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Photos © 2005 Seth White

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For this trip, our goal is to reinstall the spectroradiometer instrument. Jim and I came up in May to take it down and pack it away before the Green House building was moved. The Green House is now in its new home, so it's time to get the instrument back in the saddle. The Green House, along with the other camp buildings, were moved because of drifting snow...so VECO decided to put some manpower into elevating and/or moving the buildings...most of which had gotten drifted up to their rooflines. Jim and I had come last August and this May, but this time Jim decided to send Johan and I. Johan is a veteran science tech at Pole and Palmer, and is heading back for another winter at Pole this year as a NOAA tech. I met him during training prior to my stint as McMurdo scitech in 2002-03 and we have stayed in touch since then. We have both done work for BSI off and on and he is a great guy to work with, especially when you're installing sensitive equipment out in the middle of the frozen wastes. So we're about halfway through the job, and are in good shape for the coming week. For my part, there is a also second objective for this trip. I recently got a new job working for UNAVCO, doing GPS work in their polar group. If anyone reading this has also read my McMurdo stuff, you may remember me mentioning two people named Chuck and Beth. Well, this job is similar to what they were doing on the ice. I had been in touch with UNAVCO off and on over the past couple years, and while I was here in May I found out that a position in the polar group was opening up. I applied and they decided to hire me, simple as that. Anyhow, my boss Bjorn was intending to bring the new hire to Summit for a few days of training as he does a site survey and establishes some baselines for future snow accumulation data. So when I was hired, it turned out nicely that I would be here anyway doing work for Biospherical. So the last week here I'll be finishing up the BSI work and helping out Bjorn with the surveying. Anyhow, this picture is one I took while walking out past the end of the runway in Kangerlussuaq looking for fossils. The flats at this point, near the end of the fjord, are constantly eroding away and exposing all sorts of fossils. I had seen some that other people found and thought I'd spend the evening after we arrived walking around out there. It is a neat area, actually, kind of a lunar surface which has this grey soil with rocks sitting on top, which have been exposed by the erosion. There are a lot of pretty soil patches, lichens, and rocks here, but my camera batteries weren't fully charged so I only took a few pics. This one is looking back towards town, where a bunch of Greenland huskies are raised for use as sled dogs.

As we were getting settled in the LC-130, one of the crew said there were two spots available in the cockpit for takeoff and two for landing. Only 6 of us were on the flight up today, so I ended up with a prime seat for a few minutes. Here's one as we were about to take off.

Flying eastward, we found ourselves over some incredible scenery as the land turned into ice. I've seen this scenery before, but it's still hard not to gawk...and take pictures. So here's one of a glacier which, like just about every glacier in the world, is shrinking quickly. Global warming is a fact, and the more we learn the more it becomes certain that we are playing a large part in it. I have a real hard time with political types who ignore solid science and spin the findings of serious researchers to keep their constituents and backers happy, and to further their political ends. Our friend Mr. Bush and his cohorts are just such people. There is a long list of things that they should answer for but never will, and it is hard to decide which is the worst. But the environmental policy of this damned adminstration is near the top.

Near the ice edge, there are thousands of these melt pools, with a striking deep blue color. This and the next three pics are some of the best ones I saw from the window of the LC-130. This has been a pretty good first week at Summit. Katie, Jason, Johan, Al and others are here...so it's always good to have people you know around when you're in a tiny place in the middle of nowhere. Toby was here for a few days earlier this week but has since handed off the camp manager duties and flown south. I did manage to get in a smoke and some beers with Jason and Toby before he left, so that was good. Some of the other people have also turned out to be pretty cool as well. Card playing is more popular this time than before, and we even got a game of Pitch going last night...first time I've played this in a long time. I won $20 in poker a couple nights ago but will probably lose that before too long. We had a game of volleyball the night before a truckload of people left camp earler this week (yes, volleyball - they put up a net this summer). The food is great as always, and weather hasn't been too bad. What can I say? It's been pretty good so far, and it sure beats the hell out of the 100 degree days out on the plains east of Denver, where I was working before coming up here. That project, for Applied Research Associates, was an intense, demanding, and ultimately successful experience and I am proud of the work I did over the past 9 months. But as the heat wave gathered strength I found that I was looking forward to the balmy 0-20F type temperatures I'd see here at Summit! Right, so anyway, it's been a busy week and I'm having a good time, but actually it has been a nice respite to have a more mellow and relaxed day today.

Another beautiful melt pool. This one turned out to be the best of the pics I took from the plane...which were probably 50 in number. Ain't digital great? I kind of have a reputation for taking more pictures than necessary, especially with Paola, who just LOVES it when I stand around shooting the same damn thing 10 times. She and I have been a lot of places together, and so the amount of time that she's patiently waited for me can probably be measured in tens of hours. "Hold on a sec - just one more."

But then again, isn't this a cool scene? If this was a painting on someone's wall, it would catch my eye. But this is actually a place on earth, which makes it that much cooler to me. I think textures are especially cool things to photograph, like lichens on rocks, crusted soils, adobe walls, and yeah, ice and snow.

One last melt pool picture.

Not long after I arrived, another Herc flight took out the RAMAS hut, which is going to be upgraded and hopefully returned to service here at Summit. I took a a photo because this is one of the larger things you can fit in a LC-130. The pilots occasionally have to use JATO bottles to get enough speed up to take off from Summit, and with a heavy load like this, they were anticipating a trickier take off than usual. But as it happened, the snow conditions, wind speeds, and air temperature today were good enough that they made it off on their first attempt.

So with all this moving and shuffling around of buildings, the place looks as LOT different than last August. There are several major changes. First, the Green House and Berthing Module are now connected by a vestibule and so they now comprise one big "Green Module". Second, there is a brand new structure here: the DISC building. This building was put up this summer and is being prepared to be the site of a drilling project which starts next year. When it's finished, the building will stay here and become the new Summit Camp Shop, since it's a lot larger than the current shop and will fit larger equipment inside. Third, the buildings are noticeably closer together. It doesn't take nearly as long to walk from place to place as it used to. Fourth, the RAMAS building is gone. Fifth, the skiway is a lot closer to camp than last summer (at least it seems this way to me...could be my imagination). Sixth, the Big House has been elevated quite a bit. In May, all you could see from snow level was the white radome atop the roof. The rest of it was down in a valley, which took a lot of time to plow out after the brutal winter. So VECO hired a crew to come up and lift the building up. It was originally designed to be jacked up, but because the building had settled unevenly (because it's heavier on one end), the original jacking system wouldn't really work. This system was a series of shafts and chains which drove a set of jacks similar to those used with over the road trucks. The problem was that this system lifted all points of the building at once, and therefore could not be used to level the structure. So a new hydraulic system was purchased which allows independent control through a manifold over each lifting point. There are 10 posts, with two hydraulic cylinders per post. A pretty slick arrangement. The three guys here doing the lifting, Sean, Bill, and Jim, are from Alaska, where they do this stuff pretty regularly as part of their normal jobs. As part of this project, they've been doing a lot of cutting and welding to build onto the building's support frame. So here is the south side of the Big House.

This is the west side of the building. The first day I was here, they were doing a lifting operation. It's a slow process and they have to do it in small increments. You can see from this photo how high they've already lifted it, and there is still a good ways to go. Anyhow, the building creaks and groans when it's being raised. I couldn't help but think of the hoards of ships that were caught in the Arctic and Antarctic pack ice and slowly crushed. The sailors told of the ominous snaps and creaks that they'd hear as the ships were slowly giving way under the immense compressive stresses. It was a bit unnerving the first time I heard it, but hey, they got the building this high already so it appears they know what they're doing...

The east side.

And now, guess what, the north side! The sewage/wastewater outfall can be seen here.

A Herc pulling away from the fuel pits. The last flight this week was a fuel flight, which brought a record 4,666 gallons to the station. There are three types of fuels used here: diesel for generators and heavy equipment, mogas (normal unleaded gas) for smaller equipment such as 4-stroke snowmobiles, and premix for the 2-stroke snowmobiles.

When I arrived, there were something like 50 people on station. This was, frankly, too many. Logistically, the station can support this many, but 20-25 is a much better number as far as I (and most others) are concerned. It's just more peaceful and laid back. I was sad to see some of them leave, but the change in the station's atmosphere with fewer people is very noticeable - and it's a change for the better. But anyhow, with the large number of unfamiliar faces, this fellow didn't really stand out to me. I saw him around but just thought he was part of the station staff or just another accursed beaker like me. The second or third night I was here, there were two science lectures given by visiting groups. The first one was good, the second was decidedly NOT a good lecture. Science groups on the ice are like any other segment of the populous: some are made up of pretty good people who have some clue about, you know, life, existence, and everything. But other ones are lead by boneheads, and hence, the group becomes populated by more boneheads. Perhaps I shouldn't say this, because maybe people see myself, Jim, and Johan as the latter type! But it's true...beakers are people too, for better or worse. But back to the story: in between the two science lectures, Toby introduced this fellow Erik, who was going to tell us about his current adventure skiing Greenland south to north with his friend Claes (pronounced similarly to Klaus). I heard two Swedes were here for a couple days as a stopover on their way, but until he stood up I didn't know who they were. Anyhow, these two fellows had done this type of thing before, successfully completing crossings of Greenland west-to-east and then east-to-west. So what to do next? Well, how about south to north? Ya sure, ya betcha. Now THIS is hard core. So he got up with a map of Greenland, and after apologizing for his english (which was pretty good actually), proceeded to tell us about his past and present expeditions. His talk was very matter of fact, and his manner was very warm and disarming. And of course he described everything in the typical understated Scandinavian fashion, as if it was nothing remarkable at all, really. This was the second time I'd heard an in-person, on-site presentation from a polar expeditioner. The first was from Fiona Thornewill at South Pole last year. She impressed me as quite a remarkable person as well, but being British, her talk had a decidedly different flavor. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Erik (and Claes) both seemed like very genuine guys, and they just had this kind of forthright and humble way about them. They weren't gregarious and tended to use few words to communicate, but at the same time they were very approachable and seemed genuinely interested in the people here and what the hell we were all doing here! So anyhow, here is Erik a couple days later. I walked out to the runway to see them off and take a few pictures.

Another one of Erik

Here is Claes, also getting ready to depart. Their original plan was to ski from the southern tip of Greenland up to Cape Morris Jessup, the northernmost point, then ski back southwest to Thule to catch a ride home. The Danish authorities had originally gotten permission for this from the American ambassador, but a week into their trip Erik and Claes found out that the numbnut base commander at Thule had denied permission for them to come. Never mind that these are two 57-year old Swedes who were going to ski thousands of kilometers, and that they had already been there before on a previous journey. Nope, I guess they were some sort of risk to national security or something. What a crock. Anyhow, it worked out to be a moot point. Due to bad weather, it took them an extra month or so just to reach Summit Camp. It's getting late in the summer, and at this point, it's not really feasible to try to complete their original route. So they spent a couple days camped here deciding what to do. They had two options: try to get permission to reach Thule and continue northwest up there or to turn straight west and end up at Upernavik, a town on Disko Bay. Obviously both these guys are in killer shape (especially for being 57!), but Claes was not reacting well to the altitude. He also seemed like a bit more reticent of a guy than Erik, so he didn't talk or socialize as much. He still wanted to push on to Thule, but with the whole silly access issue and the fact that they had been to Thule before, they decided just to head out to Upernavik and see some new country.

Right before he strapped into his harness and skis, Claes walked out to photograph this gaggle of onlookers that had assembled to see them off. So I took his picture. He had a NICE camera stowed away in his gear.

This is the tent the Swedes had with them, which they put up near Summit's Tent City area.

Here is what one of their sleds looks like, fully packed and ready to go. I actually made it a point one day to sit down next to Erik at lunch at strike up a conversation...which is an exceptionally uncommon practice for me. I really need to explore more of Scandinavia. It's not just the amazing beauty of these countries, it's also the type of people that live there. I'm not a tremendous people person, and when I travel I am not necessarily looking for deep insights into the culture or personality of a country. But when I was in Norway, I liked the feeling I got from most of the people I encountered there. I've also read a good number of books about polar explorers, and the ones that impress me the most are the Scandinavians - people like Amundsen, Nansen, Sverdrup, Nordenskjold, and Balchen (whose book "Come North With Me" is a marvelous read - I found a copy for $2 at the Littleton Library book sale earlier this year). And so meeting Erik and Claes only reinforced these opinions. Cool guys, no doubt about it.

Did I mention these guys are both 57? During his presentation, someone asked a question which spurred him to remark that it doesn't take a hero or a super athlete to do this kind of thing. Yeah he says, you DO need to be in good shape and do exercise before trying something like this, and excellent preparations are a must, but he didn't view his accomplishments as anything exceedingly extraordinary. In some ways, it's hard for me to believe this. Honestly, skiing across this vast and often brutal wilderness with only what you're towing along behind you is a significant feat...no matter who you are or aren't. But on the other hand, his is right. If you set your mind on a goal, prepare to reach that goal, plan it properly, and you know, be professional about the whole thing and don't do anything stupid, your odds are pretty damn good. These guys had been out on the ice for many weeks, and were running a month late because of bad weather. They had to stretch out their provisions a bit, but nonetheless it was not a catastrophe. They certainly seemed keen on putting away a good meal or two, and Marge's cooking makes that quite easy to do. But overall they arrived here hale and hearty, and seemed to be in good spirits even though their original route was no longer feasible. They had worked out a deal with VECO to bring up some provisions for their trip, so once they replenished their supplies and made their route decisions, they were off: no fuss, no muss. Here is Claes with a couple Summitites testing out their sail. On the day they departed, there was not enough wind to help them along...which unfortunately had been the case for nearly all their trip. On their best day on a previous trip, they made something like 120 kilometers on their best wind-assisted day.

Here is how Erik had his footwear set up. The boots are hand-made Norwegian pieces ($800 a pair), but are not that warm by themselves. They are essentially a rugged outer layer. Then there is a plastic bag to keep out moisture. Then, a woolen middle layer, then another plastic bag to keep sweat away from the wool, then socks, then feet. He said that this arrangement caused his feet to sweat quite a bit, but they NEVER got cold. Interesting approach. In a related note, they were wearing Patagonia pants and jackets...spendy, but good stuff. I also asked about their stove. Claes told me it was made by an American company - MSA, I think - it was a three-letter acronym but I don't recall the exact name. He gave it his highest endorsement. I asked if it was like a Primus (a Swedish invention) and he said yes, only a bit more refined and efficient. Mental note to self: buy an MSA stove if you find yourself in need of such a thing.

So they waited by the runway for the incoming flight to land, and then they were off. They have a website which tracks their progress each day via short text messages they send out over Iridium. It is here: here.

Continuing on from Thursday 8/4/05...here is the Big House in its final stage of lifting. I took this pic just this morning, and now at 10:50 PM all the hydraulic cylinders have been removed from the posts and the lines are laying disconnected by the side of the building. All in all, this whole operation seems to have gone pretty well. No catastrophic architectural mishaps, and no injuries that I know of other than a scraped leg. It's an amazing difference to look out the window as compared to May, when the whole building was under the snow level and all you could see was an ice cliff outside.

Here is the front of the Berthing Module with the new "porch" area, comprised mostly of things scavenged from the old GRIP site. In other news, tonight's poker game finished up about an hour ago. Evidently, poker has been popular on Thursday nights this whole summer. Tonight makes two for me, and I finished up $30 ahead this time. This means I don't have to sweat cab fare from the ANG base at Scotia back to Schenectady. In a nice coincidence, I hope to meet up with my old friend Juan, who I spent untold hours hanging out with during grad school. After graduation, he moved out to Schenectady to work for GE and essentially fell off the face of the earth. My friend Alaina was in Denver a while back, and while we were having beers at the Table Mountain Inn we decided that we were going to get the Herrick Laboratories (see here) crew back together for a trip to Moab in March 2006. In some ways those years were some of the very best of my life, and some of the people I met there I hoped to keep as friends for a long time. We have seen each other since we graduated, but it seems like it's becoming less frequent. Unless someone is getting married, or there is a random business trip involved, we just don't get together. Which is a shame. So Alaina and I decided to throw down the gauntlet and get a real bike/hike/beer-drinking trip together in March, come hell or high water. So, she sent out the email to everyone to see what the response would be. And unbeknownst to me, she actually had Juan's email! I had seen just about everyone from the old days at least two or three times in the past 5-6 years, but not Juan. After all the time Juan, Andy, and I spent together from 1996-1998, we hadn't even had an email from him since then. So I got his address and told him I'd be in Schenectady on my way to Greenland around 7/24. Turns out he was going to be in Hawaii (on business, no less!) at that time, but on my way back we could get together, around 8/13. So that's the plan. Hopefully it all works out and we can catch up - it has been way too long.

This actually reminds me of the ice. Relationships on the ice are unusual in several ways. You bring people together from wildly disparate backgrounds and somehow many of them manage to get along well. You have people hanging out and forming bonds that normally wouldn't happen back in the "real world". It's not that they would normally dislike each other back home, it's that they just wouldn't come into as close contact as they do on the ice. So people from all walks of life often come together here, and while they are on the ice it seems like the friendships might actually last. Just like everything on the ice, relationships are intense... and yeah, some of them do last a lifetime. But by and large, ice friendships are often difficult to rekindle and sustain back in the world. Why? Well, it could be that your friend is from a different part of the country, or from a different country all together. It might be that with the whole ice lifestyle, your paths just might not intersect at all for another two, three, or more years. It might be that when you get back to the world, you just settle back into your old lives and find you don't really feel like keeping the friendship alive anymore. And, most importantly, that common thread of being in Antarctica (or Greenland in this case) doesn't exist any longer. Being on the ice with someone brings this kind of inherent bond. Sure, there will always be people you dislike, where it doesn't matter if you're on Mars with them or not...you just don't like them. But in general, the shared experience of being there adds a certain impetus to the relationship. I am old enough not to be so naive as to expect that every relationship I form, no matter how good it is at the time, will last a lifetime. However, I still found myself a bit surprised at how my friendships turned out once I left McMurdo.

Often times I get blase' about my relationships. But I do remember a time in my life when I didn't have any friends. Not one. And the truth is that if I ever found myself back like that again, I don't know if I could go on living. And so I hope that I can keep people like these as part of my life. But I don't know how things will turn out, and if I do lose them, it might well end up being partly my fault.

I could go on for 5,000 more words about some of these people, but yeah I'll just stop here. The point of all this, if I remember correctly, is about relationships on the ice. The bonds people form here are quick to form, intense, and unfortunately quick to dissolve. I do realize that this same generality often holds elsewhere too - I can name many people that I never thought I'd lose touch with that, ultimately, I have. But on the ice, everything aspect of a relationship is magnified, which makes the whole process a little bit harder. And as a result, many people tend to take on this ice persona: where they are very cool to be around and are likeable people, but where getting to know them takes an exceptionally long time - or is, in fact, impossible. One of the grantees from my days as science tech, a fellow named Gonzalo, mentioned this fact to me when I visited him a while back in Seattle. Out of nowhere, he observed that although he and I had developed a pretty good relationship, personally and professionally, he didn't really know anything about me. He then remarked that, during his years of doing work on the ice (which are many), he had noticed that this was true for many people he had met. At the time, although his comment did strike a chord with me, I really didn't think about it too much. But since then I have thought about it more, and he is completely right. I think this is a result of the intense, focused, but transient life that ice people lead. People build up this kind of shell around them, which protects them from the hurt that comes with the inevitable separation and breaking of the bonds they have formed. I only have about 18 months of ice time, but I have seen some of this develop in myself. And sometimes it serves me well. But at the heart of the matter, it does hurt me to lose people that were once so important in my life. I wish this could be different, but in the end, perhaps this is just the way life is. I suppose this is the bottom line, the moral (as I see it) of this whole rambling monologue: If you can find a few kindred spirits as you live your life, and share some good times with them as you grow old, then you are a truly fortunate human being. I have had many disappointments in my life, but I have also been lucky enough to find a few such people...and I hope they will stay with me.

I don't really know what cause me to write all those things above, but whatever it was, let's get back to Summit Camp. Of the 8 people who have read this far, probably 7 don't care about my thoughts on interpersonal relationships. Which is absolutely OK by me...I mean, there are about 1x10e25 people out there filling up servers with gigabytes of self-indulgent websites and shitty blogs, so whoop-dee-frickin-doo about what I think. What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China? Not a damn thing. So here's a photo of Jason and Johan playing horseshoes. A good Summit Camp moment.

Another good scene from Summit. This is a view out the window of the Green House kitchen area. I dig the chili peppers hanging from the windown, and in fact I brought a bunch of my favorite hot sauces with me up here. The Apocalypse sauce is my all-time favorite....from Grand Junction, Colorado, by the way. It's unreal.

This outhouse was graced by the presence of yours truly today. The whole put-your-used-TP-in-the-trash-can-in-front-of-you thing at the Big House and Green House is something that, even on my third trip to Summit, I still can't get used to. So when nature called today, I went to this outhouse. Yep, you just drop the TP down the hole. Ahhh. The thing here is that you don't get that familiar bowl of water under your butt experience. Nope, underneath this outhouse is a giant hole in the snow, which is populated by one formidable brown stalagmite. Yep, believe it. And this outhouse has been in this position long enough that the pinnacle is just a few feet below the, um, horizon. At the risk of becoming more macabre, let me just say this: the angle of repose of this thing is startling. I would have guessed that the CONE OF POOP would be more obtuse, you know, with a broader base and shallower angle. Nope, this thing is damn near cylindrical. You want proof? Email me, and I'll send you a picture of it.

On to more pleasant topics - here is a photo of Summit Camp, sprawling out behind this pig. A "pig" is basically a giant water jug on skis that is used to carry water between the snow melter attached to the shop and the Big House. This one was painted bright pink by last year's winter over crew. The Green House (and now the Berthing Module) both have their own heated water lines from the snow melter, so all you gotta do to fill up the water tanks there is flip a valve. The Big House, however, still relies on manual labor to drag water over there. There have been a lot of little (and big) infrastructure upgrades at Summit this summer, but one thing still missing is a heated water line between the shop and the Big House!

Hello again...it's 8/29 now and I've been home for a couple weeks. I got home on Sunday 8/14 and started working at UNAVCO on 8/15. I have been busy getting educated on a great many things concerning the GPS universe, and the commute between Littleton and Boulder is brutal. So I haven't had a lot of time to finish up these pages. But there are a few more photos that I wanted to post on this page from my last few days at Summit, so here goes. Johan and I were pretty much finished with the BSI work at the end of our second week at Summit, so we had a couple days to "relax" before the start of the flight week on Tuesday 8/9. Johan flew out that day, however I was staying until Thursday 8/11. Bjorn (my new boss) flew in on Tuesday, as did Kim the new science tech. Those two days were pretty busy for me, as I needed to train Kim on some aspects of the BSI system as well as help out with a couple GPS surveys of the camp itself. I was kind of dreading this, because being the pessimist that I often am, I was expecting things to go a lot less smoothly than they actually did. In the end though, we got everything done without a problem and I even had an evening free to have a few beers and play cards one last time. After he arrived Bjorn convinced me to come out and watch the takeoff of the plane they had just flown in on, with the hope that they'd use the JATO bottles. Turns out, they did just that. However, I buggered up almost all of the photos. And I was standing too far from the skiway anyhow. So this is the best one. It's not a great photo, but it does show the JATO being used. This is kind of special, since with the advances in modern aircraft engines there is not much demand for JATO anymore. The LC-130 is kind of a throwback however, and at high altitude sites on the ice, they will sometimes need the extra boost to get airborne. The dark figures on the right are a couple guys that went out next to the skiway...and they ended up with some great still shots as well as video of the takeoff.

Part of my new job was to do a survey of the ATM array, a snow accumulation study area. This is a large grid of flagpoles outside of station where the net accumulation of snow is monitored. Actually, this is not the accumulation itself because that quantity is technically dependent on the density of the snow. What they are measuring here is actually the change in snow surface height over time. So John and Steve went out to do these measurements while I followed behind with a GPS system. The idea here was to get a continuous data set to see how feasible it is to perform this measurement with GPS. Normally, you drive up to each flagpole and measure the distance from the snow surface to certain marks on the flagpole, like they are doing in this picture. The thought with GPS is that it would be easier and faster to just drive along with a snowmobile through the grid and look at the change in elevation throughout your traverse. It would also provide a greater spatial resolution of the snow elevation throughout the grid. The data set I took has yet to be processed, but odds are good that this technique will be useful.

So here is my snowmobile, with an antenna mounted on a pole. The antenna is hooked up to a receiver in the yellow backpack on the back of the machine. The yellow thing on the back seat is the hand-held data collector, which communicates with the receiver and allows you to control and annotate your survey points. So you can either a) drive along and have the receiver automatically store points every few seconds or b) stop and do a more accurate measurement on a a specific, named point. Pretty slick. And, not a bad way to spend a few hours on a sunny afternoon. After the snow accumulation survey was done, John and I surveyed some other features near camp, including two long transects about 5 km out from station. Although the weather was absolutely superb this day, I did find myself thinking about what Erik and Claes had experienced. Although we were only a few miles from station and just a radio call away from a tow, it was hard not to be impressed by the utter vastness and beauty of this place. In books I have read, people often talk about the deceptive allure of the Arctic and the Antarctic. Days such as this are what they're talking about. It is such a strange and enchanting environment that it is sometimes easy to get drawn in and forget how completely hostile it is to life. On countless occasions, polar explorers and adventurers have made optimistic decisions that later proved to be tragically rash. The calm, sunny, tranquil scene in front of me today really belies the true relentless fury that these places can unleash upon you. The 1845 Franklin expedition comes to mind as well as Borchgrevink's 1899 Southern Cross expedition. In both cases, there were moments where better judgement was cast aside and an optimistic course was pursued, with disastrous (Franklin) or nearly disastrous (Borchgrevink) results realized.

As the month of August progressed, the sun got lower and lower on the horizon during the late hours of the day. Here is one looking back at the Big House from tent city, about mid-evening.

Jim (from CRREL)and Alex (from Dartmouth College) were on station for a couple weeks to test their "Cool Robot" prototype. This machine is intended for use on the Antarctic Polar Plateau, as an autonomous, mobile instrumentation platform. My first thought when I saw this thing was "what the ?!?". My initial impression was not positive, since you know, it doesn't LOOK like a real rugged moon rover type vehicle. But I figured these guys knew what they were doing, and after talking with them for a little while that turned out to be the case. They had put a good deal of thought into this, and with Jim's considerable first-hand experience with snow and weather conditions on the plateau, this thing might just work. By the end of the two weeks, they got it out on the snow a couple times for some full-on tests, and it did pretty well. Here is Alex (left) and Jim (right) sending it out along a supervised run around the skiway taxi area. Kathy is in the middle taking a couple shots. Alex is running the system computer while Jim takes a solar radiation measurement in order to get an idea of how much energy is incident on the vehicle's solar panels.

Another one of the robot going its merry way. At some point later in my life, I will probably stop doing technical work and do something completely different. I don't know exactly what that would be, it's more just a feeling. But whatever happens, I will always have a little part of me that remains a technogeek. Sometimes I am just being polite in listening to people talk about their work - I don't care who you are, sometimes it can get pretty damn dull - but in this case it was actually interesting talking with these guys about what they were trying to do with this machine...the design issues, the problems they faced, and the solutions they came up with. I am all for the idea of a fleet of these little buggers running around willy-nilly on the Polar Plateau. For more on this project, including Alex's blog from the Summit trip, see here.

Anyhow, since Al was leaving on Tuesday's flight, he decided to spend part of Monday rigging up his own robot to one-up these guys. This is it. A beautiful piece of engineering: two pigs and an outhouse being dragged by a snowblower.

Al, with his handiwork. The monitor and keyboard are a nice touch.

A few atmospheric-related photos here. These are some stark clouds I saw one night.

This was either my last night on station or the second-to-last. The whole time we had been on station, the weather had been dismal. Not windy or brutally cold, just overcast and dreary. As was the case last August, I started to wonder if I'd have even one nice sunny day. Turns out, our last 3-4 days at Summit were actually quite nice. Here is a photogenic sunset. For a few days before we left, some of us would mingle in the Big House and wait for the sun to set, hoping to catch a green flash. But of course, as with all occasions I have watched for this, it didn't happen.

Johan, however, did come up with the clever trick of focusing an image of the setting sun through some binoculars onto this white sheet of paper. Here, you can see some traces of color separated by refraction of the sunlight, as well as the wavy image caused by thermal gradients in the atmosphere. Here, the sun appears as a rectangle because of the flat horizon below and the low-lying cloud layer above.

On another evening, a bit of low-level fog had set in and I noticed that there were fragments of a fogbow around the Swiss Tower. They always seem to appear here because a) fog will often show up later in the day, b) the sun is at a nice low angle at this time of day, and c) the sun points directly at the Swiss Tower during these hours. When the sun and fog are just right, you will see an entire white fogbow formed directly around the tower, with the tower gleaming brightly in the center. This didn't happen today because the fog didn't extend high enough, however, you could see several orders of refraction (first-fourth) contained inside the white area (aka "zeroth order"). My polarizing lens helped these stand out, but as with seemingly all atmospheric optical phenomena, it just doesn't look as cool in a photo as it does in person.

I was taking pics of the fogbow when Alex walked by and mentioned that there was also a cool halo around the sun itself, but that you had to block out the sun to see it. So walked over to the side of the Big House and did this, with this result. Not a great photo, but the halo came out well. This is nothing compared to those spectacular halos formed by ice crystals floating in the air, but cool nonetheless since I hadn't seen one like it before. In a related note, while we were surveying the perimeter of the winter cargo storage berm, I noticed a "glory" surrounding the shadow of my head. First time I had seen this, but no camera handy. The lesson, as always: if you come to places like this, keep your damn camera handy!

Here is one of the Big House with a kind, low sun. The total lift of this building was 23 ft, and an admirable job it was. Jim, Sean, and Bill did a great job getting this thing elevated without any mishaps.

Same thing - a pic of the Sno-Cat and the D6 resting for the night.

The last night I was at Summit, Marge made this incredible spread - including Thai peanut chicken and sushi. One eats well at Summit, indeed.