Aerial View

NASA's IceBridge mission recently flew over the South Pole and took this cool aerial shot.

I'm reposting it here with with descriptions:

In the upper-left you can see the "dark sector", which is home to the South Pole Telescope, Ice Cube Laboratory, and MAPO/SPUD (which is another telescope and a machine shop). South Pole Station is to the center, and you can see the three berthing units and gym extending from the station. To the upper-right of the station is the NOAA building, situated in the "clean air sector" (wind primarily comes from this direction). Below the station is "the berms" which is the storage/junkyard/graveyard of the South Pole. Below that is the RF sector, housing the satellite dishes that provide internet and transmit our science data. The "end of the world" is an emergency cache of fuel. 

I think a lot of people imagine a single station with a couple outbuildings surrounded by pristine snow, but the bird's eye view shows a different story. Things rarely leave this place once they are here, and therefore a large collection of junk has accumulated from old projects and past construction projects. 

The shot was taken just a day or two ago, so you can still see the Basler planes in the photo.

Winding Down

Each day now we get closer to station opening, November 1st. This is the nominal date when we will see our first LC-130 flight (weather permitting). Inbound LC-130s have to wait until the temperatures are reliably above -50 F because that is the lowest temperature their landing gear hydraulics are rated for.

Even though the station has not yet opened, we have already seen a couple Twin Otters and Baslers fly through. Seeing the first new faces in 8 months, I did my best to completely avoid them. Although, one of the Basler crews was nice enough to bring in fresh fruit ("freshies"), and I enjoyed my first apple in months. The Basler's are actually still here, unable to escape the pole due to the poor weather we've been having the past week.

A Basler aircraft is stuck at the south pole in blowing snow. 

When the Basler's finally do make it out, they might even take some mail for us, which normally takes a long time to make it out on the LC-130s.

The Twin Otters and Baslers are operated by Kenn Borek Air, and fly down from Canada to McMurdo, where they service field camps. So unlike the LC-130s flying to Pole from Christchurch, they fly from Canada through the Americas, cross from Chile to Rothera Station, and then fly to Pole. I think sometimes they stop along the way, landing in the middle of nowhere to switch from tires to skies.

Although the winter is winding down, the work load on station has been increasing. On top of the ongoing Rodwell repairs, preparing for opening means that everyone is busy cleaning and organizing the station for the 40 people that will come in on the first flight. People who operate the loaders have been busy grooming the runway for incoming flights.


Other outgoing mail:

• Everyone has also been busy packing up their rooms, and planning travel
• I'm one of the unlucky ones who has to move rooms for the new people coming in, so I have to move rooms 10 days before I fly out anyway - this is a process winterovers generally consider extremely unfair
• The weather the past week has been extremely poor, meaning the Kenn Borek Air crews have been stuck on station for days. I've been doing my best to hide. 
• But wait! If there was a window of good weather, why wasn't the runway groomed? Why didn't the groomers get the previous day off so that they could prepare the runway overnight when the weather improved? Isn't getting the Baslers off base top priority since one of them is supposed to immediately return from McMurdo with a group of technicians that are supposed to fix the Rodwell? Why is the only person on station with experience as a fuelie no longer working in the fuel pit? These are good questions... please consult the Logic Column. 

Next Week in Pole: Trying to take over the world

The Great Water Crisis of 2014

The past few weeks have brought a flurry of activity to the station as we suffered a failure of our primary water system. As I've previously mentioned, we get our water from a pump that goes into a rodwell. Basically we shoot enough hot water down into a hole in the ice to maintain a pool of liquid water, which we pump back up to use. However, a few weeks ago this pump died. Because of this, we switched to a Snow Melter for our water supply. This means someone has out with a loader/tractor and retrieve snow to dump in the snow melter. While all of this was getting running, we were on conservative water ratios, so no showers or laundry. Now we are limited to one laundry or 2-minute shower a week (as opposed to the normal two showers and one laundry load).

I don't want to spend too much of the post assigning blame, but the general consensus is that the various temperatures on the control computer have been maladjusted by He Who Shall Not Be Named the entire season, to the dismay of all the utilities technicians on station. The temperature controls may have been maladjusted to the point where the water pump in the rodwell finally failed. Not only has this caused tons of extra work for people on station, but it also is likely costing the antarctic program hundreds of thousands in dollars. There were also repairs to the rodwell system done over last summer's season that weren't optimal, which also contributed to the failure.

Overall, I'd say one of the most surprising things I've found working at the South Pole is failures such as these. Some of the processes, e.g. hiring, psych evaluation procedures, internet controls etc. are really illogical. We have a procedure for dealing with instances like this, the logic column:

When you hear about something illogical done in the antarctic program, you bang your head on the logic column.

That being said, most of the people working here on station are great, and most of the people in Denver are too.


Other Logical Inconsistencies:

• [redacted]
• The world experts in ice drilling were required to fix the rodwell last Summer. They offered to come back to help fix our current rodwell problems but USAP has declined in favor of trying the same techniques that didn't work last summer.

Next Week in Pole: Ebola!