Images of

ANTARCTICA

Arrival Heights Area

Photos © 2002 Seth White

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Here is an official placque sticking out of the ground which describes the Arrival Heights Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). More about the area here. It's not on the main road, it's actually nearby the older road which is seldom used.

50 MHz Riometer. A riometer stands for Relative Ionospheric Opacity Meter, and is an antenna specially designed to receive cosmic background radiation. The earth's ionosphere influences the radiation arriving at the earth's surface, and thus the riometers can be used to characterize changes in the ionosphere. The riometer itself is in the center, and the other poles are its supports.
The riometers originated from the University of Maryland. This is a 4x4 array, each element being a separate riometer which views a certain portion of the sky. In this way, an spatial image of the current state of the ionosphere is created.
The riometers look flimsy, but the design is quite robust. Winds above 150 knots can occur here, and meanwhile they just sit there collecting data.
Second crater is an old volcanic crater about 1.5 miles north of the hut. Inside the crater is the VLF (very low frequency) antenna. Stanford University is running the project and this antenna, in combination with the ELF (extremely low frequency) antenna, measures very long wavelength electromagnetic waves which propagate around globe between the earth and the ionosphere.
Another distant view of the VLF antenna.
The VLF antenna again. A central wooden pole is mounted in the ground, and four triangular loops of wire run down to the ground from its top. The other four wires are support lines for the pole itself. The wire loops are oriented N-S and E-W, and pick up radiation in the 3 kHz-30 kHz range.
Center of the VLF antenna.
This is the view of the Arrival Heights huts and First Crater as seen from Second Crater on a stormy day.
The fabulous VLF preamp box, containing amplifiers and line drivers for sending the signals back to the hut.
The VLF/ELF project was inactive during the past year. Dr. Dana Porrat arrived for a couple weeks this season to repair and upgrade the systems (some very vintage pieces of equipment were replaced). This picture is at the ELF antenna vault. Unlike the VLF antenna, which sways in the breeze, it is important for the ELF antenna to remain stationary. Thus, it was buried in a wooden vault out in the lava fields north of the hut.
Huck Auen working on the Preamp box at the VLF antenna.
Dana and me working on the VLF preamp box. Cold and windy this particular day! (Photo by Huck Auen)
One of the VLF antenna arms had completely snapped due to high winds. So here are Dana and Huck dutifully repairing the poor thing.
Me, at the top of the VLF antenna pole. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
This is the ELF antenna inside the vault. Actually, there are two antennas, one oriented North-South and the other East-West. They pick up signals in the 30 hz - 3 kHz range.
The ELF antenna preamp box. Oooooh!
Huck again, this time inside the ELF antenna vault.
More of Mr. Auen inside the vault.
Me, inside the ELF antenna vault. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
Ice crystals in ELF vault. This vault had not been entered in over 10 years. In the meantime, hordes of exquisitely formed ice crystals had slowly formed on the ceiling of the vault. These crystals were perfectly formed and quite beautiful. So, there are 6 pictures of them here....with and without flash.
My personal favorite pic of the ice crystals.
Pic #3.
Pic #4.
Pic #5.
Pic #6.
Dana with a kite, on a windy day at Arrival Heights. It is usually much windier here than at McMurdo.
Another pic of kite-flying, on the way back from a hike to work on the VLF antenna.
Still more kite flying.
Me, jumping from the roof of the hut into a high snow drift. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
Another one of jumping into the drift. This makes for a great mid-afternoon break from work. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
The classic United States Antarctic Program photo: Some person in the ubitquitous RED PARKA, looking out into a vast white landscape during severe weather. This picture is of me, but it could be anybody in the entire program. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
The Arrival Heights hut on a nasty day. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
Movie file of yours truly, taking five on the hike to Second Crater during stormy day. (.avi file, by Dana Porrat)
The snow here blows around just like sand in the desert. Behind these rocks, snow was piled up during the past couple days due to constant winds from the South.
These footprints are left over from a short walk we took in the middle of a raging storm a few days prior. Our feet compressed the snow, and thus the winds hat not eroded them as fast as the surrounding loose snow. So, the footprints remained raised as the rest was blown away.
The Kiwis also operate a research building here, and naturally it's green. Among other things, they are doing electromagnetic sampling, air sampling, and ozone measurements. Their communications antenna is housed in the green radome in the background.
Another view.
And another.
This little vault houses the Bell Labs fluxgate magnetometer. It measures very slow fluctuations in the ambient magnetic field (0 to 0.1 Hz). Twice a year I have to re-level this thing, and each day I check various values on the control box inside the hut. And that's really about it. Low-maintenance is a very applicable word here.
This is the fluxgate magnetometer itself. It is a three axis device, with the N/S axis aligned to the magnetic poles.
A differential GPS (DGPS) base station. The ELF/VLF project needed to get exact bearings on its VLF antennas, but the large amount of iron-bearing ores in the soil here makes compass readings very sketchy. So, Jeff Scaniello (station surveyor) and I came up one day to do a measurement. He used DGPS, and this is the base station. Basically, the DGPS system works like this. You put a base station at a known location, such as the USGS marker we had at this site. This base station then communicates with the GPS satellites and gets a reading of its location from them. The difference between its known location and the reading from the satellites is thus the error in position. So, if you take a portable receiver out to another nearby spot (such as a VLF antenna), you can use that positional correction to refine your reading down to sub-centimeter accuracy.
Jeff with the DGPS base station, entering in its exact location.
Jeff with the portable DGPS unit, recording the location of one of the VLF antenna arms. On this particular day, Second Crater was literally in the clouds. Ghostly fog was wafting over the crater...very surreal.
A little box we found on the way back from Second Crater. I have no idea what this was....perhaps an old instrument station or survey point? The interesting thing is the effect of the weather on the wood. Dimples and deep grooves have been worn into the wood over years of exposure.
Yours truly, on the roof of the hut, with a Cuban cigar (this particular one was a Romeo Y Julieta). These arrived courtesy of Jim Ehramjian, who did the site visit for the UV measurement system this year. During training for this job, I spent a week in San Diego at Biospherical Instruments, who are subcontracted by Raytheon to run a UV monitoring network. Amidst the training, Jim and I managed to have a few beers and cigars. So he showed up on site with a handful of smokes, remarkably well humidified considering the long voyage. These, combined with Sierra Nevadas and a gorgeous day, made for good times at Arrival Heights.
This is Jim, with a quality malted beverage and a fine tobacco product.
Jim again, and his friend Steve who also came up to hang out.
A little video of us sitting on the roof. I love this clip - usually my digital camera movies don't turn out that great. But not this one, it's awesome. Let's see....we have Cuban cigars, Sierra Nevadas, the hut window open and music blasting from below (Bruford Levin Upper Extremities), and this unbelievable view of the Ross Sea, Mount Erebus, and the icebreaker out working in the channel. A harsh continent indeed!
For no good reason, Jim and Bryan Venema (of Gonzalo's group) decided to slide a 6-pack of Guinness down the drift in front of the hut. Here's the video of this thrilling event, from the hut roof. Kinda humorous. Only problem is, I took the video with the camera vertical, and my quicktime player can't rotate the video. Oh well...it's still entertaining....
Here's a random picture of Olivia driving the Pisten Bully back to town from Arrival Heights one day.
This is a movie file (.avi format) of sunset on a windy day. The wind was kicking up the snow pretty good, and I had Rush playing in the hut at high volume. The particular song was "Freeze", so I made this little movie to go with the song.
It's early October now, and I'm getting ready to leave the ice. There has been a rash of flights cancelled lately due to weather...which has mystified me on occasion, since the weather here has been pretty good on a few of those days. Anyhow, the "new" science tech hasn't arrived yet, and I need to wait for her to get here before I leave since a turnover period is required. Since she's done this job before the turnover will be short - only a few days. But there are a lot of changes and modifications to some of the systems since she was here, so I really do need to wait so we can spend at least a couple days together. So in the meantime, I have the time to do stuff like this: put miscellaneous pictures up on this website before I go. Here's one of Erebus, Second Crater, and the moon that I took at Arrival Heights a few days ago.
My friend Paola came along to Arrival Heights this day to hang out while I checked the experiments. The LIDAR season is over with, and she's now waiting around McMurdo...also delayed by the flights. Here she is, with White Island and some nice colors in the background.