Images of

ANTARCTICA

Arrival Heights Hut

Photos © 2002 Seth White

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This is a view of the Arrival Heights huts, taken on a very nice day. The US hut is the white one and the NZ one is the green one (naturally). The truck I used during the summer is parked outside. The green radome in the background houses the main telecom antenna for Scott Base. This radome is actually an interesting thing. The Arrival Heights area (a sizeable chunk of land surrounding these two huts) has been specifically designated as a specially protected area - a Site of Special Scientific Interest, or SSSI. Most SSSI's are biological or ecological in nature, for example: penguin colonies, sites in the Dry Valleys, and others. There is even an SSSI on the top of Mt. Erebus, where a weirdo patch of black moss grows due to the perpetual warmth near the crater. But this one is different. It has been set aside as an SSSI so that delicate geophysical and astrophysical measurements can be done here. In particular, it is an electromagnetic quiet zone, a dark zone (far from the lights of the McMurdo metropolis), and a clean air sampling zone. There are also many cables laid along the ground which can be easily damaged by vehicle or foot traffic. Thus, this area is restricted to authorized visitors only. Various precautions are taken when people work here, aimed at preserving the integrity of the measurements being performed. Anyhow, back to to the Kiwi radome. This is a new installation, which went in a few years back. You might ask: if Arrival Heights is an SSSI in part because it is an electromagnetic quiet zone, then how could they put in a communications station right here? Indeed, as I understand it there was a significant controversy over this. So we commissioned a panel of experts to examine the effects of this installation on the purity of the electromagnetic fields here. What they found was interesting: the NZ antenna was actually very quiet. It was very directional, pointing toward the north to communicate with specific satellites. A much larger amount of radiation was seen to come from the United States' T-Site area. This area is a couple miles from Arrival Heights, but there is a direct line of sight from one to the other. And the antennas we have there were much noisier than the new Kiwi dome. It seems this was kind of a black eye for the USAP. Very funny stuff!

So anyhoo, here is a snow drift that formed near the hut. It is much windier at Arrival Heights than at McMurdo, and the wind often does very nice things with the snow. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
Another pic of a drift near the hut. (Photo by Dana Porrat)
This drift was particularly nice. It formed after an extended summer storm, with strong winds from the south. These storms are called "Herbies", for reasons unknown to me. Herbies are generally the strongest storms, as the winds from the continent race northward.
When you walk in the hut, this is the entryway. Sealing of entrances and windows is an issue here. The storms come with such ferocity that you will often see snow inside buildings, where the wind has just forced the snow through the relatively well-sealed cracks. This entryway is often filled with a few inches of snow after a good storm....so I dutifully shovel it out now and then. The freezer-type door leads to the outside, and another regular door leads to the foyer.
And this is the foyer. Various electrical panels are in here, as well as the restroom facilities. The restroom is a propane-powered incinerator device....the rocket potty! It is in a small room to the right in this picture. The way this thing works is as follows. You sit down (or stand up) and do your business in a little metal can with a toilet seat attached. After this can get sufficiently "full", you put a cover on it and light the burner. There are a couple propane cannisters hooked up outside which feed the burner. You then let the burner go for 4 hours...and at the end, your handiwork has been reduced to ashes. These ashes are vacuumed up with the cannister vacuum in the left corner of this picture. And that's that! One note, though. You don't want to burn the toilet during Kiwi air sampling days. They will take air samples when the winds are from the north at greater than 10 knots (if you take samples from any south-like direction you will get pollution from McMurdo!). So it's a good idea before you burn the toilet to see a) if there is a NZ truck outside their hut and b) are the winds from the north at 10 knots or more? Ah, the things I do for science....
While you're enjoying the comforts of the rocket potty, there are various things for you to gaze at on the inside of the bathroom door. Really, this is a good setup. Cosray only has a barrel and a bucket-with-a-plastic-bag for you to use, and it's closer to McMurdo!
Let's take a closer look at this particular poster on the inside of the bathroom door. It's a poster for Dr. Bronner's Peppermint 18-in-1 Pure-Castile Soap. OK, big deal. So what. Well, take a good look at the writing on this poster. It's this rambling manifesto about God, Jesus, the Rabbi Hillel, Easter Island, and Mark Spitz! It is filled with run-on sentences, disconnected ideas, and nonsensical mish-mash. It does mention the word "penguin", however, so perhaps it does belong here. But anyway, I have probably spent 90 minutes reading this thing over the course of my tenure here, and I have yet to acquire one smidgeon of understanding of what this is all about. It boggles me!! I implore you to read this... it's like nothing you're ever seen. Where the heck did this come from???? It leaves me speechless. I have no more speech. It's a big picture (450k) but worth downloading.
So, back to reality. Entering the main building from the foyer, this storeroom is directly to the left. Here are various computer parts, supplies, boxes, water jugs, etc.
The main room of the hut contains most of the equipment. Here are the main electronics racks which house the computing end of most experiments operating here. Notice in particular the three leftmost racks. This is the Stanford VLF/ELF system as I found it when I arrived. The computer in the third rack pre-dated PC's. It failed in 2001, and the system sat idle during the 2001-2002 season. This season, Stanford sent down a Ph.D. student (Dana Porrat) to upgrade the whole thing. Which was nice. We took out a lot of the old equipment and put in a more modern setup, which is shown in the next picture.
This is the Stanford setup at present. It is much less labor intensive than the past, and doesn't require that much attention. In years past, it was the bane of the science tech's existence! More about this project and the ELF/VLF antennas here.
This is just another picture of the equipment racks. Here, the UV monitors, magnetometers, riometer, and auroral photometers send their data to be recorded.
Turning around the other way, there is the door to the living quarters. Also, there is a PC here for general use (email, FTP, internet, etc.) on the left as well as the FTP server for the Maryland/New Hampshire/Bell Labs systems on the right. The speakers attached to the left PC are quite good - they will fill the hut with whatever sounds I choose!
In the main room is this workbench area. The hut has a reasonable supply of parts and equipment, and you can take care of most little jobs with what you find here.
This is the door to the living quarters. It has a nice cloud identification chart on it....you know, this place really is GEEK HEAVEN.
The living quarters. You never know if you might be working up here and a huge storm will blow in. If it's "condition 1", then it's too bad outside for you to drive back to base. You are stuck, and could quite possibly remain so for several days. So, there is a bed here along with a coffee maker, hot pot, and various types of food. And a limited supply of reading material (the Far Side is open on the table). The tree on the right is fake, as no plants are allowed here. Yeah - like they'd survive anyway....
Another part of the living quarters. The door leads to the supply room.
Here is the pantry. Chock full of dehydrated rations....mmmmmm. I have eaten quite a bit of this stuff on days that I am up here working on something through dinner.
There's a little chalkboard on the wall with various graffiti from scitechs of years past, including a nice sketch of Erebus.
There is a back room where several instruments operate: the auroral photometers, two GPS antennas, and the UV spectroradiometer are here. There are also various spares and supplies.
These are the auroral photometers (each sensing a different wavelength of light emitted by the auroras) and two GPS antennas installed in the back room. There are two clear plastic domes on the roof that these devices look through. The GPS antennas are connected to systems in the main room. The photometers view out through the domes and are powered by the blue box.
This is the roofbox containing the spectroradiometer which is operated by Biospherical Instruments (BSI). This system was installed to measure UV radiation, in pursuit of monitoring and understanding of the ozone hole and its formation.
The BSI UV project requires frequent calibrations. Some of these run automatically inside the roofbox, however, every two weeks I will go on the roof and set up this fixture. It is an absolute calibration scan which corrects the system based on a known intensity profile of a very expensive tungsten lamp. The barrel is then placed around the setup to keep stray light from corrupting the measurement.
More instruments on the Arrival Heights hut roof. The three cylindrical instruments are different varieties of sensors associated with the UV monitoring project. The one on the far right is a GPS antenna. Right in the middle of the pic is a little cube screwed to the wooden rail. This is a light intensity sensor used by David Ainley's penguin group. This little thing is nice - it's fully encapsulated and only has two little leads sticking out of it. It can last for years on its battery, and during that time it will write the time of day and light intensity data to non-volatile memory every 15 minutes. They have these things all over, including attached to penguins' legs (hence the small size). They asked if I could put one up at the hut. Well sure, no problem! I took out a couple screws and stuck it to the wooden rail, which was just fine by them. They'll come back and pick it up sometime down the road. This was without question the easiest instrument installation I have ever done!
This is a relatively new addition to the Arrival Heights hut. It's a little room built last year for the U. of Washington interferometer project.
And this is the setup for the UW project. The goal of this system is to measure wind speed and temperature in the high atmosphere (90-250 km). They do this by looking at the doppler shift of light from the auroras as well as a phenomenon called nightglow. This faint light is analyzed to yield velocity and temperature of the winds which carry the light-emitting particles. I won't bore anyone with the details, but it is very impressive to me that this measurement can be made at all!
Here is Gonzalo Hernandez of UW. He is the designer of the Fabry-Perot interferometer system at Arrival Heights. He and his group were down this year for a site visit, and we spent a lot of time at the hut. He has the same instrument at South Pole as well as Mount John in NZ, so they visited those sites as well as the McMurdo one. The interferometer system is without question the most sophisticated and sensitive of all the systems I maintain, and it definitely has a personality. Here, Gonzalo is contemplating why the system has decided to misbehave. All was sorted out, and the experiment is ready to gather data for this season (it is a winter-only measurement).
While Gonzalo's group was in town, a three day storm blew through. The road to Arrival Heights was impassable by truck, so I was able to get a Pisten Bully to get them to and from the hut each day. As an aside, the McMurdo science tech job has to be one of the very few in the world where you can end up commuting to work via bicycle or Pisten Bully, with equal probability (at least in the summer). Anyway, this was a good time and I did not mind acting as chauffeur one bit. The Pisten Bully worked great, just gliding over the snow drifts. Here it is parked outside of the hut.
One nice feature of the Pisten Bully is that you can spin it around in place by reversing one tread. So here is a video of me doing just that. Careful to do this only on a patch of snow....if you do it on dirt you can throw a tread. Then, the heavy shop guys will not be happy to see you with your broken Pisten Bully. Unless you bring a good quantity of beer. (.avi file)
Tony Mactutis came down with Gonzalo's group this year to install a cloud detector. And this is it - a neat looking Dr. Who type of instrument installed on the roof of the hut. Cloud cover will affect the interferometer measurement, so they decided to make a cloud detector to scan the same areas of the sky the interferometer does. This is a definite upgrade from relying on a weather guy popping his head out the door now and then and writing down roughly how cloudy it is (which is the only info they had before).
Another picture of the cloud detector.
This is the other half of the cloud detector system - the power supply and computer. It lives inside the building directly below the cloud detector instrument itself.
Another picture of our transportation, with Ruth Wilton-Godberfforde standing nearby. She is Gonzalo's student and came down to assist with the site visit this year.
The Bully, parked on a snow drift in front of the hut. I like this pic a lot....now THAT'S ANTARCTICA! Actually, it was a pretty harsh day but not as bad as it looks from this picture.
The Bully again, parked nicely on the snow drift, just a few steps from the hut doorway.
Around the middle of May, we had a really nasty stretch of weather. We had condition 1 called at least 5 times over the course of 3 days. My friend Steve has been here three previous winters and he says that was the worst two weeks of weather he's ever seen during winter. Funny thing, though - one day in May we actually set a record high temperature for the month: +27 F! Anyway, during the worst of the storm we had some serious winds. When I was finally able to get back to Arrival Heights, I found that the maximum gusts were 144 knots! No wonder this building is tied down to the ground with braided steel guy wires - otherwise, it really just might blow away.