Happy Holidays from WAIS Divide!

I didn't manage to pop off another post before I left McMurdo for the internet-less deep field, so I’m writing this one now. I arrived at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide camp on Sunday (12/23), having gotten through McMurdo in record time (3 days)—a very rare logistical feat, I am told. Thankfully, there was a break in the weather that allowed me, along with other members of my research group and some people who had been weathered in for up to a week, to get out.

Our LC-130 Hercules pulls off the skiway at WAIS Divide to refuel before heading back to McMurdo.

We were greeted upon arrival by my advisor, Terry, and a number of camp staff, who informed us that our presence expanded the camp’s total population to 53. We were oriented and sent off to set up our tents, which we did with relative ease, as the weather was very agreeable at around 0°F with little wind and some insulating clouds. We were then able to mingle with everyone, including the members of our research group who were still there from the first half of the season (we had about 4 days of overlap). As it turns out, that night was the Christmas feast—lobster and steak—which was fantastically prepared and wonderfully delicious. There was plenty of food and drink to go around, and the evening culminated with a white elephant gift exchange, where a number of unique gifts, some crafted by camp members in their spare time, were passed around. I wound up with some New Zealand food and a piece from the drill for which this camp was established a couple years ago.

Following the dinner a few of us got together a football game in the snow outside the galley, which resulted in lots of laughs and only minor injuries. Most notably it entailed two graduate students, Joel and Andrew (a different one) being chased around camp by Terry, who was wearing a mask with a picture of Joel’s face on it. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera. Luckily, one of the UNAVCO engineers with our project, Jeremy, did…

Terry (right) and Joel (left), wearing masks with each others' face, chase each other around camp on Christmas (photograph by Jeremy Miner).

I had no concept of time, since it’s permanently daylight out here, but pretty soon I was tuckered out and I decided to retire, having met somewhere near 40 people that day (everyone except the night shift drillers and mechanics). The next two days, Christmas Eve and Christmas, were holidays in camp. There were no flights and no work. We played lots more football and I got in some cross-country skiing. The snow is not soft and it’s not very deep, so classic skiing is not a great option. The recreation tent has some skate skis stored in it, so that’s what I have been using. I mostly skated up and down the runway, which is at least a couple miles long, and I spent some time teaching a few members of the group, Jie (who is from China and hasn't seen much snow, let alone skied on it), Erica, and Marsella, how to ski. It was a great refresher for me and helped to shape up some muscles that I haven’t used in a long time, Ohio being snow-challenged and all that. Hopefully it was productive for them as well.

While everyone was here there was lots of skiing, Frisbee, football, jamming (there’s a keyboard and a guitar here at camp, and plenty of people who like to sing), movie-watching and game-playing. I played plenty of President, Monopoly Deal, Cribbage, and I re-learned Euchre and started to learn 500, or Bid Euchre. Very socially, if not academically, productive.

On Wednesday the first fraction of the people who had been here since the beginning of the season left. Among them were Terry and our mountaineer/safety person Mark. The office got a little bit less crowded, and a little bit unruly in the absence of a Principal Investigator (PI)/authority figure. I came into the work tent late at night to find the UNAVCO (GPS) and PASSCAL (seismic) engineers engaged in an experiment to see how quickly they could send a small toy penguin stuffed with washers (for weight) down a zipline the length of the tent. The path was modified to include spinning about the zipline axis (the penguin was hanging by a rigid, copper wire, which the UNAVCO engineers, Jeremy and Travis, had loudly and forcefully removed from a conductive contraption earlier that day) as well as flat out throwing the penguin from the top of the zipline. This activity rapidly devolved to the point of playing ‘penguin’, a game in which someone sat at the bottom of the zipline and did their best not to flinch as the metal-laden penguin hurdled toward them with surprising speed. Most of the time the penguin missed (and ‘penguined’ out first), but there were a couple of bruises by the time the night was over.

Our ballistic penguin moves down the line toward its next target (in this instance, I think it was Joel).

When we got bored with penguin we played t-ball briefly with a cardboard tube and an orange. At that point, however, a storm was approaching and after the orange was smashed to bits we decided to adjourn and batten down the hatches for the next day’s onslaught of wind and snow.

Erica bats and Joel photographs as a storm system moves in.

Thursday was a day of low visibility and high winds, so work was called on account of weather and we spent the day playing cards and music indoors and shoveling out our tents at various intervals. I got some work done, and by the end of the day the weather had started to clear and I went on a late evening ski (9:15-11:15 pm) in broad daylight.

Friday the weather was good at our camp, but not at any of the sites we needed to fly to, so there weren’t any missions. However, the pilots of the larger of our two planes were flying out to a fuel cache in the middle of the ice sheet, so Erica and I went along for the ride, and to avoid another day of sitting around the work tent. Since the cash was in the middle of the ice sheet, all we could see was flat white in every direction, but it was beautiful. When we got there Erica and I helped the pilots shovel out the three buried fuel barrels and replace them with eight new ones, and then we flew back. All in all, it was about four hours of flying for ten minutes worth of work, but it was fun to get out. On the way back, Erica fell asleep and I spent most of the ride in the navigator seat of the cockpit with a headset on chatting with the pilots. They were from northern Canada (that’s where the flight crews are based) and had some interesting stories to tell, and I had a lot of fun picking their brains about the equipment, all the buttons, etc.

The flight crew works to secure the new fuel barrels as Erica fills in the hole we dug the old barrels out of (so the next plane doesn't fall in).

When we got back, our work tent was very different. Four more of the early-season people had left, so our tent was clean and un-crowded. It made it that much easier to load the sleds and prepare for our flight the next day. The weather forecast was miserable, but it’s almost never reliable, so we try to be reliable anyway.

Saturday and Sunday were both beautiful and so both were workdays. Saturday we flew to a site called Mount Carbone, named for the cook, Al Carbone, on the later Byrd Antarctic Expedition from 1933-1935. The GPS station there needed a new circuit board and solar panels, so we flew out (about 3 hours - almost to the coast) and climbed up to the peak of the mountain (not saying much, since most of it is buried under ice) and got to work repairing the station. After helping to set up the new solar panels, I wandered off across the cliffs to search for glacial erratics and samples (the rock was all volcanic) for the Polar Rock Repository at Byrd Polar at OSU. I was moderately successful, and changing out the components on the station didn’t take long. With the pilots watching, we finished up maintenance and left, having been there for a couple of hours.

Jie, Travis, and Dave work on replacing solar panels as Jeremy configures the circuit board for the GPS station at Mt. Carbone. Our mountaineer, Mike, looks on with the tops of the Phillips Mountains in the background.

Sunday there were both GPS and seismic sites to service. Since the GPS site could only be accessed by the smaller plane, only a couple (more experienced) people went there. The seismic site needed to be dug out, so Jie and I went with the seismic team to Siple Dome, which was startlingly similar to the WAIS Divide camp – flat and white. We had to dig up the electronics box and seismic sensor (about 3 and 6 feet deep, respectively) to reseat some components that had been skewed by snow loading. It took a little while, but it was fun. It was also windless and felt like it was about 70°, even though it was not more than 25°.

Paul, an engineer at PASSCAL, documents the condition of the site and its components at Siple Dome prior to the start of digging.

Today we got another storm. I woke up at the usual time (6:00 am), heard the wind, and looked out my tent. With some weather experience now under my belt, I knew immediately that we wouldn't be going anywhere, and I went back to sleep. I woke up again around 8:00 am, had some breakfast, and went to the work tent, where I got a number of papers read and a decent amount of work done on my proposal for next year.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve, so there’s a big dinner planned and, I suspect, a camp-wide game of capture the flag in the works (I overheard some camp staff planning during lunch). Tomorrow’s a camp-wide day off, and will likely be spent skiing if the weather’s good (Sven, one of the heavy machinery operators, recently groomed a ribbon along the runway and then out up onto the berm protecting camp and back down into the plane parking area) and playing cards and watching movies if it’s not.

So happy New Year! I’ll see it before most of you, but it doesn’t much matter, since life here is just one perpetual day. All the best!

The team at WAIS Divide, including the overlap from the first and second halves of the season (I don't remember who took this picture, but it wasn't me - it was distributed around camp and I'm borrowing it).