An Easy One

Photos © 2005 Seth White

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Today is Christmas Eve Eve, and tonight marks the beginning of a two-day weekend for McMurdo Station. The standard workweek for station staff is six 9-hour days a week, with Sunday off. Although grantees can more or less keep their own hours, we generally work as much if not more than the station employees. Well, most of us, anyhow...science groups here are like any other group of people, and a certain percentage of grantees are useless dead weight. On the other hand, many of the truly impressive and capable people here are scientists. However, I digress. The point is that for pretty much everyone on station, staff and beakers alike, a two-day weekend is a nice thing. We even had fresh salad at dinner tonight, and the store is selling liquor today and tomorrow. Good times. Yep, nothing like the ice to make one appreicate little things like two days off, lettuce, and old New Zealand beer ("Speights" is Kiwi-speak for "Budweiser"). The station Christmas party is also tonight, and will be held at the Heavy Shop. So I'm going to type away at this webpage for an hour or two and then head over. Actually, I had two paragraphs typed up last night, but I started blathering on about GPS field work, logistics, and all sorts of technical details of the TAMDEF project, and before I knew it my eyelids were drooping...so I deleted it and am going to keep the monologue for this webpage short. Or at least shorter. First off, here is a tabular iceberg we saw on our way to Cape Roberts one evening. Huge, yes, but really just a tiny scrap broken off the Ross Ice Shelf. My guess is that it's a splinter piece broken off from the mega-berg C-16. It floated around a while and then got trapped a while back in the sea ice. Maybe this year the sea ice here will break up and flow out, freeing this iceberg and its group of buddies nearby.
Here was our first destination: the GPS installation at Cape Roberts. The Trans Antarctic Mountains Deformation project (TAMDEF, see here) has many sites around the Ross Sea area, with the goal of measuring uplift of these mountains. Yes, if you are careful, you can do this with GPS. By receiving signals from satellites 12,000 miles away, you can measure the motion of the earth's crust to sub-centimeter level accuracy. This is AMAZING if you stop to think about it. Anyhow, this project is headed up by people from Ohio State University and USGS who have been doing this work here for many years. Of the multitude of sites this group measures, Cape Roberts is one of three continuous stations (with Fishtail Point and Mount Fleming) that will transmit its data back to the world year-round. UNAVCO's involvement in this project is twofold. First, we provided 15 GPS receivers for campaign work this summer. Second, we are working with them to modify and upgrade these three sites with the overall goal of keeping them running and communicating year-round. Developing instrument stations that operate and maintain comms year-round in Antarctica is a challenge. TAMDEF, the AGO group, the Mt. Erebus group, and others have done a lot of work toward this goal, and the body of practical knowledge down here about doing this sort of thing is large. But there are still challenges to be overcome to achieve a standardized, rapidly deployable, robust year-round instrument station for the deep field in Antarctica. However, I personally am very optimistic about how these three TAMDEF sites will perform over the coming winter. Time will tell. This photo shows the installation at Cape Roberts. The shadowy figure standing over the white box is Mike, who is the field team leader this season. On this visit, he and his group were here primarily to do a "footprint survey". The idea here is to make sure that your primary geodetic monument is not moving relative to the ground nearby. For example, if you measure 5 mm of movement over the course of a year at your primary monument, how do you know that this represents large-scale crustal motion of the site as opposed to shifting or settling of the rock your monument was placed on? The answer is that when you install your primary monument, you install a few other monuments nearby so you can make sure that the primary monument hasn't shifted relative to these other monuments. If not, the motion you measured at your primary monument really represents a large-scale crustal displacement.
This webpage is getting lengthy (again)...sorry about that, but to explain what we were doing here takes a bit of doing. That being said, my goal here actually wasn't to help with the footprint survey but rather to scout out a good location for a new solar panel frame. Part of our work here this year was to upgrade this site with two additional solar panels and a bunch of batteries in order to beef up the power system to last longer into the winter. But, as you can see from the photo above, Cape Roberts is a bouldery site. Not a lot of great locations to construct a tubular aluminum frame for solar panels. The older solar panels were mounted directly into the rock...which is a pain in the butt to do and is also not feasible for every site. An adaptable, robust solar panel frame design is important for such a site, so we brought a bunch of hardware down this year to make such frames. I looked around for a little while and ended up finding a spot that would work out nicely if we modified our original tube frame design a little. So after making a few measurements and taking photos of the spot, I was able to enjoy the scenery a bit. Here is our ride parked by the Cape Roberts hut. This is a Kiwi building (note the regulation Scott Base Green), and I believe it was used during the Cape Roberts drilling project a few years back. It still sees visitors now and then, such as...
...Geoff. He works for Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and was down as part of the TAMDEF crew this year. He also did work with USGS on the tide gauge installed at Cape Roberts, in fact he and Larry (from USGS) stayed at this hut for a few days while they worked on that system.
There are some beautiful sea ice pressure ridges near here, with seals lounging about here and there. There was absolutely no wind, the temperature was reasonably warm, and it was a night flight so the sun was at a nice low angle. I walked down to the shoreline and took this one while looking back towards the Wilson Piedmont Glacier, which borders Cape Roberts.
Another one with a pressure ridge, looking out north out over the bay.
A skua, flying over the bay to the south.
Seals. This is a pic from Cape Ross, a few miles north of Cape Roberts. Both sites are over an hour in a helicopter from McMurdo, so Mike scheduled footprint surveys of both sites while they were in the area. I helped out a little carrying gear around, but overall they didn't need any help so I just toted my camera around. I found a nice spot overlooking the sea and sat for a while soaking up the sounds. Skuas breed here (as well as at Cape Roberts), so the were making some racket in the distance. Also, the seals would chime in occasionally with all manner of grunts, yells, gurgles, and so forth. Remarkably human-like, some of the sounds those things make. Especially the pups. They squak, coo, whine, and wriggle around just like human babies. But the best sound of all was the sea ice as it cracked, squeaked, and groaned as it shifted. Now and then I'd hear a whip-like sound, but not a sharp crack. It was more like the weird sound you get if you whip a thin sheet of plastic around. A weird, synthetic, dynamic sound that would actually move side to side in front of me as the sound waves bounced off a nearby cove.
There were some neat sculpted rocks here, and a few of them made a little window through which you could see Erebus. So here's a pic.
A skua mating pair. Skuas have a well-deserved reputation for being agressive, clever, and resourceful. I have never been attacked by one, but fairly frequently some unsuspecting soul will get dive bombed as they walk outdoors from the galley with food in their hands. Actually, several people have told me that lately they are changing their tactics. Instead of swooping down from above, they will fly in low, under your radar. If you're not paying attention this is very effective, since they blend in well with the brown backgrounds of McMurdo. A person was telling me recently that a scientist at Palmer Station was actually knocked out by one - it dive bombed him from behind and whacked his head with its wing. Caught totally unaware, he actually fell over and took a minute to come to. While I was walking around Cape Ross, one of them started flying toward me fast, silently, and low. I saw it and turned to watch it. It kept getting closer and closer, and I started to think what I ought to do to fend it off. Truth be told, I actually started to feel a bit intimidated. These birds are big, with sharp talons and beaks. Basically they're the badasses among terrestrial wildlife in these latitudes. But I guess it finally realized that I had nothing in the way of food that it could scare up from me, so it ended up swerving away at the last second. Later in the year, when the chicks are hatching, I'm told that it's somewhat hazardous to walk around Capes Roberts and Ross. The rookeries themselves are protected areas and are off limits, but the skuas don't care if you're following the rules or not...
One of my favorite pics from this season.
Some crusty little lichen thingies, clinging to life on a rock. This stuff grows here and there, and in some places it's hard not to step on. But I try not to, since these things put up with a lot of harship just to exist here. I have a fondness for scrubby, hardy little plants and things that grow at high altitudes or high latitudes.
The sun was very low at 1:00 am when we flew back to station, and the scene out the left side of the aircraft was dream-like. The next four are shots of Erebus, sea ice, and icebergs along the way. The light was fairly low, and at first I was a little disappointed that I hadn't kept my shutter speed up high enough to cancel out the vibrations of the helicopter. But I think the slight fuzziness actually made the effect a little better. This one and the next have become two more of my favorites from this year. Just surreal.



We flew low past a couple icebergs...here is the side of one that has calved off a bit.
A look at late-night Mac Town.