the uncomfortable parts (and regrettably I've done that a little), but the good and the bad are all part of the experience and I hesitate to edit it too much. It's like only taking pictures on nice sunny days, you forget about the rest. Without taking the analogy too far, this approach was responsible for the deaths of many in the search for the northwest passage, as those ships that did return, in stereotypical British fashion, made little mention of the hardships, such that the next trips were also unprepared for them. We're not experiencing anything close to what they did in terms of survival, but I'm sure the minor annoyances I've been dealing with prompted very similar conversations on every remote expedition that's ever been. By the time this one is over, I hope our friendships will be strong enough to take it all in stride, provided I haven't warped the perspective too badly.

I haven't had any thoughts of leaving early lately. I've been trying to just go with the flow, smile and nod. The general plan is well established, so it's mainly a matter of finding ways to work around problems and make things most efficient, so I've probably over-reacted internally to not having much a say. I feel a bit like a whiner about the food (though outwardly I've only made a few comments, that I thought were pretty rational), but I'm likely a bit more food conscious than most people. As for the group participation level, I hope that this experience (and being later able to read both the good and the bad later) will improve my leadership abilities in my own trips. In retrospect, I should pay more attention to myself when I think that I should just be patient as I'm the new guy here, and just learn as much as I can about the science while I have the opportunity. It took me a long time to get over being jealous about collected data and paper writing rights, and I suspect this trip will go a long way to helping me get over being jealous about wanting to have a hand in everything. The past few days have been pretty fun, and I've enjoyed hanging out with everyone in the evenings and so far I feel like everyone enjoys my company as well. In the end, it's really the people that make trips worth going on. The science and the food make the trip more enjoyable, but they're not enough for me to keep me coming back for more. So I should probably start spending more time drinking, socializing, and making hot tubs for everyone, and less time writing in my tent.

Thursday, 12 December 02, 9PM, CT1

After a day of writing papers, we've got most of our second seismic line complete.

The winds stayed strong enough yesterday that we called it a weather day and stayed in camp. We had decided the night before that if it was still blowing snow in the morning that we would just sleep in. I didn't even have to poke my head out of the door in the morning to know that it was strong enough, so I got a good long sleep in. I spent most of the day in the science tent. Sridhar worked on getting the seismic processing software running and the data organized. Bob and Anatoly spent most of the day in there too, working on their data. I decided to try to finish up a paper I started in McMurdo on Lake E. I got most of it finished and made most of the figures. One more weather day and I should have it licked, minus a few details that are still in my field book in Fairbanks. Hopefully by then we'll be able to process some seismic data and actually learn something from the data. As my funding runs out when the field work's over, I hope to get a bunch done before we leave, so I can work on the papers on the weather days in the next project. That night I cooked dinner, frying up halibut steaks again, this time experimenting a bit more with the spice box. No one complained anyway. But this is a group content with a slice of salami for lunch, so I'm not sure that's much of a complement.

This morning I was half looking forward to hearing my tent flap strongly in the wind, but it turned out to be a reasonably nice day. Andy had come down with a cold yesterday, and decided to sit this one out, so I ran the front wagon and got to coordinate the blasting and recording activities. As far as I can tell, I didn't screw anything up too badly, and we made good progress along the line. During the lulls, Peter tried to teach me to draw penguins, but I'm afraid I'm pretty miserable at it thus far. Perhaps the funniest thing that happened during the day was when Don tried to use the Iridium phones. Some of our shots are just at the maximum range of our radios, but we have several satellite phones that we thought to use for communication if needed. When he turned his on, it rang and a guy with a British accent said hello. Don thought, reasonably, that it was Ash calling him. After a few minutes of confused conversation, it turned out to be Ed King, who is working on a seismic project on the other side of the continent, calling to say hi. Unfortunately by the time they had sorted things out, Don's batteries went dead, I'm sure leaving Ed wondering about what Don puts in his coffee in the morning and wishing he had some.

If we have good weather tomorrow, we should be finished early tomorrow, with enough time to pack most of our stuff for an early departure the next day to our next line. This will be at least two full days of driving. But if all goes as well as it has been, we should be back on OnD by Christmas.

Saturday, 14 December 02, 5:30PM, CT1

Another line finished and another blizzard.

We woke up Friday morning to find only a light breeze and overcast skies. After a sluggish start, I again ran the front hut. Bob has run the rear hut since the beginning, and it has been fun talking with him on the radio. He doesn't go for the radio-speak lingo very much, and often replies with some unexpected quip. For example, our blasting occurs only at the beginning of a minute (for example, 03:26:00), so often a decision has to be made whether to shoot in 35 seconds, or in one minute and 35 seconds. I asked him once if he could make it in 20 seconds (instead of waiting 80 seconds), and rather than respond with a 'roger' or 'charlie charlie', he just said 'making it'. And so on.

The work continued until after noon and began snowing during the last few shots. Fortunately the winds held off until just after we finished, at which point it turned into a pretty good blizzard. We spent an hour or so packing up and drove back through the blinding white hell to camp.

By the time we returned, a few of the others had already completed most of the equipment packing for our next trek, so there wasn't much to do. I took a nap, woke for dinner, did the dishes, and went back to bed. Andy, however, didn't even make it to dinner.

He stayed in his tent during our last weather day, and apparently his condition worsened throughout the day. He developed a hacking cough and lacked enough energy to even eat. As it turns out, another Otter was going to be in the neighborhood, so it was decided to send him back to McMurdo for some better rest and attention, as it was clear that he would not be able to drive the next 250 km leg of our trip. Unfortunately, with the weather closing in, the plane was unable to come last night.

This morning I did not even need to lift my head out of my sleeping bag to know that there was no need to get up for breakfast and an early start for our trip. The wind was still blowing hard, so the plane would not have left McMurdo and we could not leave with Andy. Likely we would not have left in these conditions even if we wanted to. So I slept a few more hours.

By the time I got out of bed, Don, Peter and Ash had decided to go up to our last transect, CT2, to retrieve some equipment we left running there to speed things up for a departure tomorrow. Sridhar has been involved with passive seismic projects here in the past, and they seem to yielded some interesting information. So we left five of these passive instruments running while we were down here. These instrument simply record natural noises, like earthquakes and icequakes. In this case, hopefully they have recorded noises produced by the action of the glacier sliding over the bottom (or deforming the bottom). Such movement seems related to the effect of ocean tides at the end of the glacier, at least in some locations. Much of the research here is focused on the importance of 'sticky spots' in the bed, or parts of the bed that seem to provide more resistance to motion than other parts of the bed. Theoretically, much of the noise recorded on these instruments will therefore be the chattering associated with slip over those spots.

The snow came and went most of the afternoon, but the conditions were good enough to convince the Twin Otter to come out and see us. If it makes it here tonight, it will take Andy and his snow machine (as we will have no way to drive it without him) back to McMurdo, as well as run a few more gear-shuttling trips for us. If all works out as planned, it will take a bunch of our science equipment to our next site, such that we wont have to overload our sleds due to having one snow machine less. In the meantime, I've spent most of the day finishing up a paper and finishing up a proposal. With the data connection at OnD, it's possible that I can get much of the preliminary submittal work finished while here, such that by the time I get to McMurdo with its faster connections and phone links, I will be able to submit both officially so that I wont be tempted to dwell on them during my honeymoon in New Zealand.

Monday, 16 December 02, CT1, Noon

The winds have died down considerably over the past few days, but our tents haven't moved.

The Otter showed up yesterday though. It had left McMurdo on Saturday, thinking it was just going to do a 'quick' turnaround from McMurdo to Onset D to take Andy back. En route, however, we overheard some of their traffic and realized that they had received misinformation, as Andy was with us, about 250 km from OnD. We explained the actual situation, and we could pretend to here them scratching their heads in the background, cursing that if they did what we needed they wouldn't be able to spend Sunday in McMurdo. Only 45 minutes from OnD after 5 hours of flying, they seemed to actually contemplate turning around and coming back on Monday. They could not reach us now because the weather was poor here. But eventually they landed at OnD and spent the night.

The next morning, we spoke with them on the radio and told them that our weather hadn't improved much, though it was calm and not snowing. We told them that there was a flagged runway not far from here, leftover from several years ago. The problem is that when it is cloudy, the light gets so flat that you cant distinguish the ground from the sky and it is easy to 'land hard'. Two miles of flags at equal intervals provide a lot of ground reference. So they decided to give it a try and we headed to the runway to pack it down with our snowmachines and provide some extra ground definition with snowmachine tracks.

I was the first to head off, thinking that the others would leave about five minutes behind me. It was the first time I had been off on my own, I think for the whole trip, and it felt really good. Because of the flat light, it felt a bit like I was driving some anti-grav jet ski in the clouds, like Buck Rogers. There was little wind and it was fairly warm, and it was fun just cruising through the landscape, not really being able to make out anything except for the occasional flag in the distance. My bubble burst a few seconds later when I looked behind me, expecting to see camp receding into the distance, but found a number of the others driving up my tailpipe.

We spent an hour or so just cruising back and forth over the runway, at first serpentining back and forth over the two mile stretch, then concentrating on packing a few thousand feet in the middle. None of it was truly necessary, as the snow conditions were fantastic and the flags were likely enough, but at least we knew that there were no buried obstacles or leftover flags in the middle of the runway and that there were no major sastrugi. After a while, most of the rest of the group showed up and we eventually heard the sound of engines in the clouds. We tried calling them, but our handheld radios did not have the right frequency programmed into them and we did not have their iridium number. It didn't much matter, as a few minutes later they broke below the cloud layer and saw us in the distance. A few minutes later they were on the ground, unloading mail and some resupply equipment.

It took about an hour to load all of our gear. They hadn't heard about us sending out a snowmachine, so we all took a corner and beefed it into the plane. There were also some empty gas drums to send out, empty boxes, garbage, etc, as well as Andy. We were all a bit sad to see him go, but he seemed in pretty good spirits and it seemed likely that we would see him back at OnD in a week or so, after he got some good rest and good drugs. The plane took off, and we headed back to camp to open our mail.

There were several large mail bags, and it felt a little like Christmas on the way into the tent. I remembered remarking that we needed a little Bing Crosby music to get the full effect. The first box I opened was from Kristin, and the first thing I pulled out was a Bing Crosby CD, having no idea that one would be in there. There was also "It's a Wonderful Life" DVD, which was something else I was wishing we had here. There was also a complete party favor kit, containing leis, party poppers, hats, etc., as well as snacks and magazines It turned out to be Paul's birthday too, so it was perfect timing. I distributed the leis, blew off a few poppers, and passed around the bags of homemade cookies. My mom had also sent a few packages, containing more candy and magazines, giving us quite a new assortment of culinary and reading alternatives.

I found that the selection of magazines helped us learn more about each other. A Time magazine had a picture of George W on the cover, with the line 'how they aced their midterm exams'. Don said it was because the cheated. Bob picked it up and said, 'oh, my heros'. A little while later, he remarked to me while reading that he hadn't realized that so-and-so was married to whats-her-name. I asked who so-and-so was, and he said, 'oh just some dickhead democrat', which just about sums up Bob's political views. I tried to pawn off a book of crosswords on Peter, who said that we could be stuck here for 53 days with the food completely gone before he would open that one. A few people remarked that they would rather read the labels on their clothes a few thousand times first. Ash then stated the case would be different for the Maxxim magazine, containing numerous pictures of scantily clad women, "t'woodn't need to be a weetha die fo'that one, jist a cloud on th'orizon" A few comments were made about having a sign up list for it, and whether a lamination machine were available. In any case, the magazines seemed a welcome sight to most, and were a source of new fun facts that we would otherwise be unaware of. My favorites were the back issues of Science News, which I read cover to cover before going on to the magazines.

It still being early morning, people gradually drifted away from the cook tent and started other projects. I took a nap after a lunch of cookies, and found that hors d'oeuvres were being served before dinner tonight. A box of fresh food had come in with the plane, and also being Paul's birthday, it was decided to splurge a little. We had crackers with hummus, oysters, and shrimp, followed by steaks, cherry tomatos with avocado, and some sort of New Zealand sweet potato dish that I cant remember the name of. For desert there were apple slices and fresh grapes. Egg nog was also served towards the end. It was quite a feast. I gave Paul my army-man parachute toy (that I had just received in the package from Kristin) for his birthday. He was very happy about it, but Don was even happier when he announced that he had the perfect way to get it into the atmosphere. Don's been handling most of the blasting on the trip.

The next morning, today, I woke up early and headed for the cook tent, thinking that we would probably leave this morning as there was little wind and no snow. The light was still pretty flat, however, and there was some forecast for strong winds rumored about, so it was decided by someone to spend another day here. Everyone spent an hour or so in the tent, still pulling new fun facts out of the magazines, and again gradually drifted away. I took a pre-lunch nap, then powered up my computer and am writing this to the music of Bing and another lunch of homemade cookies. After another nap, I might start on a new paper.

Wednesday, 18 December 02, 10PM, UPC1B

We have arrived at our last site on ice stream C.

The weather broke late on Monday, and it soon became clear that we would likely be leaving the next morning. As hoped for, the weather held, so we packed up camp and headed off. It was a bright sunny day with little wind, but I decided to bundle up right off the bat so as not to develop a chill throughout the day, and I think that was a good decision. As we headed out, our shadows led the way and we were greeted by thousands of winkling lights most of the way up, as the sun reflected from a surface hoar.

The trip was largely uneventful. I suppose that I began to feel a bit more nostalgic about our adventure along the way, as I realized more and more how unusual it was. There aren't many places in the world that you can snow machine for days on end and not see anything except flat, white snowfields. There are no mountains on the horizon, no nunataks, no birds, no stream valleys or hillsides, or patches of bare ground, just snow. And more snow. And more snow. It's really unlike anything I've ever experienced before.

We made camp next to a cache of fuel barrels, and left first thing the next morning. The weather had deteriorated, but not horribly so. There was a good overcast, but the light was not too flat. We drove through a few snow squalls, but generally the conditions were ok. There was more sastrugi on this leg, so I think that everyone generally felt that this was a longer day, even though it was the same as yesterday basically, which is about 100 miles.

The snow machines are generally getting pretty poor mileage. Mine is especially bad, as I am towing one of the wagons that has become heaped with gear. I'm getting about 3mpg, whereas the average is about 4. At the moment we seem to have plenty of fuel.

Friday, 20 December 02, 9PM, C1B

The wind howls and pump growls.

We woke up yesterday to some pretty strong winds. They started during the night, and essentially have not let up. The sky has been clear and sunny, with air temperatures only -5C, so it would be great weather otherwise. But the wind is strong enough to create large drifts behind anything standing in its way, and can chill your gloveless fingers to numb within 5 minutes. An especially large drift formed between the cook tent and science tent, such that one has to climb up then slide down to go from one to the other. Any other place that snow can settle also gets drifted in. Fortunately we placed our tents in the right direction this time, but typically our doors get covered with a thick spin drift that you have to kick at before you can open. The shitter tent has no floor, and a small gap between the walls and snow provided an excellent landing spot, creating a pretty spiral-shaped drift inside the tent, stretching like a mobius band from one side to the other. Over open ground, these drifts are called sastrugi, but they typically only make a foot or so of relief, as they tend to scour each other up and down. But when you set up a tent or a sled in the way, they create rather beautiful, albeit awkward, giant sastrugi. Looking downwind from a tent, you can see that it creates a lee that is over 100 meters long before the snow streams on either side link up again. It's really quite fascinating to watch it all happen, at least while standing in the lee of something.

After a lazy breakfast, we broke up into our normal working groups. Leo and Sridhar began surveying our next line. Bob and Paul unpacked the seismic equipment. Don, Peter, and Anatoly drove to the fuel and food cache (about 15 miles away) to retrieve some goodies. And Ash and I worked on getting the drill going. Andy is still in McMurdo; apparently he developed a little fluid in his lungs and the doctors want that to clear up before he comes back out. Things went pretty smoothly at first, and we were able to get a new shitter hole drilled without any major problems. Once more fuel arrived, we headed out to the first pole.

Strong winds move a lot of snow, but only within a foot of the ground. It travels in little streams, like thousands of braids twisting and squirming towards the horizon. Driving towards pole one, with camp and everyone else behind me, I got the sensation of crawling along the bottom of a very wide river. I had my heavy parka on, with my head bundled up, so I may as well have been wearing a diving outfit. And pulling the drill and the water tank, it is slow going, like there is some stronger-than-air resistive force. It's all a little surreal out here, when it comes down to it. The spell was broken after a few seconds though, when I realized that Ash wasn't in front of me because he was actually heading towards the correct pole, unlike me.

Once we got things started up again, we discovered that the engine that drives the pump had developed a funny noise that seemed to be getting worse. So we pickled the pipes and took it back to camp for some investigative surgery. We pulled off the air filter to find it fairly packed with snow, then looked in the carburetor to find that ice had built up there as well. So we pulled off the works and brought it into the tent. After borrowing Don's hair dryer and thoroughly drying things out, we put it all back together without ending up with any extra pieces. We fired it up and it seemed to work fine, but by this time it was 7PM and too late to start any real holes. So we went for dinner.

Peter, Don and Anatoly had already returned and did a major reorganization and consolidation of our food stocks. For the first time, I really felt comfortable with the amount of food available for lunch. I think that because we spent longer at our last sites than anticipated (and having run out of tea, cocoa, salami, etc) and as a result shortened our work here, we now have more than planned per day and what seems to be a lot. Plus, Shad put together a large box of food at OnD before he left and set it into the cargo line for caching at our current location. This box contained tons of bagels, cheese and butter, enough to keep us all happy while here. Plus, when at our last visit with the Otter (when Andy left), I skimmed a weeks' worth of dehydrated food from the resupply box before anyone had a chance to count them, so I haven't been hungry for the past two days. I found it funny that some other lunchmeat and sliced cheese found in the box of resupply food (actually food leftover from last season and cached at OnD) was immediately attacked and consumed, confirming my suspicion that even though I'm the only that has been openly grumpy at the lack of suitable lunch food (other than Shad, who is gone), that more and better would be consumed by everyone else without a second thought were it available. At this point, I cant even ask a question like "where's the salami" without Sridhar or Peter giving me some abuse about it like "when it's gone that's it" or "there's plenty of food here", when all I asked was where to find a slice for lunch. I've just been ignoring it, but it kind of takes the fun out of being here.

Today we spent the day drilling shot holes. After a sluggish start out of the cook tent, we fired up the drill at the first hole and waited for the water to get warm. And waited, and waited, and waited. The drill itself, while functional, could have been designed much better. The main problems are the controls are in awkward locations, the plumbing fittings easy to jar loose and spring leaks, and, perhaps most importantly, the large number of fittings located all around the unit act as heat radiators in the wind, seemingly loosing heat almost as fast as the heaters make it. A little more forethought and consideration for how it would be arranged on the sled could have led to a more user and wind friendly design, but it works well enough and I suppose that's most important. My first thought for a solution was to just take one of a dozen 8'x10' size blue tarps that I would have expected to find lying around, and lash it to some poles to create a wind break. But unlike Alaska, blue tarps have not caught on here. I've only seen one tarp in camp, and it is a huge silver one. Oddly, duct tape and bailing wire are not common either. But we got creative and parked one of the wagons upwind of the plumbing and threw a skidoo cover over the water tank, and this largely solved the problem and gave us a cozy place to escape the wind at the same time. That night I was still pretty exhausted from the last traverse, and went to bed early before dinner was served (I scarfed leftovers from the night before).

See the pictures!

Monday, 23 December 02, 11PM, C1B

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Ash and I spent the day drilling on our own on Saturday. Everyone else was drafted into the geophone core. We also lost our wagon to block the wind, but fortunately it was not as strong as the day before. It was fun working together, but the noise from the pumps and heaters is so loud that it's tough to make much conversation. I got some significant time into reading my next book, the Count of Monte Cristo, which Don lent me since I was out of romance novels.

We got back to camp around 7PM, and I decided to take a bath before pickling the drill. I was greeted first by Sridhar, who seeing me pull the rig downwind of camp with it still running, no doubt realized my intentions and eagerly pitched in to help set it up. I was first in while everyone else was eating, so I had a nice relaxing time of it. As I went back to my tent in my bathrobe and bunny boots, I yelled towards the cook tent that the tub was free. By the time I got dressed and came into the tent, I hadn't realized anyone was in the tub already, and wanted to mention to the first person to shut off the burners so as not to get scalded. Apparently Sridhar was already trying to get it, and found out the hard way, as I heard him shoveling snow into the tub to cool it down.

The first time I set up the tub, I dumped the water every third person or so. This night, however, I was still feeling tired and had little desire to perform this service. By the time the 6th or 7th person was in, the water was turning pretty dark. Leo was the last one brave enough to venture in. He left Paul his camera so that Paul could take a picture of him while in the tub. As Paul left the tent to head over there, he very excitedly started shouting, "Help, save me. You're scaring me Leo", at which point the tent door flew back open with Paul leading a half naked Leo. Apparently no one had told Leo about the burners and he hadn't quite figured out the snow trick. So half wet and in the wind, he threw on his bottoms and made a dash back to the tent. Once the water was cooled and he got a 'clean', I pickled the drill and covered over the tub for the night.

Next morning, Ash and I went drilling again, this time for a refraction line. For this type of work, we drill holes every several kilometers, rather than every 300 m. So the driving distances increase, which is somewhat inconvenient because the snow here is much harder and bumpier than the other locations we've been to. It was another fairly breezy day, but not so much that snow was blowing around. However, by 1PM we had only finished 3 holes, and we had another 9 to do, which at this rate would take us two days and hold up the work quite a bit. We tried blocking the plumbing from the wind as best as we could, but that didn't seem to help. Then I had what I thought was a bright idea. I had been told to keep the thermostats to just at the point below which the water would boil, which is what we had been doing. However, the thermostats went up another few hundred degrees, and thermometers all read up to 600 degrees. I took this to mean the equipment was rated for these temperatures. Further, there was a pressure release valve that presumably kicked off before things got dangerous. So I cranked it up a bit and hoped for the best.

Fortunately, nothing blew up. And what was even better was that the water coming straight from the heaters was hot enough to drill with, meaning that we didn't have to wait for the whole tank to heat up, which effectively eliminated my reading time. But we started cranking holes out in rapid succession. By about 6PM, however, we had to make a decision as to whether to stop and leave the last two holes for the next day, or go for it and get back quite late, as we were 25 kilometers or so from camp already. We decided to go for it, as then we could put the drill to rest forever and get started with the shooting right away. We finished by about 7:30, and I thought we could just ditch the sleds and race back to camp while dinner was still hot, but Ash wanted to do things right, which was just as well. So we put the drill to bed, dragged it a few kilometers further to our caching location, dropped off some more barrels we had been toting, and headed back to camp towing empty sleds for use later.

It had been snowing on and off throughout the day, and the light was very flat on the way back. In these conditions, you literally cannot see the ground topography or distinguish it from the sky. It's kind of like being in complete darkness, but different. You can see people and equipment just fine, just not the ground. I think of it like those blue screens they use on TV, you can see everything just fine except the background. The problem this causes is that the ground is fairly rough, so you get knocked around without being able to anticipate it. I found that if I drove a few feet from Ash, just about in his blind spot in a car, I could get significant definition of the surface in the dim shadow that his snowmachine created. So at least I could tell in advance whether it was my left kidney or my right that was about get launched into my throat. All was fine, until we made it to camp.

Sridhar again greeted us with a smile on our arrival, as I think there was some talk of coming to look for us in a few more minutes. We had pulled around through the back of camp so as to park into the wind next to the other machines. I noticed that Peter had taken his makeshift flag pole off his snowmachine and planted in the snow, and I was about to make a joke that his machine had drifted in completely (leaving only the pole visible), when the my snowmachine decided to flip over unexpectedly. Sastrugi is at most one foot high, but drifts behind man-made object can grow enormous. Our snowmachines had created such drifts, which normally we just drive around or over. However, in the flat light and having just driven an hour over sastrugi and not really paying attention anyway, I drove over the side of it, tipping my machine perpendicular to the ground, like those stunt drivers who ride on two wheels. I was only going walking speed and fortunately was kneeling on the seat to start with so I could easily plant my free foot to brace it, but it struck me how ironic it would be to get sent home after driving thousands of kilometers only to break a leg taxi-ing in camp.

I don't know exactly what the turning point was or when it occurred, but sometime over the past few days, the trip actually started getting fun and I felt more a part of the group than I had before, I think largely because Sridhar has stopped giving me the stink eye and actually laughs (or pretends to) at my jokes. I didn't find myself grumbling and perseverating to myself during the day, but rather thinking of new projects and even missing dinner in order to get this one completed on time. It's this type of energy and focus that make field projects fun. Perhaps it has a bit to do with Andy being away, as there was one less chef in the kitchen and more demand on me to actually do something autonomously. In any case, I'm glad of it. Andy is now on the OK list for travel, but flight schedules and the Christmas holiday will prevent him from joining us until at least Thursday, which is about when we should arrive back at OnD, if all goes well.

Today we tried our first refraction line, and it was a learning experience for all of us. Rather than just try to get echoes off the ice/bed interface as in reflection work, refractions attempt to get echoes of the layers deeper than the ice bed, such as if there were a layer of sediments between the ice and bedrock. This requires larger offsets between the shots and the receivers, which means the shots have to be bigger. Significantly bigger. Because the shots are bigger, they take longer to load, and because they are farther away, it is more difficult to communicate. This and several other factors made for a long day.

I ran the seismographs in the hut. This time, to save manpower and decrease communication needs, we ran both seismographs from the same hut. This hadn't been tried before, and I had never actually set up a hut myself as I was always drilling during setups, so I learned a few things trying to find enough space to set up both units and their associated batteries, monitors, keyboards, shot boxes, etc. Fortunately everyone else was learning new things too, so I didn't slow things down. One thing that was quickly learned was that it takes a hell of a long time to put 600 pounds of explosives into a three inch hole, one pound at a time. You cant just drop them in, as was learned, because they get hung up in the hole prematurely, preventing the rest of the load from reaching the bottom as well. You also cant load them all up on a cap wire and lower them down, because then they would stick up too high. But it is also difficult to lower down successive strings on separate cap wires, because they tend to fight with each other and tangle on the way down. These any many more lessons were learned by several teams of loaders.

Meanwhile, once I had all of the equipment running, there was fuck all to do. Don managed to get a few of the smaller (that is, permanently screwed up) shots off, which we recorded, but minutes turned into hours, waiting for holes to get loaded. I used this time to write a bunch of postcards, so it wasn't like I was completely bored. And communications kept me on my toes occasionally, as I was trying to relay messages between teams via satellite phone, vhf, and fm radios. In the end, we only got four shots off out of the 14 or so total. Sridhar was the last hold out in thinking that we could finish the work tonight and I'd have been up for it, but at about 8PM (with obviously many more hours to go) he called it quits and headed back to camp.

I got back first and got dinner going. I've cooked three times now, and every time it's been halibut, and I think I'm starting to get good at it. I fried up some pita bread and put cheese on it first (pitazas), as a quick hors d'oeuvres while the rice and halibut cooked up. People trickled in over the next hour, and it was quite a fun evening, as everyone shared stories of the problems they had loading their holes, and the solutions they came up with to solve them. It was quite interesting how many of the same solutions were derived, and how useful most of them found explosives could be for non-explosive purposes. It was after 10PM by the time all the food was ready, and everyone was fairly exhausted (it was a very windy and cold day today), but I think everyone went to bed with a full stomach and in good spirits. All of the holes were declared loaded (despite what the original volumes were intended to be), so tomorrow it's just a matter of shooting them and packing up, and we're off to OnD and our Christmas dinner.

Thursday, 26 December 02, 10:15PM, OnD

Merry Fucking Christmas.

The next day, I again worked the seismographs in the hut while most everyone else helped out with the shooting. Now that the holes were all loaded, things progressed pretty quickly. The shots had to occur on 15 minute intervals, rather than 1 minute, because we had a number of automated, single geophone seismographs programmed to turn on every 15 minutes, whether there was a shot or not. But there was plenty for me to do initially in between shots just trying to coordinate everything and get the computers ready. The first several shots went off without a hitch, and by noon it looked like we would be finished shortly. We coordinated the nearby shots using the VHF radios. As the distances increased, however, this link deteriorated too much, such that we had to begin using the satellite phones. Somehow Paul got left on his own to shoot, and for some reason two intervals went past with misfires. By this time, Anatoly, Sridhar, and Leo were in the hut with me, and we began discussing the data. I lost track of time, and with 30 seconds to go, Paul called and asked if I was ready to shoot. I had the wrong screens up at the time and scrambled to get them ready and get everyone to stop moving. During this process, our phone link went dead (as often happens) and I was unable to tell him to abort at the last seconds as it appeared that I would not be ready. The system that Don and I had worked out was that if communications are broken at the time of shooting, that we would wait rather than miss recording the shot, but I don't think this message made it to Paul before Don left him in charge. In the end, one of the two seismograph were ready, so it wasn't a total loss. The rest of the shots proceeded without hitch, though one interval on the last hole was missed as the blasters moved farther from the shothole, which proved to be fortuitous. So after an hour or two of packing up the gear, our work on Ice Stream C was finally completed.

Once back at camp, we had another late dinner. I worked on reorganizing my notes from the previous days in a more easy to read form, and it felt good to feel like I had made a contribution. I also counted up the number of shots we had taken so far to get an idea of how many chances to screw up that we had avoided, and we had only done so twice out of 450 chances, one of which was that day. I thought that was pretty good. Sridhar though made a comment suggesting that my screw up of a 200# shot skewed the results over the large number of 1# shots. In the moment, I thought it was just some friendly kidding, but in the end I seemed to have been blamed for losing a shot which should never have been made without proper comms, rather than just blamed for a 15 minute delay. So that was likely the next trigger into a downward spiral of wanting to catch the next flight out of here, a spiral for which the trigger itself does not justify, just triggers. This trip has been the biggest emotional rollercoaster ride that I've been on in a very long time.

Thus I found it hard to be cheery on Christmas Day. We woke early but it was nearly noon before we were on the road back to OnD, and nearly 3 before we left our cache 15 miles away. I was exhausted. We had just worked a number of long days and I decided on a little extra cheering up on Christmas Eve. To unwind on days I felt most lonely and to keep from crying myself to sleep, I had taken to drinking a glass of Scotch and watching an episode of the Simpsons before going turning out the lights (pulling my hat down over my eyes). That night I watched three, and didn't stop with one glass, so I had even less sleep than normal. I don't recall anyone mentioning anything about it being Christmas, and I told myself that it was just because we were redeclaring Christmas to be the day after we arrived back at OnD. The traveling, therefore, wasn't much fun, and the bumpy sastrugi didn't help. By the time we stopped and set up camp, it was 9PM and dinner was still a ways away. So ate a dehy meal in my tent and went to sleep without socializing, or watching the Simpsons. It was by far the lamest Christmas I've ever had, made perhaps worse by how appropriate the setting could be for a good one.

Next day, today, we got an early start and found driving conditions substantially improved. For some reason, wind conditions are substantially stronger on Ice Stream C, and by the time we crossed to D, the sastrugi had largely disappeared and we could travel quite fast. As we pulled out, I found that most of the machines we're lined up in the way that I had wanted to get a group shot when we first departed. I had wanted to get one with everyone standing in the foreground with the machines in the back, but didn't have the energy to try to organize it. Rather, I took one of my standard shots with me in the foreground with an outstretched hand holding the camera, and that got me in good spirits. We stopped several times so that Bob could get his picture taken at 'convergence' points, where latitudes and longitudes cross with whole numbers. In most inhabited places, these points are widely spaced. Here, near the pole, there are many such crossings in a short distance and few people to be the first to say they've stood there. Apparently there is a web site devoted to cataloguing such pictures. We traveled about 70 miles that day, roughly the distance from New York to Philadelphia, and reached OnD by about 4PM.

As we approached, I could see that a number of things had changed in our absence. I couldn't tell what they were from the distance, but a number of new, large structures had been built. I wondered if McDonalds had opened a new franchise, or if some strip mall had been built, or whether the carnival was in town. There are only four people staying here semi-permanently in a few structures, but it sure felt like we were leaving the wilderness and entering civilization. As we got closer, I could see that these new structures were in fact snow forts, created with large blocks of snow, and decorated radio towers. Apparently the camp staff had some free time on their hands in our absence. Another fort had been carved into an extremely large drift, and a light house or air traffic control tower started on top of it. It was all very well done.

I had spent the day looking forward to a good Christmas dinner either that night or the next day, but was disappointed to find that dinner had been held the day before, consisting of lobster tails and prime rib. Later, this prompted some discussions on Christmas in Antarctica in general. Typically, Christmas has been held on a Saturday, like every other holiday here. Last year was the first year that the McMurdo-approved dinner was held on Christmas itself, apparently because a number of complaints were heard about it. Sridhar explained to Doug his sentiment, which was that we're only here for a few months and we don't really need any such luxuries, and uttered a line which I believe really captures the difference in our styles, 'sympathy, I have none', in reference to those who would complain about when Christmas was held. This strikes me as why peanut butter on a few crackers is considered suitable lunch, why baths which could be had every night happen once a month, why iridium phones are not used for personal calls, and many other things. It's all the little things that make camp life fun and special instead of tolerable and boring that are missing here, and those are the things that I really like to provide and enjoy. Whether it's because Scott didn't have them or not, I cant say, but I have learned one thing on this trip: on my way down here I asked myself whether skill in geophysics or skill at having fun at 30 below was more important on this trip, and I have an answer now. A question asked shortly afterwards really drives the point home. One of the drillers asked whether they should disassemble our hot water drill (we wont need it for work anymore) and take it home with them tomorrow, or whether we wanted to keep it for bathing. The answer was a no-brainer to most of us, but when Sridhar paused to actually consider it, many of us looked up from our dinner plates and exchanged an expression of you've-got-to-be-kidding-me. Everyone is different and has different needs, wants, and comfort levels. My complaint here is not that these exist, but the 'my way or the skiway' approach to dealing with them does nothing to improve the science and makes for unnecessarily and unfortunate alienation. I still hold out hope that we will be able to work together as well as we had this summer on projects that don't involve field work.

On the drive today I reflected on what's been getting me gloomy. During phone conversations in preparations for the trip, I felt like I had finally found a colleague with my same interests, energy level, and personality in Sridhar, whom I had known for many years but never really hung out with. For whatever the reasons, this has not turned out to be the case, which is be unfortunate but fine, as there's often no accounting for such things, they just happen. The real bummer is the feeling I have that I'm not free to ask questions, make suggestions, or not have an opinion outside of the party line, or perhaps more accurately that it's not worth the effort. There's certainly no open oppression, but it only takes so many dirty looks, cold shoulders, or unnecessary rebukes before I begin to look for other alternatives. I come on these trips to have fun as much as anything, and when I cant get a supportive laugh from a well-meaning joke or an honest answer to an honest question, I begin to lose interest in trying, especially as these subtle interactions are observed by and have an influence on everyone else. So, when my energy is too low to smile and nod, I mostly find other ways to amuse myself (eg., the Simpsons) and put my brain to work (eg., writing papers and proposals), trying not spoil the fun of others, if that's what they call it.

See the pictures!

Friday, 27 December 02, 5:15 PM, OnD

It would appear that Christmas has been cancelled this year for IO-205.

Before I went back to my tent last night, I heard Leo ask Sridhar whether he could sleep in tomorrow, and Sridhar replied that he could sleep as late as he wanted. I contemplated nothing less than taking the whole day off, and possibly the next as well, so I was glad to hear that I would not have to make a scene about it. When I finally made it to the galley about 11AM, I found that the rest of the group was leaving, as if to start working. Everyone seemed cheerful and ask if I slept well, which at the time I found very refreshing and pleasant, but later began to wonder whether I had missed some meeting I was unaware of, as everyone was indeed heading out to work. I didn't even ask, I just made myself a heaping plate of leftovers and enjoyed my day off regardless. Bob was the only one who did similarly, and I've heard him stick up for himself several times in similar ways. Everyone else except Andy and Ash are on Sridhar's payroll, and for the most part when he says let's go do something, everyone says OK, which I think Sridhar interprets to mean it's truly OK, rather than 'what choice do I have'. But I could easily be wrong. Andy's done a lot more projects like this than I have, and for whatever his reasons, he's seems pretty content to go with the flow without much discussion, which may be Sridhar's expectation for me and possibly the reason for our weird dynamic. I could easily be misinterpreting this, however, and everyone may really prefer not to have a day off. In any case, no one asked me to do anything and I didn't volunteer. I spent a few hours in the galley finishing a few papers and getting some emails ready for tomorrow (which I guess is not truly taking a day off, but it's certainly a chance to be my own boss again for a while, which is a break from the norm).

I have high hopes that the next few weeks will be more pleasant. With an established camp, there are more opportunities for diversions and people outside of the group to hang out with. It really has not been awful by any means, but it was so refreshing to talk with some of the camp guys openly about whatever came up without feeling like I needed to censor myself. I read through my journal last night (I had no idea it had gotten so long!), and in retrospect, I wish I had been more direct and demanding and trusted that voice that says "your toes are being stepped on, do something about it". I guess when it comes down to it, I'm no better at initiating conversations that might lead to confrontations than most people. Fortunately, society has long been prepared for this and offers a wide variety of tasty adult beverages to remedy the symptoms, at the risk of perhaps prolonging them indefinitely at a barely tolerable level.

Monday, 30 December 02, 7:45PM, OnD

We are an even leaner and meaner seismic machine.

Saturday was a beautiful day without a cloud in the sky, and we began a long longitudinal line not far from camp. The shotholes were already surveyed and drilled, so nearly all our manpower could be directed towards reflection profiling. The snow here is significantly different than other places we've been. The surface is very smooth and covered with what would appear to be fresh powder, but there hasn't been any snowfall in quite some time. I don't really understand it, but even though it does get windy here, there is almost no sastrugi, and one could travel as fast as one cared to without getting bounced around. It's kind of a granular surface and everywhere you step you sink in a few inches. It would be perfect for skate skiing, had anyone brought skis.

With so many people working and conditions so good, work proceeded rapidly. The end of the line was cut short a few pole as we found a few small crevasses that were previously unnoticed, but the line itself is longer than we are going to shoot anyway, so it did not affect too much. Sridhar and Bob ran the huts, Don and Andy did the shooting, and the rest of us moved phones. With so many jugheads, we reduce our moving cycles from 30 minutes to 20 to 25 minutes. I began thinking about the next few weeks and at one point mentioned to Sridhar that I wanted to leave her on about Jan 7, so that I could catch the Jan 10 flight to Christchurch from McMurdo, leaving enough time for weather delays so that I could ensure I would get there by Jan 14, which is when Kristin will arrive and we can start our honeymoon. We decided to talk about it further later that night, but dinner and other conversation dragged on and I needed to get some sleep.

The next morning, Sunday, I slept in, as was our original arrangement. When I arrived at the galley about 9AM, however, everyone had long gone to start work. I was half-expecting this, so it didn't surprise me too much. I took advantage of the quiet atmosphere and took a shower, put on clean clothes, and had a leisurely breakfast. It was by far the most pleasant morning I've had here. I left about 10:30 and spent the rest of the day moving phones. When I arrived, Paul had just driven over the geophone cable, cutting through the insulation but not damaging the wires, and saved everyone the effort of coming up with some warm electrical tape to fix it as I had some in my pocket. This day was completely overcast and the light very flat, in strong contrast to the previous day. Almost no definition on the ground could be seen, and I always find it remarkable that this could be the case. With the snow so soft and forgiving, it really felt like driving on a cloud. The weather did not slow us down at all, and we had our most successful day yet.

That night, Sridhar and I discussed plans for the next few weeks. He had apparently noticed my lack of heartiness in the project. It reminded me a bit of a story Max Wyss once told me about his time in the army. A competition was held to see who could perform maneuvers like turn left, turn right, etc., with the most skill. It came down to him and another guy, who each perform flawlessly and a decision could not be made solely from the drill. The instructor turned to the class and announced that the other guy was the winner, saying that while both were performing to the same level, the winner was doing so out of a desire to please, while Max was doing it out of spite, all the while saying 'fuck you' with his eyes. My eyes were apparently saying 'yeah, whatever, nevermind'.

Sridhar is a much better public speaker than I am, and I've always admired that talent in him. In any case, we talked a bit about convenience of flight scheduled, and he pretty much said it was up to me when to leave, including any of the flights occurring this week, in a very non-confrontational matter. I told him that I was ready to leave and was basically just putting my time in at this point for the sake of completing the job, and his response was if it's not fun anymore, then no sense letting myself get irritated, but I should make a decision. For me, I think the turning point was that open recognition from him, which to me opened the door to grab a more active role in the planning if I were to stay. Though a few extra weeks on the beach sounded pretty tempting too. I thought about it a lot that night and talked about with Kristin on the phone.

Next morning, today, we got an early start and again made rapid progress. The weather had turned completely sunny again, and the snow once again sparkled with multicolored lights, twinkling on and off in every direction as you traveled over it. I had finished my book the day before, and spent the five minute shooting breaks reading a guide book for New Zealand. There do seem to a wide variety of activities there, with an even wider variety of terrains, subcultures, and wildlife. We had talked again yesterday about some of the sub-projects we wanted to try while out here as we had over the summer planning for the trip, and I thought about those while moving. At dinner I proposed to finish up testing the powered parachute tomorrow instead of jugheading, as well as attempting a 4D seismic project at our next line, similar to the work I had done for my thesis, and it was all well received. It was very refreshing discussing different options and their tradeoffs and how to fit them into the schedule without holding up the main effort. Had I not been so content to lapse into bouts of self-pity the past few weeks, likely I could initiated the same conversation long ago, and had a substantially different view of my time here. But better late than never I suppose.

I switched with Andy to be house mouse tomorrow, so that everyone else could work on the line while I stayed at camp doing dishes in the morning and working on the parachute during the day. It should be a short day of seismic in any case, as it's almost done now, and tomorrow we're having New Year's dinner and celebration. It appears that there is no more lobster tail, but plenty of crab legs. I'll guess that will have to do. But I also have a complete box of party favors sent by Kristin, so maybe that will distract everyone from noticing the sub-Christmas fare. If not, we still have quite a sizeable amount of alcohol left, and not a lot of time to finish it.

See the pictures!

Thursday, 02 January 03, 7:45PM, OnD

Should old acquaintance be forgot.

After some house mousing, I spent most of New Year's Eve day rebuilding the powered parachute. I was able to crudely fix the broken servo, replace the broken prop, and move the engine mounts and chute struts into new locations that I thought might help performance. That took most of the day, and I didn't have a chance to try it that night. As it turned out, we did not have our New Year's Eve feast, as someone forgot to inform Flora of our expectation. But one was planned for the next day instead. A few of us spent the evening watching movies, waiting for the new year to arrive. It was a fun evening with plenty of laughter and drinking, later making me wish a bit that more evenings had been spent like that.

Sridhar, Andy, Paul and I spent most of the next afternoon GPSing some survey poles to measure ice motion. These poles had been placed last year, and were arranged more or less in a grid with rows spaced 5 km apart and columns at 2.5 km. We each picked a row and plugged in the beginning, middle and end coordinates into our hand held GPS units. The idea was to start at the middle, then navigate towards one of the ends, coming across poles along the way. We would each log GPS data for 20 minutes at the pole using survey grade GPS units, all at the same time on the same column, to ease later processing, then move for 20 minutes to the next pole, and start logging again.

It was a fair enough plan, but several factors complicated matters. We left in about a 30 knot wind with very poor visibility. By the time I got to my line, I could barely see the ground and I was getting hit at head level with blowing snow. Because I had to use the handheld GPS to find where I was going, I was driving with one hand. Because of the wind, our beautiful snow surface had turned into sastrugi hell with large drifts. Because it was hard to find the poles, I knelt on the seat to get a better view. Fortunately it was not cold (about -5C), otherwise driving with one hand over invisible-but-large sastrugi while kneeling and looking all directions at once for poles would have been a pain. Because of these difficulties, I arrived at my first pole late, but was able to get the minimum time in. I turned on my radio, and could barely make out Andy telling OnD that he was about to move to the next pole. I told him I had finished the first as well, and that I thought the weather sucked. Because we were barely in range and the wind was dominating the transmission, it took a number of attempts to get that message across.

After searching in vain for the second pole, I nearly gave up and went back to camp. It was a pretty crazy situation, sending people out alone, 20-30km from camp, in a whiteout blizzard, with essentially no communication, relying completely on the GPS to find home again, as the snowmachine tracks quickly drifted over and were more or less invisible anyway. Once I realized that I was completely lost and had no idea where the next pole was, I sat on my machine contemplating my situation. I had plenty of reasons to go back to camp, but the only one I could come up with to stay was that I didn't want to be the only (smart) one who gave up. I had just about made up my mind to return when the clouds parted slightly and the pole I had been looking for appeared about 300 m in front of me. I was again a bit late, but with enough time to log it to get a good position. I decided if I had trouble finding the next pole that I would turn around then, but fortunately the skies continued to improve and I could actually get decent visibility. By the end of the line, much of the sky was blue and it was a much more pleasant experience. That evening we had a nice dinner. It was pretty traditional with turkey and roast and all of the fixings, similar to Thanksgiving. It was a wine-type evening, and plenty of bottles emerged.

Today again was another windy day, but the skies remained mostly blue such that the visibility was pretty good. Too windy for seismics, about half of the group went up about 25km from camp to our next line to lay out the cables and get everything set up for when we are able to work. Don, Sridhar, Andy and I stayed behind. I didn't have much pressing to do, so I disassembled the powered parachute as I think we've lost our last chance to try it. Should the wind die down enough for it, we will spend that time doing seismics, trying to get out of here as soon as possible. If all goes according to plan, Sridhar and I will leave in a week, with everyone else following a few days later.

In the afternoon, I went to our last line near camp to stand up our survey flags such that we could find the holes again in future years if desired. The flags are about 1 foot square and stapled onto bamboo poles. We take them down while shooting because the flapping of the flag creates noise on the geophones. With all of this wind, however, many of the flags and nearly all of the holes drifted over, making setting them back up something of a treasure hunt. Some part of the bamboo or flag was usually visible, and once found the snow end could be used as a probe to try and knock into the buried piece of plywood. I found all but three out of about 50, and with another hour or two I could finish it off. Although it was still a bit breezy, it was nice to get out of camp on my own and just enjoy the solitude. I thought surveying yesterday might turn out like that, but it was a bit too hectic and frenzied to make the most of it. As I drove up and down our line, I felt a bit nostalgic as I could see our snowmachine tracks peeking out beneath the drifts and clumps of snow where the geophones had been, remembering that I sat here or there reading this or that part of my book. It was a remarkable change in surface quality too, with our cushy powder being replaced by hard rock, bumpy sastrugi. I guess it's the sunshine that gradually melts and recrystallizes the drifts into the nice stuff, certainly wouldn't want to try skiing out there now.

See the pictures!

Monday, 06 January 03, 8:30PM, OnD

We're in the home stretch now.

To be honest, the past few days are a bit of a blur. It was decided to attempt some refraction work first at our last line about 20 miles from camp, as a way to hedge our bets against the weather. Since a drifted in seismic cable is fairly impervious to wind-related noise, we could get that part of the work done regardless of the weather. This meant, however, that the 4D seismic experiment that I was most interested in had to be blown off, since it requires the cable to stay stationary for about 36 hours while the hourly shooting would occur, which could only happen if the cable was not needed for other work. This only could happen during the refraction work, since it takes about a day to load the shots and another day to shoot them. But at this point, I was already in ready-to-leave mode, so I wasn't too phased by it.

We broke up into three teams to load the larger shots. This entailed stringing together 3 one-pound loads together using excess cap wire, then dropping them into the hole. The trouble here is that the holes are 4 inches diameter and the 1-pound sticks are about 4 inches long, meaning that if you just dropped single sticks down, they might turn sideways on their way down the 60 meter hole and get jammed. Stringing together three makes the package longer and more difficult to jam because its harder to turn sideways but, as we found, not impossible. If the packages were not very tight, the lower one could still torque a bit and jam, as happened on two of our holes, meaning that no more charges could be dropped to the bottom and a new hole would need to be loaded. After some experimentation, all three groups discovered the necessary tightening tricks and got the holes loaded. This took all day, by the end of which the weather had deteriorated significantly. Visibility dropped to a few hundred meters and the light was fairly flat, with occasional squalls of falling snow. It wasn't particularly windy though, and the drove home was fun. I went back with Don, Peter and Anatoly. I was pulling up the rear, and at one point I saw Anatoly driving with his left hand (the throttle is on the right handle bar), and noticed he was fiddling with something with his right. So I pulled around to his right side to see what he was doing.

An interesting thing about driving so far with people is that you begin to learn everyone's different style of driving. Anatoly tends to sit side-saddle to his left. I knew this, and knew that he wouldn't see me on his right side. After he had finished putting his GPS back into his right pocket, I knew he would look over his left shoulder to make sure that I hadn't been left behind, as even a few minute stop would put me out of visibility of the group. Sure enough, he glanced over his left shoulder and didn't see me, then gunned it towards Don and Peter to tell them that I was lost. Don was sitting side-saddle towards his right, and could see Anatoly frantically waving and pointing back, but with me just a few meters to his right. So we all stopped briefly and had a good laugh. All three groups arrived back at camp more or less at the same time, and more or less had the same thing in mind, as more or less simultaneously six packs of beer emerged on the dinner tables in front of everyone. Most of the work here is not too strenuous, but simply being outside all day is often a bone-wearying experience.

Next day, Sridhar and Bob went up to the line (about 20 miles away) early to set up the Refteks. These are useful instruments that can be set up as either passive seismometers, recording any natural shaking events (such as earthquakes or icequakes or bed slips) as they occur, or programmable to turn on at specific times, like every 15 minutes in our case. I went up with Ash and Paul a bit later to set up the seismographs on our reflection lines. By about noon, we began shooting the larger shots, to be recorded on both the reflection line and the Refteks. Because the Refteks we set at 15 minute intervals, the shots had to occur on those intervals as well, though missing intervals was not a problem as only noise gets recorded. It does mean, however, that if you're ready at 15 minutes and 30 seconds, that you have to wait another 14 minutes and 30 seconds before you shoot, which introduces considerable delay throughout the day. So in the end it took a pretty full day to shoot these 10 shots or so, as it was not possible to move from one hole to another quickly enough to shoot every 15 minutes. I worked the back hut that day, and since I wasn't handling comms and the instruments were fairly automated, I had plenty of time to read Paul's guidebook to New Zealand.

It was a sunny, pleasant day and we headed home around 5PM. On the way up, my gear box had opened up and my extra gloves flew out without my noticing. Ash found one on his way up, so I decided to head back along my track on the way home to search for the other. I was on my own, and remember thinking how pleasant it was. We have a flagged route to get us from camp to the line, which gets used only occasionally now since almost everyone has GPS they can use to navigate back from wherever they are along the line. We used it the first few days, so it was well beaten down with tracks. I felt like I was simply driving along a highway that I had all to myself, in my shiny yellow convertible, wind in my hair and sun on my face. I didn't find my missing glove, but it was a very pleasant drive nonetheless. Over the next few days, I made several similar drives on my own, over the course of which I began to look forward to them.

That evening I returned first to find that the camp staff had discovered our hot water drill and fired it up for showers. They managed to freeze the lines a few times, but they did a pretty good job in general considering that they figured it out on their own. My bathrobe was still hanging up next to the heater from the shower I had last Sunday, so I was able to get in pretty quickly. Showers are a much better idea than hot tub in many senses, since there is nothing to gum up. A primitive shower stall was permanently placed in the galley using a tarp and a standard molded plastic shower floor with drain. Typically one fills up a bucket with hot water and pours it personally, but here the drilling hose was run through the doorway and up and over the tarp and fitted with an actual shower head, so it was pretty deluxe. For the first few weeks on our trip, I could scratch my scalp and end up with huge chunks of dead skin, but I've noticed that's stopped now. We've had several discussion on whether showering is beneficial to skin health over the course of the trip, and it seems to me the jury is still out. Arctic and Antarctic explorers are some of the best candidates for the experiment, as the many shipwrecks and strandings that have occurred provide some data that show that washing with soap is not necessarily as necessary as we often assume.

Next day, Sunday, we had our first day of reflection profiling. It being Sunday, I slept in again, though not as long as the previous Sunday. No one else did. By the time I finished breakfast and got suited up, the last of the group had taken off, but most were towing sleds so I was able to go much faster and ended up getting to the line first. Most of us sat around for a few hours while a number of preliminary shots were made, but it gave me time to get a good start on my next romance novel. It took a few moves before we were back into the swing of things, but fairly quickly were back at our 20 minute turnaround time and work proceeded quickly and without many glitches. After a pleasant drive back to camp, I ate a quick dinner and was back in my tent to work on a proposal before most began eating. Dinners here are as tasty as ever, as Flora continues to out-do herself every night.

The wind picked up substantially over night, and I considered not getting out of bed in the morning. I stuck my head out of my tent door to see if it was as bad as it sounded, and caught a brief glimpse of blue sky before I was treated to a face full of snow. I wanted to send off the proposal anyway while the connection was up, so I headed in to the galley. Plans were still in flux, and it was decided eventually to head up to the line with GPS gear. In this way, if the weather remained bad, we could measure some more pole movement, and if it improved we could call back to camp and have everyone else come up to start some more seismic profiling. Andy, Sridhar, Paul and I headed off around 10AM.

Though the winds remained fairly strong, it was still a pleasant drive. We had set up our old cook tent on the line to use as a break room in bad weather, and we stopped there first. We drank some cocoa, ate some leftover Christmas cookies and chatted about the pros and cons of NSF-imposed rules over making data public domain after a few years, such that it doesn't mold away in desk drawers but with the possibility that someone else could use it for some papers before you have a chance to look at it yourself. The wind was still blowing snow around, so we divided up some poles between us and headed off to measure their position to within a few centimeters. It was a sunny blue day, and the wind gradually dropped off, though not below a strong breeze. We played the same game of logging for 20 minutes then moving to the next pole for 20 minutes, and starting over. Because we log simultaneously, it allows us to briefly build a network of 5 stations, which improves the accuracy and quantifies the errors better than solving for each station individually against a base station. The idea here is that each GPS unit tracks about 12 satellites, and these are triangulated for distance to solve for the position of the unit. However, the path to the satellites is confused by undetermined delays through the ionosphere. So the more units logging simultaneously, the better the ionospheric delays can be solved for, or at least the better the errors of the unknown delays can be assessed. Overall it was a nice day to be outside, as long as you could hunker down out of the wind, and I was able to finish my book.

An interesting thing about these ice streams is that they tend to warp the surface a bit. A few years ago, a major mapping mission occurred using SAR satellites to make a radar image of the surface and map the topography, which appear as a grayscale image where intensity is related to the amount of reflected radar energy back to the satellite. We use these images as base maps for our work. On them you can see stripes that seem to align themselves in the direction of ice flow, as well as quite a few seemingly random splotches, particular in the ice sheet. Having worked with SAR quite a bit, my intuition was that the variations in grayscale that produce these features is primarily related to the angle of the ground. That is, if you have a linearly shaped hummock, the part of the hummock that more directly faces the satellite appears bright while the part that faces away appears darker, imagining that the surface acts like a mirror bouncing back more energy when the mirror is perpendicular to the satellite. Having traveled around here quite a bit lately, it was neat to take a closer look at these images again and see that, sure enough, those dips and rises (maybe a few 10s of meters) that we cross on our way to camp or down the line are indeed seen from space and have a corresponding affect on the imagery. Hopefully the GPS data we are collecting here will improve these maps, as there is very little ground truth for them currently.

During dinner we discussed the plan for the next several days. At this point, we hope the Otter will show up tomorrow evening. This leaves us a full day of use of it before Sridhar and I leave on Thursday. The plan is that I will spend that day in the plane, surveying poles at our last camp (C1B) which we did not have time to do while there, such that he can work the seismic line to the last minute. It should be an interesting experience, repeating essentially what we're doing here, but using a plane instead of a snow machine. I've been pretty happy the past few days, I think partly because I've just given myself up to go with the flow and forget any expectations I had when I got here, and because I will see Kristin in a few days. There really is a great group of people here and, as locations to work go, it is certainly exposes you to an extreme that is not found many other places.

Tuesday, 07 January 03, 9:45PM, OnD

Another windy day without much to do.

The winds that had died down towards evening once again picked up and remained strong all day. This was unfortunate timing, as it really starts to squeeze our remaining time for work down to almost nothing and some tasks are necessarily having to be eliminated. The plane also did not show up tonight, and will not until tomorrow afternoon, cutting short our GPS work at C1B. After breakfast, were it became apparent that there was not much to do except hope for better weather, I went back to my tent and began packing up. During the traverses, my gear had been arranged neatly and I knew where to find everything pretty quickly. But since we've returned, all sense of organization has been lost in my tent and there was just a big pile of stuff on the floor. So I spent a few hours consolidating things into different stuff sacks, such that I'm ready for the next several days, arranging things such that I can bag drag without repacking and all of my issued gear is one bag ready to return. Basically I can now leave on a moment's notice.

The afternoon was pretty laid back and most people hung out in the galley and read or worked on the computer. I wrote a bunch more postcards and backed up my computer. Another Otter flew in, seemingly just for the fun of it, from another camp and the crew is spending the night. They are based out of Patriot Hills right now, where the Adventure Networks has their base, so they told some stories of tourist adventures in Antarctica. Our plane should arrive tomorrow afternoon. Sridhar and I talked a bit priorities for surveying, and checked through the gear to make sure it was ready to go. It's all pretty simple really, especially considering how high-tech the gear is. Basically just plug it in, wait for some lights to start flashing, and read a book for 20 minutes.

If the weather does not improve tomorrow, it will really make things awkward for the remaining science. With another good day, most of the reflection work can be finished up. It will take probably two full days for the remaining refraction work, but I suspect this has already be written off. I think everyone is basically ready to go, and I haven't heard any strong protests against leaving or any volunteers for staying a few extra weeks. It's been a long season and it's been very successful, with about the only insurmountable problem being strong winds and not enough time. We've been pretty fortunate though, as several other projects have been either shut out completely or severely reduce in scope due to weather delays.

See the pictures!
messy_bang - MPG clip - 3.5 MB
skidoos_approaching - MPG clip - 2.5 MB
skidoos_sunset - MPG clip - 1.9 MB

Friday, 10 January 03, 5:30PM, Pegasus terminal

On D way home, finally.

The winds did not let up on Wednesday, preventing any more seismic work. I hung around the galley in the morning trying to finish up bits and pieces of a proposal, but when it became clear that weather delays were going to prevent our Otter from getting here before evening, I went back to the tent to take a nap. It didn’t last very long, however, as Sridhar came by to tell me that he was about to head out on the Otter-that-came-for-dinner yesterday for a little boondoggle, then after dinner I would head out to do the surveying until the pilots got too sleepy to continue. So I got up and got things ready, in time for dinner.

Dinner that night was a feast among feasts. Lobster tail, crab legs, roast, scallops, side dishes, cheesecake, other cakes, etc., all deliciously prepared. Couldn’t say why exactly, but the Otter pilots sure had good timing. Once suitably full, we headed off for some surveying.

We took off around 8PM and headed towards our old stomping grounds at C1B. Spore tagged along as we had plenty of room. It took less than an hour to get there, this same distance it took days for us to drive. It was my first time in the air since leaving Christchurch that I could actually look out of the window, so seeing the snow from the air was a new experience. OnD camp, which seems like such a fixture on the landscape from the ground, receded quickly into an imperceptible dot into an ocean of blinding white hell. Sastrugi covered the surface as far as the eye could see in every direction, looking more like a pattern etched into the snow rather than kidney jarring drifts we’d come to know so well. Swatches of blowing snow could be seen giving birth to new drifts off into the horizon.

GPS led us to our old campsite, which was still visible as a collection of drifts caused by our tents. We landed and taxied up to the pole we placed several weeks before, to place a receiver and antenna to be used as a local base station. It only took several minutes and we headed out to begin measuring poles placed last year. The idea is that the pole at camp is a relatively ‘known’ position (having been logged for a week or more a few weeks ago), and logging it now simultaneously with the other poles allow for a more accurate measurement of those poles in a shorter amount of time, as small perturbations within the ionosphere can be corrected for. Ideally, one would one to place a base station on rock or something that wasn’t moving, but nothing like that exists around here for hundreds of kilometers.

The pilots were friendly and a lot of fun. This was pretty unorthodoxed use of a Twin Otter, as the poles we were measuring were only a few kilometers apart. They got a pretty good laugh from it too, as just about as soon as they finished their take-off checklist, they had to begin their landing check list. I suspect it was the first time they had done so many take-offs and landings in such a short amount of time, other than in training. In the end, we were getting two poles measured per hour, with twenty minutes spent at each pole doing nothing while the magic yellow box did its business, about 1 minutes spent setting up and another taking it down, and about 8 minutes traveling to the next pole. In the end we got back to camp around 1 AM. I found a note there from Sridhar saying to be ready to do it all again at 8:30AM, with the other plane and crew. I was happy to do it though, as it’s great data to get and a way for me to feel productive. Good thing I had finished most of my packing though.

That morning the winds had died substantially and everyone else was preparing to head up to the seismic line and pick up where we left off several days before. This was the last I was to see them on this trip, so we said our goodbyes and took a final group shot before they headed off. It was not a particularly emotional farewell, at least not for me. We all shook hands and said see you around, but I didn’t feel any sense of sadness or loss. Some of them I knew I would never see again, some I probably would, but all of them I would have no problem sharing a tent with in the future.

The morning was spent much like the night before – setting up at the base station first, then hopping from pole to pole. Since we could not measure all poles along the grid, Sridhar picked one line running in the direction of ice motion to concentrate on. The idea here is that this grid is located in the onset region of one branch of ice stream C, where the slow moving ice sheet turns into the fast moving ice stream. But where and why this actually occurs is still something of a mystery, which is the reason for the GPS and seismic work respectively. It was another beautiful sunny day, just like the night before, with the wind even slower. It was just me and the pilots today, but because this was more of a cargo-oriented plane, I sat in the very back where the jump seat was while they were at the very front in the cockpit, feeling a bit like we were sitting at a banquent dinner table that required headsets for communication from one end to the other.

In flying around, I gained a new sense of appreciation for West Antarctica. It really doesn’t have much to offer except flat white landscapes, but this it does very well. Of course the fact that some of the ice is moving faster than the rest is curious and worthy of consideration too. It’s a unique place, but I think that it takes looking at it from the surface, the sky, and space to really begin to appreciate the subtleties it has to offer.

Once we finished the main line, we picked up the base station and headed back to OnD. Everyone was pretty anxious to pack up and head back to McMurdo. Some of my boxes had even been dragged out to the runway. I still had some repacking to do with one of them, since I had pulled some gear to go on the flights, so I took it aside with some of stuff to go in it while I went to my tent to get my personal gear together. When I returned everything had been loaded and was out of sight, so not only did I not get a chance to repack, but I had no way to be sure that all of the little packages of stuff were on board. It was all cinched down and the engines running, so there was little else to do but to say goodbye to the camp staff and get on board a bit grumpy.

On the way back, we stopped at Siple Dome camp to refuel. This used to be a thriving research camp of dozens, but now exists essentially only as a refueling and weather outpost, housing only three camp staff. While I had never met any of them before, I had something in common with all of them. Kevin, the camp manager, is a constant and persistent voice on the HF radio, and everyone in West Antarctica cannot

Saturday, 11 January 03, Noon, Christchurch

It was real and it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun.

My entry last night was cut off by the boarding announcement, followed by 5 uneventful hours on an air force C-141. The plane was empty except for passengers and their gear, which seems a crime considering the cost of the flight, as well as a crime because they still had us all jammed together in the front, knees to knees, for seemingly no good reason. But in any case, it was tolerable enough and I would have gotten on at that point even if they wanted to strap me down to a stretcher.

We arrived in Christchurch just after midnight. We collected our bags, searched our pockets for any miscellaneous food items considered contraband in New Zealand, went through customs, and wound up back at the CDC to return our issued gear. This was a fairly pleasant process, with no one really caring about things like my pants being shredded, the zippers on all of my coats and wind pants being busted, missing or shredded gloves, etc. Once through with that we picked up our plane tickets and lodging information. They had me booked at the Windsor B&B, where I stayed on my way in, even though I had requested a real hotel near the airport. It being 2AM, I was in no mood to deal with it, so I just checked myself into the hotel and blew off the Windsor. No sense waking them up at 2AM just to tell them I’m not coming. After two months in a tent in the middle of nowhere, I’d had enough of communal living and wanted my own shower, my own phone, my own TV, my own mini-bar, and room service. It turned out to be something about the equivalent of a Motel8, but it was deluxe to me.

Today I slept in, took a long, hot shower, and am eating an ostrich salad and beer from room service while I write. My only plans for the next few days are to finish up on the papers and proposals I’d been working on, ship a bunch of stuff back home, buy a New Zealand guidebook, trying to stop swearing so fucking much, and just relax a lot until Kristin shows up.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about life on this trip, as well as thinking about the trip itself. As long trips go, this one definitely ranks at the bottom in terms of fun. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like the people, far from it really, but I never really felt connected to them in a way that I guess I had been taking for granted just always occurred during the process of such endeavors. The cause likely has its root from the first few days and weeks of the trip, when I was severely homesick and depressed. I had never felt such exhaustion and loss before. I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time being lonely, and have grown accustomed to it enough that I can let it wash through me, but this was something new that I had never really experienced before and didn’t know quite how to handle, and it’s sure something I don’t want to go through again.

So that well could have been the start of a downward spiral in my relationship with Sridhar, our learless feader, I really don’t know. I got odd vibes from him starting in McMurdo, which I initially wrote off to just the pressure on him to get the project moving, but it never really improved. Quite likely it was just some bizarre negative feedback loop that keeps each saying “jeez, what’s that guy’s problem” back and forth until you’re convinced that you’re dealing with the spawn of Satan. But perhaps Sridhar is actually one of those dickhead democrats, as Bob would say, out to manipulate and exploit and fuel his own ego under a guise false friendship and common good. I guess at some point not too far into the trip, I stopped caring enough to figure out which, and simply enjoyed what I could while trying to ignore the rest. I suspect that this attitude also poisoned my opportunity to form close friendships with the others, with whom I exchanged no such latent animosity, as far as I know.

Two things that I think would have greatly improved the experience would have been more women and more booze. There were no women on the trip, and for quite a few years I’ve been convinced that all expeditions should include several. I don’t mean that in any way to be sexist or chauvinistic or squash individuality by stereotyping, but just as recognition that women are what make life worth living for. If it weren’t for them, guys would have long since killed each other off. Women smooth rough edges, make humor worthwhile, put guys in their place in a way that other guys cannot, and are simply fun to look at it if nothing else. They can also be infuriating and unfathomable, but millions of years of evolution have trained our genes and chemical systems to seek out their company and the field is no place to try to kick your addictions. The lack of any notable drinking events was something else I found troubling. I’ve grown not to trust people very easily, particularly scientists, until I’ve seen them completely shitfaced. It makes them hard to take too seriously anymore, which makes it hard for them to take themselves to seriously with me, and vice versa. It’s kind of the same as when you’ve sauna’d with someone a lot.

Scientifically, the trip was a great success, at least from outward appearances thus far. There were no equipment failures to speak of, everything that should have been there was, and as a team we worked very efficiently and productively towards the goals. This was in no small measure due to years of preparation and planning by people other than me. A lot of things that could have gone wrong and ended this trip early did not, and that’s not just luck, but also a result of experience and foresight. One might be able to question a number of judgment calls on how to commit remaining resources in a dwindling time environment, but that would just be me being petty because I wasn’t allowed to sit at the adult table when those decisions were being made. As for the subsequent analysis and paper writing, I’ve pretty much written off any involvement with it. On one of the last few days Sridhar asked Andy, when the three of us were alone together, whether he wanted a copy of the data now or mailed to him later. I had been fairly persistently stating my desire to start reducing and analyzing the data while in the field as it was the most convenient time for me to be involved for quite some time, but was consistently put off for various vague reasons. That last interaction with Andy seemed to indicate those reasons really were really bullshit and that I should have had no expectation for involvement in the analysis from the onset. The way I see it, there is simply no future trying insert myself further into a situation where I have to work for free and eat shit to do it. The whole idea, for me, is to have fun with like-minded people, and it’s not like I don’t have plenty of other data to analyze or papers to write. And even if I didn’t sneak a copy of the data when no one was looking, in the unlikely event that I get gung ho on my own, I can always get one from NSF in a year or two.

Besides having a good time and learning something, my other main objective on this trip was to reevaluate my choice of careers, and I learned a lot about myself on this trip towards that end. Perhaps first is that one reason field research suits me so well is that I seem to have an ingrained need to solve problems, and that field work usually offers a never ending supply of them. I found that if problems don’t present themselves, I seek them out, so it seems important to keep a steady supply of valuable problems in stock so that inconsequential minutia don’t get the spotlight. Field work has the added benefit of allowing for a purity in focus that I had come to believe could only be found there, allowing one to be a work-a-holic in a socially and personally acceptable way. That’s really what took the ‘real’ out of ‘real fun’ on this trip – I was waiting around for that focus to grab hold of me like it usually does, but for most of the trip I thought it never happened. But in the process, I came to realize that all of the little inventions around the house, for example, would make perfectly acceptable substitutes, especially when they have deadlines attached, and in fact have been for years.

Field work has a lot to offer, but not nearly as much as marriage, or at least my marriage. Being a research professor can be fun, there’s no doubt. I spend time in a lot of interesting and unusual places that I otherwise wouldn’t, have valued experiences that I otherwise would not have, and make many friends around the world in the process. Plus there’s a huge ego boosting side to it all, with papers, talks, meetings, as well as society’s high status placement of such careers to take advantage of. Plus you get to GPS electrical conduit while reading romance novels and drinking cocoa while sitting on a snow machine on top of two kilometers of ice with nothing in view but the horizon with the nearest person 20 miles away and the nearest town 1000 miles away while wearing a Viking hat with yellow pigtails. But most of that is simply window dressing. Being a professor doesn’t fulfill some long-standing dream for me, it’s just a convenient vehicle, one that perhaps I don’t need to rely on as much anymore. It’s all about having fun and being productive, or at least it should be. For me, that seems to necessarily involve building better mousetraps, but I’m not sure it has to involve long field trips, at least not without Kristin. I can’t see going on another trip like this without her.

When I graduated UAF, I can recall considering my choices at that time. I could either get the job I wanted if I didn’t mind moving, or I could live where I wanted if I wasn’t too particular about how I made a living. I chose to live where I wanted because Fairbanks allowed me to live exactly how I liked, and moving from there because of a job made me feel like I would be selling my soul. Now, however, I find there is another consideration that takes precedence over those choices. All I can think about is spending my time with the woman I love and making her happy. If I have to live somewhere else or make money some other way to accomplish that, then so be it. I have never been happier or felt more complete than I have since I met Kristin. We are not two people, but one person with two bodies, each with different needs and wants, but with only one ego, one brain, and one love. With her, with us, the possibilities are endless, and that’s really what it’s all about. We live in a society that allows us enormous opportunities for happiness, if we’re smart enough to take advantage of them and not get bogged down into the rat race or trying to meet other people’s expectations of us. We’re essentially free to re-invent ourselves at will, and I think it’s about time to start doing that again. I may not apply to work at the Post Office any time soon, but wherever I sleep and whatever I do for cash now fall under a new prime objective. Life is too short not to spend every possible minute living up to our potential, and my potential on my own is nothing compared to that with Kristin.

At the end of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, there are a few lines that were memorable to me, that perhaps may rank next to Macbeth’s last thoughts in terms of a fictional character affecting the course of my life. “… there is neither happiness or unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death, in order to know how good it is to live… and never forget that, until the day God deigns to reveal the future to man, the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: wait and hope.” I was wrong to think that I never found the focus I was looking for in the field. I was extremely focused. I spent ten weeks waiting and hoping that the day would come that Kristin and I would be together again, forever, and I believe I am a wiser man for it. What more could a guy ask for from a trip to Antarctica than that? Though there was this bright yellow cowboy outfit I had my eye on along the way…

See the pictures!
ond_blowingsnow - MPG clip - 1.5 MB