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Photos © 2005 Seth White

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If I recall correctly, we arrived at McMurdo on October 22. We flew in on one of the early season C-17 missions, which is a 5 hour flight. I will also fly out on a C-17 later in the season (mid-February). Much better than the 8 hour LC-130 flights which are the transport for those arriving mid-season. 8 hours on a Herc is a LONG time. And one such flight boomeranged today, i.e it got about halfway to McMurdo but had to turn back to Christchurch because of weather...those poor bastards. Anyhow, we stepped off the plane and almost immediately got to work. Unpacking, moving in, finding our cargo, organizing, and going through the laborious motions involved in becoming re-integrated into the system: training sessions, briefings, paperwork, so on and so forth. If a science group is bringing down a new person, that group should not expect meaningful work from said person for about a week. For returning people, your processing takes about 3 days. But we got our business in order quickly and got to work. It is now mid-December, and from our arrival until about a week ago, it was a full sprint. I think Bjorn and I did about 2/3 of the season's work in the first 1/3 of the season. Even though I have a decent amount of ice experience, this job involves a lot of new things for me...and is quite demanding at times. But the work has turned out well and I have gotten pretty comfortable with the job. Bjorn left a few days ago, which was good timing as the work is hitting a bit of a lull. It'll ramp back up in January but for now it's moderated quite a bit...hence this new webpage. Which brings me to the first photo: Scott Base from the air during late evening. Yes, it's still green. But they have built a large new science building named for Sir Ed Hillary. This is the largest building in the photo. Sir Ed was down last year for the dedication... I wish I could have been here at the time as he is one person I would very much like to meet. The beginnings of this year's incarnation of Williams Field are seen in the upper left of the picture.
Our first field mission of the year was a trip to Erebus for the New Mexico Tech group, who were not due to arrive for another few weeks. We went to Abbott Peak to retrieve a GPS receiver which had been delpoyed through the winter, then to Truncated Cones to do a variety of tasks including install a new receiver and radio, then to Nausea Knob to see if we could troubleshoot an electrical problem which had occurred with a seismic system there. First stop was here: Abbott Peak, a little outcropping sticking out of the snow on the NW side of Erebus, with Mount Bird in the background. For more info about the Mt. Erebus Volcano Observatory, see here.
Our ride, a Bell 212, parked at the Abbott Peak landing zone.
Next stop: Cones. Unfortunately I couldn't take any photos here because the work didn't go entirely smoothly and we ran out of time. When the helicopter doesn't drop you off but rather stays with you (this is called "close support"), you can't dick around and waste time. There is a schedule and you need to stick to it as best as possible. The same also holds true for times when the helicopter leaves you at a site (this is "ground time"), but there is more a sense of urgency when the helo is sitting right there and the clock is ticking. Budgeting the correct amount of time to work when you are putting together your helo request is important, because it REALLY sucks to have to leave before you are done with what you wanted to do. This time, we encountered two problems at the site that we couldn't have planned for, so we couldn't get things in full working order. But in addition to that, we also made a couple errors. These errors didn't hurt us since we had to come back later anyway, but it was still frustrating. Every field mission since then has gone very well, so I chalk that up to early season rust. The point of all this is the following: this photo credit for this one goes to Chris Dean, helicopter pilot extraordinaire. Pro photographer George Steinmetz also accompanied us on this trip. In fact, it was a night flight so we'd have prettier light for his pics. He was the photographer in residence this season and ended up with a great body of work during his stay. It's not every day that you pick up a National Geographic to read a feature about the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia and say "hey, that's the guy a couple doors down..." The photo itself contains Bjorn (left) and myself (right) working away on the systems. I also made another mistake on this trip: wearing my plastic boots. I had just bought these Koflach Arctis boots before I left - nice ones - and was eager to try them out. Bad idea. They are great boots but not as warm as the bunny boots or FDX's. It was cold during this mission, about -30C or so, and I spent nearly the entire time at Cones kneeling/squatting down while futzing around with the wiring in the yellow box (impromptu wiring in the cold = not my favorite thing, by the way). So I had low circulation to my feet the whole time, and they got COLD. Cold enough that they were still tingling for days after that trip. Normally I would have gotten up and hiked around to get the warmth back in the feet, but with the tight schedule, the work taking longer than we anticipated, and the relative safety of the helicopter nearby, I just decided to push through. Not really a big deal overall, but I have definitely gotten better calibrated on which boots to bring for which type of missions!
On to Nausea Knob...here is the helicopter with a backlit crater plume in the background.
This place was named (by Phil Kyle I believe) because the plume often blows down here, and you get nauseous quickly if you are unfortunate enough to be standing in the area. The rocks nearby are all colored a weird dull green from exposure to the plume, and some are even a bright sulfury yellow. We took a look at the system and tested a few things, but it became apparent that the problem with the seismic system here was too complex to troubleshoot in the short amount of time we had. So we took a few pictures and left. Since the NMT group arrived, the Nausea Knob site is back in good order...and this includes the crater live video feed. This year the volcano is extremely active, in fact it hasn't been this active since the mid-80's when the Upper Erebus Hut was abandoned due to bombs falling nearby. So the group is having to re-think its science goals since the mountain is throwing out lava bombs right and left, and it is getting treacherous to get close enough to the crater to do the work they had planned.
This is the shadow of Mount Erebus, projected out over the sea ice as seen from Nausea Knob.
Our last "task" was to enjoy the ride as the pilot flew around the crater for a while as George took his photos. This was not too tough for us, as you might imagine. I ended up with a few decent pics along the way, so here they are. This is Mount Terror.
One looking down on the crater itself. I hadn't seen down in here before now.
On the way back, here is the view of Mount Terror and the Erebus Ice Tongue.
Looking SSE toward Hut Point Peninsula, with the Ice Tongue to the right. Today's completely unrelated aside: the award for best random McMurdo perk is: popcorn at the Heavy Shop. It's always on, and it's always salted just about right. Another thing worth mentioning is: we have had outstanding support from the station staff on almost every occasion we have asked for it: the entire Crary lab staff, carpenters, cargo staff, the BFC (field equipment center), field safety people, the helicopter schedulers and crews, the WAIS Divide camp staff, Mac Ops, the riggers and the comms shop, shuttles, and many others that I can't recall because it's past my bedtime. We are not a particularly needy group, but when we do ask for something the response has been terrific. A few exceptions here and there like the network ops center, but overall it's probably 10-2 in the instances of excellent-to-mediocre support...and that ain't bad. There are a lot of very negative things happening within the USAP right now, but I am not going to touch on that today. The bottom line is this: most people down here just know how to get things done. And this is generally in spite of, not because of, the management. But back to looking on the bright side...let's all sing along..."Ac-centuate the positive, e-liminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don't mess with Mister In-Between."