Update 11: Happy Holidays from T2!

[Paul Summers]

Hello all from T2!

I’m writing this on Dec 30^th at 1AM during a storm day, and hopefully I will be able to send it out soon after we dig out from the storm and get starlink up again. The odd time of writing is because we are now running a 24hr camp, and I am one of 4 people assigned to the night shift. Since there is 24 hour sunlight the night shift isn’t so bad, but it is noticeably colder during the night, about 5-10F colder. On the flip side, since we sleep during the day all our clothing dries out super well as we sleep so I can’t really complain. It also is nice to have more common space to ourselves on the night shift, as a full camp of 15 makes our 3 common tents pretty crowded. The schedule I’ve been keeping is waking around 4 pm, dinner at 445 pm, group meeting at 545 pm, leaving for work around 7pm, returning at 4am, breakfast at 445 am and group meeting at 545 am. The day shift does everything 12 hours off, so we typically overlap from 4-7am and it's nice to see them then.

We flew to T2 from WAIS Divide camp on a British Antarctic Survey Twin Otter, piloted by Ian who has been flying here for decades! We packed the plane full with over 2000lbs of gear and ourselves, it was actually so full Galen and I (the only 2 from our group on the flight) had to board via the co-pilot door. Pete was very excited he even had his own seat on this flight! I had to help him with his seatbelt, but he loved the full service and felt very safe in Ian’s hands.

Once in T2, we got to work on finishing building camp as we needed to do that before we could begin our science work. This mostly was setting up our large communal tents, the Arctic Ovens, as well as helping team members set up their Scott tents as they arrived. We typically would get 2 flights a day (Ian flying to and from WAIS twice in a day) and 2-3 people per day along with cargo. I mentioned earlier that we have over 20,000 pounds of stuff which is why we have so many flights, but I didn’t mention that most of this weight is science equipment for our seismic survey. We have 1000 nodes at around 8 pounds a piece for a cool 8,000 pounds, and we also have over 6000 pounds of explosives for almost 1000 individual shots. You can see how this begins to quickly add up. Don’t worry though, the explosives are all safely stored quite far from camp. Here is a photo of camp on a nice day. We live in the pyramid tents, called Scott tents 2 per tent. Camp is set up in a line perpendicular to the wind, which is to control drifting from blowing snow. When the weather is nice here, it's really quite nice with temps pushing 20F and full warm Sun. Danny and I even had time for a nice little game of catch! We had both brought gloves hoping for a nice day, and I'm glad we got the opportunity to use them.

This is now part 2 of the update, written on Jan 4th at 1:30 am. We have had a few good days of clear weather, about 3 days of full on storm where we didn't do any work outside of camp, and a handful of more borderline days where we worked in poor weather, which lead to creative solutions like poor danny sheltering under my jacket as he tried get a touch screen monitor to work in the falling snow. I've also included a photo of camp on one of these poor but workable days, you can see how everything is so so white. It can be quite disorientating as there is no horizon, no surface definition, and you can easily not see the 3 foot wall of snow you're about to walk, or snowmobile, into.

 Work has been going well despite the lost days to weather and we have all our seismic nodes deployed, all 1000 of them! We may have actually lost 1, but we are checking and cross validating all our notes to try and track down where that one went, but still 99.9% is pretty good if you ask me! This means that the shooting has begun, but sadly I have not seen that yet, though I hear it from time to time when I'm getting ready for bed. During seismic shooting no one else can be riding snowmobiles or even walking in the study area, so the radar team is working nights so that we can do our radar work and not interfere with the shooting. This is nice in that we get more time to work on radar, but sad in that I don't get to see the fireworks. I will try to see if I can get a video or photos from people who have gone out, I hear it is exciting. Radar work is still in the set-up and debugging stage, a sadly trying time in any experiment, but hopefully we will be onto the exciting results phase in a few days!

Sorry for the long silence and shorter update, but work has been keeping me busy! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, and I hope 2024 is treating you all well. I miss you all and send my best!

-Paul