Images of

ANTARCTICA

Palmer Panoramas

Photos © 2004 Seth White

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This is the view you get looking out any north-facing window at Palmer Station. Not too shabby. This is an arm of the Marr Ice Piedmont, the glacier which covers nearly all of Anvers Island. Palmer Station is located on a little spit of land on the southern side of this island. This rocky bit of land used to be much smaller than it is today. The reason for this is that the glacier is receding...about 30 feet per year. At the T5 hut where I'm working the glacier used to be right out the back door, but now, it's several hundred meters away. Think global warming is bunk? Think again. Glaciers all over the world, not only in Antarctica, are disappearing. Why? Because temperatures are rising, plain and simple. There is no ambiguity about this. Glaciers are great indicators of overall temperature change. If you could design the perfect long-term temperature sensor, what would be better than a massive block of ice whose dimensions you simply measure over time? And they do show that the earth's atmosphere is heating up. The harder question is: why are temperatures worldwide on the rise? Is it man's influence or simply a part of a normal cycle, or both? And more importantly, what are the effects on the biosphere? And will temperatures continue to rise, and if so how much? And if so, what are the effects? Minute changes, like 0.5 degrees C, are already being seen to have enormous impact on not only the sizes of glaciers, but wildlife in Antarctica. Species like penguins have been seen to be very sensitive to small changes in temperature. It changes their world dramatically, in many complicated ways, and although humans are much better equipped to deal with global temperature fluctuations than the penguins, we are beginning to see the impacts on ourselves. I happened on this website today, and found it very illustrative concerning the glaciers. Global warming is for real. So what will happen, and what should we do? Antarctica is actually a critical factor in overall world climate, and scientists aplenty are working down here to find out what's going on. I already knew that global warming is a very real and significant thing...but the glacier in our back yard really drove the point home for me. Even now as I write this webpage I hear it cracking like thunder in the background, as one more giant chunk of ice falls into Arthur Harbor.

Palmer Station is on a little peninsula, which is separated from another peninsula (Bonaparte Point) by a small inlet. At the end of the inlet you have the glacier, with a few little caves carved out by the water. I walked out in the "back yard" (as they call the rocky area behind the station) to take a few pictures one day, and this is the end of the inlet. The wind was blowing pretty good that day, but I didn't think it was any big deal and I went walking around dressed in just the normal around-town clothes and a jacket. At McMurdo, with a temperature of 30 F and a 25 knot wind, this doesn't get you that cold, and I would have been very comfortable for a much longer time. But McMurdo is a very dry place. Palmer, on the other hand, is a very wet place. Even when it's not snowing or raining (yes, it rains all the time here!) the wind will have a good deal of moisture in it. And it's amazing how fast that chills you down compared to a bone-dry place like McMurdo (or especially Pole). True, Palmer really is the "banana belt" of US Antarctic Stations. I mean, the average temperature here is about 25 F, compared to 0 F and -55 F at McMurdo and Pole. Even now, it's a month away from the *winter solstice* and it has still been hovering around 30 F the whole time I've been here. But man, that humidity is nasty. Even so I did manage to get some photos of this inlet. I plan to go out (better dressed) for a couple hours here one of these days, but I'm waiting for a nice day. Since I got here it has gone between rainy, slushy, sleety, snowy, slick, icy, windy, overcast, foggy, and like today, downright crappy (we had 75 knot gusts today, putting it in the upper echelon of crappy conditions for the past 10 years at Palmer). But nowhere in the above adjectives do I see "sunny" or "clear". Hopefully one or two of these days will come along before I go. If so, I'm dropping everything and heading out on a long hike up the glacier, and perhaps to Bonaparte Point. More to come on this....

Another one of the inlet. Very blue, and very pretty.

This is a photo looking towards the proper Antarctic Peninsula in the distance, with mountains lit up by the sun as it was setting. That's right, the sun. Palmer is actually above the Antarctic Circle, so every day of the year you can see the sun. Granted, the station itself is south of the glacier, and so you have to hike up the glacier to get out of its shadow and see the sun. But here is is May 25 and we still have about 6 hours of usable light on station. Not too bad...and the Gould will be coming down here now and then throughout the winter, so you're not really as isolated as you are at the other two stations. Very nice indeed. Well, except for the weather itself. This was the best day since I've been here, and there was still a vast layer of low-lying clouds which obscured most of the sky. But this was still a very pretty scene. These mountains are impressive...I know a few of them rise to at least 13,000 ft, straight up from the sea. By the way, there is actually a little cart hooked up to a pulley wire in this picture. You can use this to pull yourself across the inlet.

On 5/27 I was able to tag along on a Zodiac trip out to a few islands to mark a few points using GPS. Along the way we stopped at a few other interesting places like this: Loudwater Cove. This is a bay on the other side of Norsel Point from Palmer Station. Or more correctly, I should now say "Norsel Island". People initially thought that Norsel Point was a part of Anvers Island, but this turned out not to be the case when the glacier between Anvers Island and Norsel Island gave way and left a stretch of open water between the two. The ice had been eroding away for many years and finally collapsed earlier this season. You can see some photos of this at this website. The picture here is a panorama of the glacier front which faces Loudwater Cove. To the right is the newly-opened passageway to Arthur Harbor, which borders Palmer Station. You cannot drive the boat through this gap, however, as it egregiously violates the 300 meter restriction next to active glacier faces. Want to be on the next boat out of here? Get caught "shooting the gap".

Here is a view from out on the sea as we were making the inter-island rounds on the same boating trip. Very low light, but I like the way this turned out.

This is another panorama of a similar view to the one above, but from a different vantage point.

I walked up the glacier two days ago for the first time...after nearly two weeks at Palmer. What greeted me was a spectacular scene, where the sun was setting and lighting up these mountains (more or less toward the east). Here is a photo of the whole view.

This is another, smaller view of the same thing. These mountains are across a strait from Anvers Island, and are on the continent itself. As an aside, I just stepped outside on the roof for a minute, and heard some seals in the distance...a kind of gurgling or farting sound (I couldn't tell). The first time I was working outside at night here, it took me by surprise. I'm not scared of the dark, and I had gotten used to working alone at Arrival Heights and Cosray during the winter at McMurdo. But there, no other living creatures except humans are within hundreds and hundreds of miles...so the first time I heard some snorting (or whatever) somewhat close outside the Palmer T-5 building, I said to myself "what the f*%& is that?"

After a while of milling around taking photos and trying to soak it up, the moon decided to rise over the mountains. There are some more photos of the moonrise, a little closer in, on the scenery page here. The moonrise this day was right up there with the best views I've ever seen. My favorite one is a sunset over Erebus Bay from autumn 2003, with the grand old mountain itself in the distance. That one is here. So....the Gould just returned to Palmer Station this evening (6/4/04), and with it brought an emergency spare part for our UV monitor system. While I was working on the system, a little wire broke. Normally, not a big deal right? You just repair the wire, or replace it, or you know, do something about it, right? Well as it turns out, of the hundreds of wires in the system this was the one wire that I couldn't do anything about. To fix it would have required digging into this sophisticated device, which according to our friends the manufacturers, is not user-serviceable at all. And although the T-513 project group is excellent about keeping a good supply of spare parts at each site, this was the one major system component that we didn't have a spare for at Palmer. And without it working 100%, the system is questionable at best. So the folks at the Biospherical home office got on the horn and called the Denver RPSC office. The idea was to overnight the part to the Denver office and get it to one of the people coming down on the next ship. Well, there was just enough time for that, as the last people were leaving for the airport the next day. So the part arrived in Denver, some kind soul stuck it in his/her luggage, and brought it to Punta Arenas. There, it was loaded into the "silver trunk", a metal case which carries mail and other important small items to and from the station. It is usually the first thing unloaded from the ship when it arrives, and the last thing put on the ship before it goes. The ship arrived this evening and within an hour of hitting the pier I had the golden part in my hand (a refrigerator housing for a photomultiplier tube). And of course, the new part was wired differently than the old part, so I ended up rewiring an entire connector this evening. Fun fun fun! I HATE soldering little tiny wires, especially when you will smoke the device on the other end if you get them wrong. Now, it's a race to get all the necessary tests done with the new device before I leave...approximately 30 hours from now. This is the downside of being here a short time and working on a science project. I have been more or less keeping my own hours, starting work around noon and going to sleep around 2 or 3 AM. Every now and then I'll get a slightly weird look when I come down to lunch with that just-got-out-of-bed look, but I don't really care too much because I've put in the same work hours as everyone else here...and probably more. And everyone else is at the bar getting lit with the ship crew, and I'm sitting in this hut at 12:30 am running scans. Not a bad life, though. I got to see Palmer Station for two weeks and worked my own hours, mostly by myself...and didn't have to attend any RPSC safety meetings! Now that's just about as good as it gets. I like this place and hope I can come back sometime. Anyhow, I'm currently waiting for a little scan to finish. There's a whole series of these time-consuming things to be done, but I ought to have enough time to wrap all the loose ends up...including finishing the last updates to this website...at least for now :-).