Mullock Glacier

Photos © 2005 Seth White

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I put together some photos for this page over two weeks ago, but since then I haven't been consumed by that ol' blogging fever. I'm trying to keep this website as unlike "work" as I can. I was supposed to be out in the field today, but it's been put off for a few days. So instead I'm sitting in my room while my roommate and I watch "Face/Off", possibly the worst movie ever made. Well, Highlander 2 is pretty damn bad, and so is Battlefield Earth. And Batman and Robin is quite the steaming pile too. I guess those are my top 4. John Travolta stars in two of them...coincidence? I think not. But anyhow, yes, the fact that I'm watching this movie does make me a bad person, and I am going to hell. So in the meantime I will be self-indulgent and blog away while my soul is being marginalized. Here is a photo of the McMurdo Ice Shelf. Although it merges with the Ross Ice Shelf, it is classified as a distinct shelf. If I had to guess I'd say this is probably because the ice flows in from a different origin. The McMurdo Ice Shelf also has a different look. Much of its ice is filled with rubble that has evidently been scoured up from the Mount Discovery area as it flows by.
A pic of the dirty ice as we flew by. The textures of the soil, ice, and melt pools are surprisingly pretty.
One more of the dirty ice...another one of those cool textures that seem to catch my eye. In a completely unrelated aside, one of the grantees I worked for as science tech just got word that he had a Dry Valley named for him. Very cool indeed. I think if someone asked me what feature I'd most like to have named for me on the ice, I'd have to say a Dry Valley. This is especially cool because Gonzalo is a great guy. I've kept in touch with him since 02-03, and he is down here right now doing the annual site visit for the interferometer at Arrival Heights. If you were to ask me which people on the ice right now I consider real friends, it's 6 people. Dave, Greg, Joe, Karl, Johan, and Gonzalo. That's it. That's the list. These aren't necessarily the people I've spent the most time with, and there are several other good people that I also call friends. But these are the ones that I trust implicitly. Anyhow, as it turns out, this instrument and its companions at South Pole and Mount John NZ have shown an ability to predict the size of the ozone hole in the coming year. These instruments measure wind speeds and temperatures in the very high atmosphere during the austral winter, and a surprising correlation has been found between these and the size of the hole which opens up in the following spring. The original purpose of these instruments was quite different, but that's the thing about scientific research. Sometimes, something completely unexpected comes up. Another recent surprising discovery was Elephant Seal remains buried just under the ground along the Scott Coast, on the west side of McMurdo Sound. These were found by a geology group during a previous campaign, and they submitted a new proposal to find more this year. These remains (well preserved because of the cold, dry climate), are useful not only for studying the historical range of these seals (which no longer live here), but also for studying the climate and environment which prevailed here in ancient times. Interesting, no?
So this page is actually about a trip that Thomas and I made to the Mullock Glacier last month. We supplied 24 GPS receiver systems to a glaciology group this year, most of which were deployed by the group on ice streams in West Antarctica. Three systems, however, were destined for the Mullock Glacier. This is a glacier about 100 miles south of McMurdo, one of many which flows down through the Transantarctic Mountains from the Polar Plateau into the Ross Ice Shelf. It's right on the edge of helicopter range (especially when flying south), so the weather has to be perfect for the flight to happen. The science group kept getting delayed by weather, and so couldn't deploy these systems before they had to leave for the great white wastes of West Antarctica. So they asked Bjorn and I if we could do the installations. Sure, we said, but then another few days passed and Bjorn had to fly home. But it turned out that Thomas had just come back from the Dry Valleys, so after a few more days of delay, we got out to the Mullock and installed the systems. Here's a photo of the helicopter landed on the glacier, with Thomas and his climbing gear to the left.
The Mullock is an active glacier, with plenty of crevasses to go around. Our goal was to install three campaign GPS stations - one at the bottom of the glacier, one in the middle, and one near the top. The bottom location was relatively straightforward, since it was an "ablation zone" where the wind scours the glacier of its loose snow...so the terrain is pretty much exposed and there are few snow bridges here to hide crevasses. So we arrived at the desired coordinates and simply set down. But just to be sure we were on solid footing, Chris left the rotors turning at half power and then Thomas, who was roped into the aircraft, jumped out and probed around the front side with an ice axe to check for thin snow bridges. At this location, however, the exposed hills of ice were pretty solid and compacted, so this exercise probably wasn't necessary. But at the middle and upper sites, the surface was much less obvious...and so checking the surface was more important. So after checking the surface, Chris shut down and we installed the systems. This is a photo of the system at the lower site: A GPS antenna, a solar panel, and a yellow box containing a battery, solar charging regulator, and the GPS receiver. Simple. It only took us a half hour at each site to deploy these systems. Of course it took hours spent by the UNAVCO guys back in Boulder designing, building, and shipping these systems, more hours spent by myself, Bjorn, and the science group in programming, prepping, and testing these systems, and still more hours spent getting our gear and our plan together, and 9 days of weather delays to get here. But ultimately the deployment went very smoothly. The best part is that the science group has since gone back out there to retrieve the systems...and they got the data they needed. For me personally, that is pretty satisfying.
Here's the terrain at the bottom site. The glacier was extremely jumbled and broken up, and the contours and colors of the gullies and hills were beautiful.
Here's one from the air of this rugged landscape. As we flew farther west up the glacier, the crevasses began to disappear beneath snow bridges as we entered an "accumulation zone". From the air, you could see faint lines at somewhat periodic intervals which ran across the glacier. These were obvious signs of crevasses, so we touched down on a piece of ice in between two lines. The first thing the pilot did when touching down was to grab the collective lever and jerk it up and down, forcing the aircraft to "stomp" on the snow surface to see if it'd break through. Once he was satisfied the surface was at least somewhat solid, Thomas roped up and went out to probe for hidden crevasses. However, this time Chris kept the rotors turning at full power...the idea was that we could pick Thomas up if he fell into one. So he probed around the helicopter and then made his way out the left side of the aircraft to clear an area for us to set up the system. Once this area was clear, the helicopter was shut down and we went to work.
On our way back, we stopped at a fuel cache at Cape Lankester to refuel. So here's all that going on. Evidently the geniuses who originally put in this cache did so in the middle of a giant crevasse field...but thankfully it's been moved since then.
On the way back we flew over Teall Island, an island with very nice lines. Recent bummer: the pirate radio station is no longer. The person or persons (male? female?) who had been running it got wind that it was being "hunted for", so he/she/they took it down for the season. However, he/she/they told me it'll probably be back next year. Getting to know the proprietor(s) of this radio station was one of the highlights of my season for sure...
Also on our return route was the Black Island communcations station, through which almost all of our off-continent comms run. So every bit of data that goes between my computer and the outside world passes through here. It is a notoriously windy place, hence the name "Black Island", since the snow is continually scoured from its soil.
These are two photos from our flight down, when we flew around the backside of Mt. Discovery. I see this mountain every day from McMurdo, and it was neat to see the snow-covered hump on the back side.
Here's the summit of the mountain, with giant sheets of jumbled ice flowing down. And now for yet another digression. Today's topic: Polies. Inhabitants of the South Pole are somewhat a different species of those at McMurdo. I have only been to Pole for 2 weeks, and sheesh, that was two years ago. How time flies. But I have met many of them, and count some among my friends. There are also a number of them at McMurdo right now, on a week of "R&R". This is a week or so for Polies who are about to winter over to spend time at somewhere different than Pole, you know, somewhere with oxygen, dirt, scenery, and different people. I do not claim to be a South Pole insider, but during my time in the program I have met enough of them that I have come to believe the following things. First, Polies are some hard working sumbitches. Second, the South Pole society is much more cohesive than McMurdo, and they are a closer -knit group than McMurdoites. Third, they often act quite arrogant about all things South Pole and their own Polie-ness.

The first thing is obvious to anyone who's been to Pole. This is not to say that people at McMurdo and Palmer don't know how to work, because they certainly do. But on average, Polies are a bit more hard core about this. I think this must be due in part to the shortness of their summer season compared to the other stations. They have a short time each year to do tough jobs, and are pretty serious about it by and large. No doubt the same is true for most winterovers too. The second thing is something I sense in the way they generally relate to each other. It's more of a "we're all in it together" attitude, and they definitely tend to look out for each other. Sure there are social problems and strange dynamics going on there, but on the whole I see South Pole as a much less fractured community than McMurdo. I'm sure a big reason for this is the sheer extremity of the environment there. McMurdo (and yeah, Palmer) are cold, remote, harsh places, but South Pole has all of these "qualities" to the nth degree. And this seems to bond Polies together more than it does at McMurdo, where the culture can best be described as a college campus, complete with pretentious academics, cliquish social heirarchies, curious sleeping arrangements, bizarre politics and agendas, stifling policies and procedures, impenetrable management with questionable motivations, and yes, even fraternity houses populated with people who haven't quite realized yet that college is over. But now I'm rambling. The point was that even though Pole is certainly not free from these problems, there is much more of a sense of unity among Polies than we have here at McMurdo...and that's a fact. Finally, the arrogance thing. Many Polies are prone to a peculiar kind of arrogance, which is sometimes obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious. It was something that took me by surprise when I was there two years ago, and something I had kind of forgotten about since then. But the other day my friend Holly organized a "slushie" night in one of the lounges, complete with snow from Pole to mix your liquor into (thus creating a(n) (in)famous slushie). Most people there were Polies on R&R or former Polies who are working at McMurdo this season. I knew a couple people there but mostly they were strangers...which was fine, but it didn't take long before I remembered why I had taken issue with their attitude before. Even in passing conversation, there is a subtle condescending tone they take when talking about McMurdo and the people here. Sure, McMurdo has a LOT of problems, but many of the same problems exist at Pole too. And they conveniently seem to forget that every single bit of material that goes to Pole, and every single person who goes to Pole, comes through the great logistical hub that is McMurdo Station. Without McMurdo, Pole does not exist. Period. This vibe was pretty apparent at the slushie thing, and it actually spurred me to leave the festivities a lot sooner than I normally would have. That being said, would I rather do a summer season at Pole rather than McMurdo? You bet.