Glacier Work

Photos © 2005 Seth White

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It's new years day here, and IceStock, the annual music festival at McMurdo, is in full swing. The chili cookoff is also going on...which reminds me...I should get out there and try some chili before it's all gone. Back in a half hour.

OK, I'm back. The weather is warm and calm today, and the sound system is good. I tried (almost) all the chilis, and in my opinion the "Housing Hotties" cooked up the winner. Their chili was the only spicy one, and it was a nice balance of other ingredients. Honorable mention goes to the white chili - white beans, cream sauce, and chicken - which was very tasty, but it wasn't real chili. The only problem is that I forgot about the chili cookoff and so I ate a huge brunch just a little while ago. So I had to really stuff myself to taste all of them, and had to loosen my belt a notch before sitting down to type this page. Good times! The band playing right now, by the way, is a bluegrass band called "39 Pound Hammer" - a play on the name of an old song, and a dig at one of the new station safety policies: that one cannot lift more than 40 pounds by oneself. As a result, just about everything on station weighs 39.5 pounds now. A funny thing is that the contract you sign if you're a Kiwi employed by Raytheon New Zealand stipulates that you be able to lift 40 kilograms (~88 pounds)! This sounds silly, but here that is perfectly normal. Amidst such foibles, one thing that consistently shines through is the humor of the locals. Here's a picture I found on a local shared computer drive: a very safe Christmas tree. Note the lack of ornaments above the yellow tape line. That yellow tape is 4' off the ground...the newly defined "safe" altitude, beyond which one is required to be attached to a fall protection system.
Anyhow, this page is actually for some work we did on the Clark and Commonwealth glaciers in late October and early November. A group led by U. of Maine was here drilling ice cores from these glaciers to study climate change in the Dry Valleys during the late Holocene period. A key component of ice core drilling is to select a site where the ice below is relatively stable. If the ice is shifting rapidly, the ice cores retrieved will not represent a continuous chronological record, making interpretation of the data difficult if not impossible. Karl Kreutz is the PI for this work, and his group was down last year drilling on the Commonwealth Glacier. This year, it was the Clark. These two spots were selected for several reasons, a big one being that their reconnisance had showed the ice at these two sites to be relatively quiescent. To accurately quantify the motion, however, required installation of a "strain grid" around each drill site. The strain grids were arrays of 20 poles driven into the ice, and last year Beth surveyed both grids and recorded the precise positions of each pole. This year, Bjorn and I went out to re-survey these poles and measure how much the glacier surfaces had moved in a year. The Clark Glacier site showed much less motion than the Commonwealth, but overall both results were good news for the science group. They have since returned to the US to continue analysis of the ice cores. For more info, see here. So here is this year's camp at the Clark Glacier.
Our ride, the A-star helicopter. This is the sports car of the fleet, whereas the 212 is the truck.
Here's the drilling site. This ice coring business is a tricky one. It is a touchy process, and some serious equipment and know-how is needed to extract good cores. The ice conditions vary immensely as you drill down, and the drillers must pay close attention the their machines for long hours to get good cores for the scientists to use. Then, there is the whole matter of storage and transport back to the labs for analysis. The ice cores must be handled carefully to avoid human contamination, and must be stored under precise temperature control not only to prevent melting, but to preserve the ice crystal structures.
The drill itself, rotated horizontally to allow extraction of a core segment. I hadn't seen a drilling operation in action before, but one of the crew was nice enough to explain a few ins-and-outs of the whole process. For a mechanical engineer like me, this was good stuff. When we arrived, Jimi Hendrix was playing on the (surprisingly good) sound system inside the tent. It was a great moment, to be out here on a glacier with drilling in full swing, listening to "Are You Experienced?". It was one of those 5-10 moments I have during a season where the uniqueness and beauty of it all really sinks in.
The camp's primo toilet facility.
So Bjorn and I dropped off most of our gear at the camp and then caught a lift out to the base station benchmark, about 3 km away on solid rock. We installed the base receiver and then trudged back to camp to begin the survey. This portion of the Clark Glacier is very slow-moving, and Karl had done recon before to make sure there were crevasses in the area. The snow surface was quite variable, however, and so we had patches of rock-hard sastrugi mixed with soft spots. Along the way we heard some excellent "firnquakes", where our footsteps agitate the fragile, harder top layer of snow and it collapses a few inches on the softer snow underneath. If you stop walking when you hear one start, you can hear the quake propagate outward...sometimes for 5-10 seconds. Under ideal conditions you can even hear ones that last for 30 seconds or more. "Firn" is a term referring to the top layer of snow, before it sinks down and becomes compacted into ice. The survey went well and it was a good group to work with - they seemed like high quality guys, very serious minded about the work but friendly too. And they definitely had their shit together - it was a clean operation.
Here is a photo of a glacier we flew over on this trip. One of my goals this summer is to become a better photographer. Part of this is the technical aspect - getting the camera's settings right for each shot, using a tripod and/or flash for certain shots, and so forth. I'm getting a little better at this but have a long way to go. This new camera has about 10x more capability than I know how to use, so it'll be a while yet. The other thing is trying to sharpen my eye. There are certain basic elements such as photo composition and lighting that go into this, but to me, the most important thing is your personal choice. Even though I do post things on this website, I don't have any delusions of doing this professionally. So I'm trying to take photos that *I* like. One thing I keep being drawn to is the patterns and textures in nature. It's not a spectacular shot and probably won't win any awards, but this one has simple, stark colors and lines, and it's one of my favorites from this season.
On our way back from the Clark Glacier, Bjorn and I stopped at Peak 1882 to retrieve our old DGPS repeater station which is no longer used. Peak 1882 is a terrific place. It's the high point around the Taylor Valley, and the peak itself is composed of these unreal ventifacts. Just an awesome experience to be here. There is a grassroots push to get this peak officially named "Mt. Rae Spain", after a longtime camp manager in the Dry Valleys...another example of the coolness that keeps reappearing amidst the insanity here.
We had our transmitter mounted atop these old 55-gallon drums. I never knew what this was until Bjorn told me it was an old NZ survey beacon. Most of these have been removed, but the removal crew did leave a few in place. They are old enough and significant enough that the decision was made to keep a few as historical monuments. Now THAT is cool.
A weird ventifact off to the side of the survey beacon, with Mt. Lister in the background.
I found this gorgeous sculpted piece of snow nearby as well...but the photo didn't turn out that great.
On our way back, we stopped at the Lake Hoare camp to pick up and drop off some cargo. I hadn't seen this place close up before, so here is a photo. Here, Thomas came out to the helicopter to greet us and give us a package to take back. He has worked in the Dry Valleys for the last 8 seasons, and is now a member of the UNAVCO polar group. It's always good to work with people who know what the hell they're doing!
And one last stop this trip: Marble Point, for a bit of fuel.
Last year, some of the Marble Point crew put up this mannequin. He is the station drunk, complete with a bottle of Jack. Evidently, they left him out over the winter and he survived pretty much intact.
About a week later, we returned and met the group at the Commonwealth Glacier. They were there doing some follow-up work and cleanup from last year's drilling camp, so that was a good day for us to do the strain grid survey on this glacier. Here are Karl and Michael from the I-191 project, with Bjorn on the left.
It occurred that I haven't put any photos of myself up this year...guess I'm getting less vain ;-). I'm also not that photogenic. But here's a good one (photo by Bjorn).
Due to the helicopter scheduling, we had more ground time than we needed so Bjorn and I took a hike up a nearby ridge. Which was a great idea - it provided wonderful views of the area and also had some badass ventifacts...such as this one.
This place must be a geologist's dream. On our walk back to the base station, we followed the ridge and saw an incredible array of rocks under our feet. Over the past week or so, a couple members of science groups have mentioned to me that they feel sort of an unspoken hostility from some of the station staff, as if they are a bit ostracized from the general community because they are "beakers". I had a long conversation with one guy about this over a bottle of wine, and have been thinking about this since then. So if you are at all interested in this, read on. If not, I don't blame you! Either way, putting my thoughts in writing for others to read helps to clarify them. I wrote all this earlier, and was going to delete it...but figured I'd just stick it at the end of this page instead.



I've worked with close to 30 science groups since I stared with the USAP. Most of the groups I support are pretty good, and although a few groups do have members that just shouldn't be working down here, it's been a real pleasure working with each one. However, between the science groups and the McMurdo support staff overall, there does exist some ill will. Some of it is well deserved, since some beakers are incompetent, needy, and place unreasonable demands on the support staff. Likewise, some of the support staff don't understand the scientists' missions (and don't want to), and end up treating the scientists with contempt. A favorite local pastime in some circles is gumbling about the beakers...often groundlessly.

I think a lot of it comes from misunderstanding. Science groups, many of whom just deploy for a few weeks each season, don't really comprehend the reality of life as a station worker. This isn't really a criticism, because when you come down here on a grant, you usually have a lot of work to do in a very short time. You are focused on your set of goals, on which depend your professional reputation. It is quite difficult to see the ice through the eyes of a contract worker, who is stationed here for 6 months or a year, and who is entrenched within the "big square wheel" of the Antarctic Program. But many do come here with unreasonable expectations. The result is that unnecessary demands are often placed on the staff because of scientists' sense of entitlement, poor planning, and poorly chosen field team personnel. The stories you hear are often staggering. But the thing is, for every bad story that circulates, there are many more instances of scientists doing things the right way, i.e. being very competent, serious, but reasonable about their work. They just come down and do their thing in a clean, efficient manner, and take off for home. But this isn't the kind of thing that makes for good gossip at the dinner table. Gossiping and bitching really is the #1 pastime at McMurdo. And yeah, I'd be lying if I said I haven't occasionally groused about something and later come to find out that I was totally wrong. I'm still learning too.

On the other hand, the staff often does not appreciate the strains the science groups are under. To do good science down here takes a lot. Sometimes, the group only gets one shot at obtaining the data they need. Theses, papers, and academic careers depend heavily on the results of your field season and a lot of it is very detailed, painstaking work. If you don't have a scientific background, it is very hard to understand the nature of doing research. If you're a project PI, you have had to write the proposal, get funded, select your field team, make the technical preparations, get your cargo perpared, wade through an endless mass of paperwork, all while working on three or four (or 10) other projects simultaneously. Then, you get down here and have to hit the ground running to optimize your time here. And if you're a grad student, especially a new one, coming down here is a HELL of a lot different than taking classes and doing analysis or modelling back in the lab. It may sound trite to say, but if there wasn't all this science going on here, the McMurdo population certainly would not have to be as large as it is...and many of the staff wouldn't even have had the opportunity to come to Antarctica at all.

There are, however, a good number of staff members and scientists who take interest in each other, and genuinely do their best to work together. One excellent thing at McMurdo is the weekly science lecture. Each week during the summer, there will be one or two presentations given by different science groups about the work they're doing here. Often, during day-to-day interactions, the real implications and importance of the work isn't really discussed. People are too busy building things, planning, analyzing, or whatever. These lectures, however, are great opportunities to learn about the science going on here. Many of the scientists are genuinely excited when people take an interest in their work, and many of the staff are genuinely interested in the work. It is a great forum, and I'm happy to report that most of the lectures are very well attended.