Last few days

We only have a few days left (we leave a week from today), so I have been trying to pack a few last minute adventures in, while I still can.
Today we had to take a trip to start packing some of our equipment away, so on the way home, we stopped at the Scott Base sign post.
Ooh! They have camping, picnic, dining and even docking facilities! (Can you find Goldbug in this picture? AKA, Hugh)

Later this evening we hiked to the top of Observation (Ob) Hill. It was a spectacular night. Beautiful sky, and beautiful station. The hike was a bit rough for me, what with the asthma and all, but we made it to the top and got some amazing pictures.

As we hiked higher and higher, I took pictures to mark our progress. Here is Hugh and the station below him.


And here we are together about mid way up the hill.
Finally, we made it to the top. Where's Hugh? (There sure are a lot of crosses around station.) Isn't it beautiful?

Because Hugh didn't get any pictures at Happy Camper, I wanted to make sure we got one in front of Mount Erebus.
It was a great hike. And the best part was: we got to slide down the whole thing coming down. Weeeee!

Next post = Last post from the Ice. :-(

Antarctic optical phenomena

Because of the extreme cold temperatures, both near the ground and above us, there are some pretty amazing optical phenomena to be seen. The first, and one that you will probably be familiar with is the 'sun dog'.
This phenomenon is also referred to as 'mock suns' because of the appearance of one (or, in this case, two) bright spots next to the sun. This picture also shows some of the arc around the sun, too. On this day, it was a beautiful clear day. But on walking outside, the air all around us was glittering. There were ice crystals everywhere (Not snow. Think smaller. They are referred to as 'diamond dust'.) It was these crystals that gave us such beautiful sun dogs. Ice crystals have hexagonal shapes, and as light passes through these little crystals, the light is reflected and refracted back into the viewer's line of sight, causing bright spots.

The second phenomena is really only 'optical' when there is light to interact with them, but occur when the temperatures are just right. We all know that clouds form in the troposphere (or we do now), but what if I told you that there were stratospheric clouds? My God! She must be mad! No. I'm not.
I know, I know. Not much to look at. But this is the only one I saw all season. Just before we arrived on the Ice, we were told that the sky was filled with them, causing the most beautiful sunsets you have ever seen. And boy, were they right:

This picture is in focus (see the horizon). But doesn't it look like an artist just brushed the sky with his brush? Simply amazing. This picture was taken by the station dentist, Kim. The previous one was taken by Luca who ran the LIDAR.
So what are these? They are called polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) or nacreous clouds (when you can see them). They can only form when stratospheric temperatures are very cold (-80 degrees Celsius. That's -112 F) and at altitudes between 15 and 30 km (about 50-100,000 feet). They are composed of water and nitric acid. But not to worry, they are completely natural. We are particularly interested in these clouds because of their reaction with ozone. Long story short, these clouds produce activated chlorine which is an ozone destroyer. When these clouds are present (Antarctic winter), the ozone hole intensifies. We measured these clouds when we first got here, but they are quick to disappear due to the rapid warming of the stratosphere as we got more and more sunlight.

The last phenomenon is a personal favorite of mine: fata morgana. This is a type of mirage (superior). Inferior mirages are the ones we are most familiar with. This is what you see when driving on a hot road and there appears to be a pool of water in front of you. What is actually happening is the sunlight is being refracted, or bent. Similar to putting a straw into a glass of water and seeing that it "bends", light is bent toward the colder (denser) air. For Fata Morgana to appear, the surface temperature has to be colder than the air above it. Here is some amazing fata morgana we saw, as photographed by Luca:
Do you see that strange band of "cliffs" at the bottom of the mountains? Looks pretty fake, right? Well, it is. This is the fata morgana. Light is bent toward the colder air, but our eye interprets that as being higher than reality. Here is a nifty slide I made to try to explain it better.
Angry Man is seeing the refracted light from the mountain, but his eyes follow the same line up (they don't curve back down). So what he thinks he sees is a really tall cliff, or mountain.

I hope that makes sense. It is easier to explain in person. But that's it for Antarctic Optics, Leslie Style.

Recovery. Antarctic style.

Part 3 of 3. (If you missed parts 1 and 2, see the previous posts "Tractor trip" and "Happy Camper".

For those of you unfamiliar with our ballooning escapades, I'll fill you in on a few extra details. In Laramie, after we launch our instruments, a few of us pile into a van and hit the roads in a valiant effort to recover the balloon and instrument package. We have all sorts of tracking equipment on both, and are usually able to locate both with no problems. Here on the ice, we only recover the instruments, but in a much different way.

Before we get to the recovery, how about some pictures, courtesy of the station dentist, Kim, from our last big balloon launch (Wow. There are too many commas in that sentence.)
Here is the whole set-up. We had two people holding the balloon (that was about 150 pounds that they had to hold down. Not easy to do.), two people on the rest of the balloon (we only fill a small portion of the balloon, the bubble. As the balloon ascends, the gas expands and fills the rest of the plastic until *POP*.), I am holding the parachute, Mahesh is holding the mast (with all of our tracking equipment on it), and Jen has Jupiter (the instrument. Not the planet.)

As the balloon rises, the instrument samples air and gives us information on the size distribution of particles in the atmosphere (Jupiter uses a laser to shine on the particles, based on the scattering caused by the particles, we get a size distribution).
So this picture above shows what we have to find out on the sea ice. And this is what it looks like on the sea ice.
This is the same instrument as in the launch pictures above. It was about 40 miles away from station on the sea ice. How, you may ask, did we ever find such a thing?
Well, only by the greatest means of transportation ever devised. Helicopter.
That's me and our pilot. Pretty cool, no? Even I'm jealous of me.
I was able to get some pretty amazing shots as we left McMurdo. Here is one of the station just as we took off.
And here is one of Scott Base (the Kiwi base).
It was a beautiful day and a thrilling adventure. Helicopter with a personal pilot who has years and years of experience is the only way to fly.

Well, that concludes my four day Adventure Saga. I hope it was as thrilling for you as it was for me.

Tractor trip to Cape Evans

Part 2 of 3
The day that we got back from Happy Camper, I basically took a shower, ate some food and fell asleep. I think I lost consciousness around 6 pm. It had been a long 36 hours. At 7:30 am, I was beginning to think I should pry myself out of bed (13.5 hours was probably enough sleep for one night), when the phone rang. Turns out, a couple of the guys on station were going out to Cape Evans (about 15 miles or so from McMurdo) that morning to groom the road, and they had two extra seats. Would Mahesh and I be interested in going along for a ride?

Yes we would.

I scrambled to wake myself up, get dressed and head out to the tractors. We drove through town, and got on the sea ice. From that point on, we were driving on frozen ocean. Oooh.
Here I am with one of the tractors.
It was a cloudy day, but you could still see pretty far. It is too bad it wasn't clear; the area we drove to is right at the base of Mount Erebus. That would have been really cool. But we drove. And drove. And drove some more. Eventually, we came to an small island called Big Razorback. John (one of the drivers) said he saw seals there the day before. And guess what? They were still there. I had to do a lot of editing on this picture to zoom in close enough to the seal, but here is my friend, a Weddell seal. He is waving to you.
There were about eight of them, all laying out on the snow and ice. There was a crack that we could see right at the base of the island where they came up from.
Continuing on our journey, we eventually came to Cape Evans. Scott and his men constructed another hut here, I believe in 1911. It was from here that Scott and his team departed for their journey to reach the South Pole. Scott was determined to beat Amundsen and his men to the pole but unfortunately, did not make it in time. Amundsen and his team relied heavily on sled dogs to bring them South, while Scott used a mix of horses and dogs. The horses didn't fare as well as had been anticipated. On the return journey home, Scott's men perished one by one. Eventually, unable to continue on due to malnutrition and a horrid blizzard outside of their tent (a Scott tent. Ooh. Ominous.), Scott and the final men died.
There was an interesting snow drift behind the hut.
We weren't able to enter the hut, because we were not on a tour and didn't have the key. But in front of the hut there was an anchor of a ship. I've heard this story before, but for the life of me, I can't determine what ship it came from. There was a ship anchored to this spot, but was torn away from its chain, and was lost to sea. All that remains is this anchor.
On the return journey back to station, we stopped to take a few pictures of some icebergs near the Erebus glacier tongue.
It was an incredible day, and the day that followed was equally as amazing.

Stay tuned!

Happy Camper

First, let me preface this post by saying that the past four days have been the most adventure filled, awesome days I have ever had. So in order for you to fully grasp the enormity of the events that have taken place, I will post only one of these events today, and save the others for the next posts. So read fast! You don't want to miss a thing.

On Friday, Mahesh and I had to attend a two day course commonly (and lovingly) referred to as "Happy Camper". This course teaches you how to be prepared in the event of being stranded out on the ice, or at some other remote location in Antarctica. As part of this course, the campers have to construct, maintain, and sleep one night in a winter camp.

We started the day at 0900 where we got the basics on what is included in survival bags that everyone must have with them when traveling away from station. Then we traveled out to the Happy Camper site. After learning how to use the stoves and getting a little bit of last minute information, we headed out to our campsite... a vast field of white.

Unfortunately, pictures of this expedition are rather sparse as the temperatures were freezing my camera batteries faster than I could snap pictures, but I did manage to get this great shot of Mount Erebus. We had a beautiful day.
The set-up of our camp included building a wind wall out of "quarried" snow bricks (we sawed them out of the snow below our feet), setting up Scott Tents, setting up mountain tents and building a quinzee. We also learned how, if all else failed, a snow trench can save your life. Here are a few shots of our finished camp.
That is the quinzee in the middle with the shovel sticking out of it. This is basically a hollowed out pile of snow. The way we built it was by piling up all of our gear, and shovelling snow on top of the gear until it was covered in a 12 inch thick layer of snow. There were 20 campers, so this did not take much time. After allowing the snow to harden and form to its new shape, a hole is cut on one side and the gear can be pulled out, leaving a hollow center. Where the shovel is in this picture is the entrance. It is dug down below the floor of the quinzee to allow for the cold air to pool up, and not enter the quinzee.
This is the entrance. In the background of these two pictures you can see the mountain tents and the Scott Tents (the tall yellow ones). This tent uses the same design as Scott's expeditions, nearly 100 years ago. Can you guess where I spent the night?
Behind the tents was our "kitchen" area and the wind wall.
It was a very long day of excruciatingly difficult work, followed by a long, very cold night. I think reports were that the low reached -15 F. That's cold. But, we were all well prepared, and we didn't suffer a single casualty. Whoo hoo! A few of us said that it was the "stupidest fun thing" we had ever done. Lesson learned: Now that I know how to do it all, I am sure I could do it again if I had to. But I'd never want to do it again.

By the way. I slept in the quinzee. Wee!

Scott's Discovery Hut

Last night we took a walk to Scott's Discovery Hut. It is located, how appropriately, at Hut Point, just a short distance from McMurdo. It was built for Scott's 1901 expedition to the ice, but was not lived in during this expedition as it was too cold. It was however, later used by Shackleton and his crew in1908, and again by Scott in 1910, and one last time by Shackleton in 1917. At one time, there were 16 men living in it for a month. It was, in a word, amazing.
Approaching the hut:
We'll come back to the hut in a bit. First, we continued walking past the hut up to Vince's Cross.
Here are some of the views from that portion:
Here I am, with Scott's Discovery Hut behind, and McMurdo Station further behind that.
And finally, the view from Vince's cross.
Pretty pretty, no? Back down at the hut, we found something they left behind.
That is a seal. A dead seal. A dead 100 YEAR OLD SEAL! Wow. Just wow. But wait! There's more. Before entering the hut, we had to clean our shoes off really well so we didn't track in salt and dirt and such. The lock on the door was giving us a hard time, but Chicago winters have prepared me for such a thing, and we eventually got the door unlocked. Entering the hut was incredible. There is snow everywhere in it, and it is dark. We had these sub-par flashlights (boy, could we have used some X-Files flashlights) and really could only see things by taking a picture, and looking on our LCD screens which, amazingly, hadn't frozen by this point. I know people have been there before, but I felt like Carter discovering Tut's tomb.
Their food and gear has all been left behind. Even their stove is ready for cooking:
It was very cold and very dark inside. It smelled pretty bad, I'm sure we all breathed in some fairly foul stuff. And, there was snow everywhere:
It must have been truly horrendous for these men who had to survive here. One last picture. I haven't edited any of these yet, but I love this one. I think I'll call it "Closing the Hut":