Update 13: Navigating North!

[Paul Summers]

Hello all from sunny McMurdo! 

It's been a busy 2 weeks for me, so apologies for the delayed update, but I hope this update was worth the wait (spoiler alert: there are penguins!) My last update was Jan 24 when I mentioned flights from WAIS to MCM were quite delayed, but thankfully after my update a few more successful missions happened and the bulk of the delayed people were able to fly back to McM. Danny and I were both on flying out on a slightly later flight, so we had an extra day to do one day of radar experiments at the proper West Antarctic Ice Divide, a chilly 40km drive away. Thankfully that went well with generally quite sunny though cold weather with a high of about 0F. I got a little chilled in my toes driving home that night, so I was happy to come back to a heated tent!

Flying out from WAIS we were on an LC-130 piloted by the air national guard, but this time we helped build all the cargo pallets, which is quite the precise operation. I guess it's good to know that cargo won't come falling out while we are inflight, but the 3-inch thick binder on packing regulations is quite intimidating. Thankfully WAIS camp has a few staff members this year with extensive experience building air force pallets who basically just told us what to do, otherwise we'd be hopelessly lost. The first photo here is us on the plane, the red cargo netting is not as bad of a seat as you might think, but the plane is very drafty so sitting on your jacket makes for a much nicer ride. The second photo is our personal baggage pallets with all of what is essentially our 'checked bags'. One of my bags always seems to end up at the bottom, thankfully everything was well packed and survived the journey. The last photo is the pallet loaded on the plane next to where I sat. I found my other bag humorously on the very top of the pile and resting against some radar sleds from the GHOST team. Sitting this close to a 10ft tall pile of bags I was suddenly very happy that the air force has such exacting specifications for securely fastening cargo onto the pallet. 

Once back in McMurdo the first order of business was to shower and do laundry. Though I could (and did) do both of those in WAIS, water there is very limited so I only did the bare minimum. Back in McMurdo where water is less limited I was able to take a full length shower and actually wash all my clothes which was very nice. Sadly immediately after washing my jacket, while draping it on a chair at brunch, I managed to toss the hood directly onto my cheese omelet. That stain may take more time to get out. Beyond personal hygiene tasks, we as a team had 2 main objectives for our time in McMurdo: cleaning and returning all our equipment, and doing 6 more days of local science on nearby Eastwind Glacier. All of our equipment from our time at T2 was quite well used, from tents to pots and pans, GPS units to tool kits, sleeping bags to climbing ropes. Pretty much everything was covered in snow and ice and randomly packed into little bags, so our task now is to clean, dry, count and return everything in as close to original condition as possible. The first photo here is a semi-sorted pile of about 1/3 of our stuff. Thankfully with the whole team working on cleaning and sorting we were able to make quick work of most of this, returning most stuff in about 6 hours. I personally helped clean all our sleeping pads, seen hanging up on 5 drying lines in the second photo. We washed them down with tea tree spray, which helped reduce some of the other scents coming from 14 people's worth of sleep kit. The final photo is us setting up and drying one of our 3 largest tents, the cooking and science arctic oven tents. These tend to accumulate lots of ice inside from cooking and breathing inside them, we had to use a mop to clean out a few gallons of melted snow and ice once we got it set up.

In addition to returning this equipment 7 of us, about half the original team, stayed an extra week or so to do field work on nearby Eastwind Glacier. This is an extension of some work that was done here last year, and serves as a good location to use our methods on a grounded glacier, a floating ice shelf, and the grounding line all within a close drive from McMurdo. This glacier is much smaller and thinner than Thwaites Glacier, but provides a good location to test and calibrate our radar against other radar systems that have also been used here at Eastwind. Eastwind is also much prettier I would say, as there is beautiful topography including Mt Erebus!  The first photo is from our commute, an 1.5 hour snowmobile drive through at times quite deep powdery snow, very different from Thwaites again! The second photo is Danny doing some final calibration measurements at the end of the day. Since the glacier is so much thinner, we need to move our equipment about 10-25 meters at a time, so we elected to drag it by foot with these smalle sleds. This turned out to work very well, but the walk to get our snowmobiles about a quarter mile away (small black dot behind Danny) at the end of the day was a bit of a chore. You can also see here how the snow was more powdery and deep here, this was probably the least powdery snow we had all week. 

Back in town, we also overlapped with the exciting time of year that is vessel offload! McMurdo station is located at the farthest south location accessible by vessel, and for good reason as 85% of USAP cargo comes in on the 2 vessels that visit every year. That is over 80 million pounds of cargo this year! Though the port here is sometimes open naturally, the Coast Guard's one and only heavy icebreaker the Polar Star was needed this year to break open a channel for the vessel. You can see it docked to the McMurdo ice pier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pier) in the first photo. This will be the last year they use an ice pier, as they will begin building a permanent one next year, but I think the ice pier is a very cool engineering solution. The second photo is the cargo vessel unloading its cargo. It was very fun to watch the cranes do their work. The second photo was taken much earlier, so you can see more ice in the bay here. The icebreaker photo is just from this morning when it's fueling up to go home and you can see that the winds of this week have blown much more ice out of the bay and sound here. There was also a 3rd vessel, a fuel tanker that delivered 2 years worth of fuel to the station. This all happens in winter quarters bay, which is right behind my dorm! These photos were actually taken out of the window at the end of the hall, which is regrettably rather dirty but provides a great view.

In addition to bringing vessels to port, the channel and broken out sea ice brings lots of new wildlife! There have been some sightings of Emperor penguins farther out on the ice, but the Adelie penguins have been coming close into town and by Hut Point. They are absolutely adorable little guys, smaller than I expected but very plump. I got quite a few photos of them napping thinking this was a rare occurrence, but it turns out penguins are extreme nappers. They don't sleep deeply ever, but instead nap for just a few seconds, but 1,000s of times a day for over 10 hours of sleep a day! I've been feeling like I need about 1,000 naps myself after this season, hopefully I can do that soon. The brave penguins that make it to town are very cute, but cause a bit of a traffic jam as we must not disturb the wildlife, so road closures and detours on account of a wandering penguin happen from time to time. 

 

A final fun event this week was that we were invited over to Scott Base by another science group based there. Scott Base is the New Zealand base about 2 miles away. Since Scott base is so much smaller, we can only visit if invited, so it was exciting to have the chance to visit! We even got to go to their bar, the 'Tattered Flag' which is stocked with a much wider array of ciders which I was very excited about. It was nice to meet some new faces and hear about their project, a technical project testing out new rapid ice drilling and coring technologies. In addition to a nice bar, Scottt Base has a very nice store which I couldn't resist going to. This is actually where I found Pete 2 years ago, and I found a new friend for him there this year! Today they are helping me pack up my bags for bag drag this evening, my last major task in McMurdo before heading to NZ tomorrow if weather holds! 

New this year United flies direct from Christchurch to SFO, so fingers crossed I get booked a flight home on that. I expect to only spend about half a day in Christchurch on my way home, so hopefully I will be headed to the Northern hemisphere soon! It is always bittersweet to be leaving, but I am savoring the views and hopefully will do some more penguin watching in the afternoon to get my fill before flying out. I am excited to see trees and greenery again, and very excited to see you all soon as it's been a long 3 months! 

Excited to be home soon!

Paul