Drill Site 1

Current Conditions
Temperature: 29F
Wind Chill: 25F

Sorry my posts are getting a bit more spread out. This month is turning out to be very busy. I have several more topics in the queue, though, so hopefully next month I'll have time to fill in the gaps.

I saw the sweetest Skua attack the other day! A girl in front of me was walking back to her dorm with an exposed tray of food. The Skua zipped past me and swooped in on her from behind. A well-executed dive sent her salad exploding into the air! When I passed the Skua, madly gorging on his scattered accomplishment, his entire beak and half of his face were covered in ranch dressing! Priceless.

I got another helo ride to Erebus, this time to 'Drill Site 1' on the west flank of the mountain, at about 4000 feet. It was a beautiful calm, sunny day ... in town. It was beautiful and sunny on Erebus, too, but the wind was blowing 35 knots most of the day. Jay and I spent the entire day on the Barne Glacier digging holes. Our windbreak was simple, but crucial: just a row of flags and a tarp:

We dug three holes, each about 6 inches in diameter and 7 meters deep. Later, these holes will be filled with explosives and detonated to provide a calibration signal for the various seismic stations strewn about the mountain. As a fellow outdoorsman and mountain biker, Jay and I had much to talk about while we pulled out ice cores one foot at a time.

Unlike my last trip up to the mountain, the clear skies allowed me a fantastic view. The pack ice in the Ross Sea has blown out considerably, leaving only the occasional iceberg floating in the open water between Ross Island and the Royal Society mountains:

Somewhere out in this direction, the nearest thing is New Zealand:

I found a few Erebus crystals in the rocks near the drill site. They are much coveted items here in McMurdo. A crystalline rock made up of a specific mixture of feldspar minerals, called anorthoclase, Erebus crystals can only be found here and on Mt. Kenya in Africa. Scientists don't know exactly how they form. Usually crystals like this require a slow cooling process. But these crystals are formed in the hot magma pool at Erebus' heart. Strombolian eruptions fling large chunks of pumice that contain various crystals. The soft pumice erodes away quickly, leaving behind only the hard crystals.

A parting shot of Erebus from the helo ride home:


Just like Mt. Hood back home, I never tire of seeing Mt. Erebus. You can only hope that I eventually tire of photographing it!

Cheers!

...Again

Current Conditions
Temperature: 30F
Wind Chill: 23F
(Similar to most of you, eh?)

Another very busy week: a flight to Erebus, a drive to Windless Bight, grantees arriving, more deep snow, more critters. Where do I begin? I wasn't expecting this post to be a continuation, but...
The Kiwis warned me again that the drifts had gotten bad and they nearly got stuck. They planned to come back up at the end of the day, this time in a Hagglund instead of the usual Land Cruiser. Knowing they'd be happy to pull me out, I went for it. As they pulled me out, I told one of them that their Toyota is much better suited than my Ford pickup. When he asked if that was my excuse I said, "Hell no. My excuse is that it's too much fun to not try!"

The next day our fire inspector got stuck and the Kiwis got stuck in the tracks he made, so they both had to be pulled out by a loader, which then plowed the road. All I can say is, at least I'm not the only one.

Several of my grantees arrived this month. Two groups are at Pole, working on duplicate equipment there, and will be here next week. Right now I have a Kiwi fellow working on the interferometer at Arrival Heights (more info on interferometers later, probably much later). It's fun to watch him accidentally go to the passenger side of his vehicle. I also have a group of Alaskans working on the infrasound array.

Infrasound is simply low frequency noise that is below the threshold of human hearing. Not by volume, by frequency: very low notes. Some things that produce infrasound: earthquakes, avalanches, volcanoes, wind, lightning, auroras, elephants, nuclear blasts. Infrasound waves can travel immense distances without losing amplitude. Elephants can communicate using infrasound over a distance of several miles. Infrasound waves produced by a nuclear blast can travel around the world by echoing between the ground and the ionosphere.

The infrasound array here is part of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT. I don't know where the 'N' has got off to. The CTBT has been signed by 177 countries and ratified by 138. Several infrasound arrays are located around the world in order to detect nuclear blasts. Our array is located to the east of Hut Point Peninsula in an area called Windless Bight. The Alaskans refer to it more accurately as 'Less Windy Bight'. It is about 20 miles away from town, an hour drive by MatTrack. This is an ideal place for the array because wind noise is minimal, and the flat, unblemished ice sheet allows for perfect placement of the eight microphones, and no sound barriers like trees or rocks. The specialized microphones are placed in a specific pattern; three microphones form a 100 meter triangle, and five microphones form a 1 km pentagon. Because a sound wave will hit each microphone at a different time, the direction that it came from can be determined. At the center of the pattern is BOB, the Big Orange Box:

BOB is the power supply for all the microphones. It contains two generators, two solar panels, batteries, and a lot of sensors, communications, and control electronics. From BOB, cables go out to each of the microphone vaults:

This is one year of snow accumulation. Every year these guys dig up the microphones and place them back on the surface of the snow again. They actually raise BOB up as well. The connecting cables stay under the snow and become deeper and deeper each year. When they run out of cable slack, they'll move the whole array back to where it started: everything moves with the ice sheet about 65 meters every year.

Here is Mt. Erebus again:

The tower and flags in the distance mark one of the five microphone stations in the outer pentagon, half a kilometer away. Each station has a tower with a directional antenna that transmits data back to McMurdo.

Back in McMurdo, it's getting to be pretty busy again. Lots of folks are passing through town. There are dozens of field camps all over the continent, most of which are supported from McMurdo. The population is constantly changing as different groups pass through: lots of scientists, but also field camp support groups, and recently, a group of congressmen (some of whom slept on a helicopter ride to the Dry Valleys that most folks here would kill for - again, our tax dollars hard at work). The field camps all have different purposes and schedules, but many that last the full season are now wrapping up. We also have the Swedes from the Oden icebreaker coming and going, and soon the supply vessel and fuel tanker will pass through town. During vessel offload, we'll be invaded by "Nav-Chaps". These are very young military types who have a reputation for being very young military types. The bars close for the week and there is no alcohol sold at the store. I've been advised to lock my room and my vehicle, and to stock up the week before!

Stuck in the Snow

Current Conditions
Temperature: 31F
Wind Chill: 23F

It's been an eventful week here. Early in the week, the New Zealand science techs, my neighbors up at Arrival Heights, invited me to Scott Base for tea (that means dinner in Kiwi). It may not sound terribly exciting, but I assure you I was the envy of many. Scott Base only has about 50 residents, so their food tends to be considerably better than our mass produced slop (actually our food is pretty good considering it's made for over 1000 people). My fantastic Kiwi dinner was topped off with real ice cream! A huge leap over our "Frosty Boy" soft-serve machine.

Also this week, I was on the helicopter manifest twice to go back up to Mt. Erebus, but the nasty storm that blew in shut us down both times. It also shut down my truck when I tried to drive through a three-foot-deep snow drift on the Arrival Heights road. The Kiwis got stuck earlier in the day, but what was a warning on their lips turned into a challenge in my ears. This section usually gets several inches to a foot of snow on it. Blazing through it in the truck is one of my favorite parts of the day, and usually a little momentum goes a long way. Not this day. I made it a good hundred feet, and when I stepped out to assess, my leg sank all the way up to my nether-regions in the snow. oops. A co-worker came to get me in a Pisten Bully. We dug out snow around the wheels and realized the truck was completely high-centered. It stayed the night. The next day we brought tow straps:

The Bully had no trouble pulling the truck out, but the overnight winds had filled the engine compartment totally with snow:

I wish I had thought to take a picture before Ethan cleaned most of it out. While the engine warmed, we had a blast taking turns driving the undulating drift in the Bully. Give two boys a 50,000 dollar toy! Woohoo!

While we were compacting the road, the Swedish icebreaker 'Oden' was clearing a path from the Ross Sea to McMurdo:

The ship made port in town today. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get on board and check it out.

Another big buzz this week has been the fuzzy little Skua chic. Skuas nest right on the rocky volcanic pumice. They don't seem to mind rocks in their bed, so no cleaning is necessary. On my first attempt to see the chic, mom was protecting it from the wind under a wing:

Yesterday was a little calmer, though, and the chic was out and about:

The Skuas have no reason to fear humans. Actually, they see us as a great source of cafeteria food, so they let us get very close.

All for now.
Cheers!

LDB

Current Conditions
Temperature: 38F
Wind Chill: 38F

Warning! This post is sciencey! (and may contain made up words)

The Long Duration Balloon group launches enormous balloons with payloads of instrumentation that collect data at an altitude of 125,000 feet. Flights can last up to several weeks. The LDB facility is located on the ice shelf about a mile from Scott Base. I got a tour of the place several weeks ago, before the balloons were launched. It consists of several buildings, including a galley, a powerhouse, a couple labs, and two very large buildings that house the payloads. A small city on ice.

This year there were three different science groups that launched full-scale balloons. I managed to miss all three launches, but in my own defense: two were in the middle of the night. The apparatus is quite impressive. The balloon itself, once fully inflated, is 450 feet in diameter. That's well over a full football field! The amount of material required means that the balloon weighs as much as the payloads, which are in the neighborhood of 5000 pounds! Hard to get perspective here, but the wheels on the launch vehicle are nearly as tall as I am:

Here is a balloon in mid-launch:

The orange section in the middle is the parachute. The long line between the parachute and the balloon is actually not a line at all; it's the rest of the balloon! On the ground, the pressure of the atmosphere only allows helium to fill the very tip of the balloon. As it rises to its cruising altitude, 23 miles up, the atmospheric pressure will drop and the balloon will expand to its full size:

This balloon circumnavigated the continent and flew right past McMurdo, 2 weeks after it was launched. The air currents here form a convenient loop around the pole, so the balloons just circle the continent until the scientists decide to let 'em drop. The chances of a balloon passing this close are pretty small, so it was exciting to see it overhead.

Most of these balloon-bound instruments are measuring cosmic rays. A cosmic ray is a high energy atomic particle that travels through space at nearly the speed of light. These particles may be conventional protons, neutrons and electrons, or they may be anti-matter particles such as positrons or the aptly named anti-proton. Cosmic rays come primarily from extrasolar sources within our own galaxy: neutron stars, supernovae, black holes, etc. But some cosmic rays are so energetic that scientists believe they come from other galaxies. These particles are rare, but can have 10 million times more energy than modern particle accelerators will generate. Imagine a single atom with enough energy to rival a baseball going 60 miles per hour.

These are the three payloads launched this year:

ATIC
The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, or ATIC, is designed to measure the energy spectrum of cosmic ray particles. Put simply: a graph of energy level vs number of particles. From data collected by ATIC, scientists hope to validate the supernova shock wave acceleration model, which suggests that cosmic rays gain their energy as a result of supernova explosions.

BESS
The Balloon-borne Experiment with Superconducting Spectrometer, or BESS, also measures cosmic rays, but focuses on low energy antiprotons. Most antiprotons are secondary cosmic rays produced in collisions of primary cosmic rays with interstellar gas. However, it is suspected that some low energy antiprotons may be primary cosmic rays produced by other, more primordial means. The low energy antiprotons may therefore be a viewing window into the early universe.

CREAM
The goal of Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass, or CREAM, is to observe features of cosmic rays related to a supernova acceleration limit. The shape of the cosmic ray energy spectrum suggests that cosmic rays are accelerated by supernova shock waves (this is what ATIC is trying to validate), but there is a limit to the energy that could be produced in this way. The baseball-rivaling cosmic rays have five times the amount of energy suggested by the limit. Their origin is still a mystery.