Images of

ANTARCTICA

Three Sisters

Photos © 2002 Seth White

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After finishing the installation at Bomb, we flew to Three Sisters, located on the NW side of Erebus. Here is Barry at the controls.

The Three Sisters site consists of three small peaks protruding from the snow, two of which are shown here. The installation is on the left one, and the landing zone was in between them.
The A-Star, with the second sister. The weather around Erebus can vary dramatically as you move around the mountain, or change elevation. Fortunately the weather at this site was also great, except a little breezier than at Bomb.
Sastrugi. Barry wasn't that happy with the landing site, and picked up the helo a couple times to reposition it before finally setting down. It was fairly soft snow, and the runners sank down a little bit. Naturally, when we stepped out of the aircraft there was this area of hard, wind-blown sastrugi just to the port side. Would have made the perfect place to set down, but it's hard to tell this from the air.
Second sister, with the peak of Erebus. This site was a gorgeous place. The rock formations, the view of Erebus, and the view over McMurdo Sound were all spectacular.
This is the peak of the first sister, where the GPS monument (a permanent marker in the ground, whose coordinates are well known) was located. This was also the site of an old siesmic sensor which was decomissiond a couple years ago.
Another view of the peak, looking from the edge back toward the installations.
And another.
Here is Beth with the installation. Our goal here was to install a temporary GPS site, which would collect data for a few days and then be retrieved. The portable solar panel array is on the left, along with the battery box. The antenna mast (with the old solar panel) is in the foreground, and the GPS antenna is out of view to the right. Hut Point Peninsula and the Erebus Ice Tongue are in the background, off the top right corner of the old solar panel.
The GPS antenna, with cable nicely rocked down. When we arrived at the site we were not sure on which of the peaks the GPS monument was located, since we had received conflicting reports of where it was and none of us had been there. So we tried the peak with the old seismic installation first, and sure enough there it was.
Beth with the (nearly) finished installation.
Same view, only with me in it. Beth definitely makes a much better model for showing off GPS sites....
These GPS stations are pretty modular, and are relatively easy to install. You have a portable bank of solar panels, a battery box which you wire up to the solar panels (through a controller), another box which houses the GPS receiver and radio, a GPS antenna, a communications antenna, and a bunch of cables. Over the course of about 4 hours, we flew from McMurdo to two sites on Erebus, installed two GPS stations, and flew back. A pretty efficient job...but then again, good weather REALLY helps.
Looking west over McMurdo sound from Three Sisters. Bomb was also a beautiful place (are there any ugly places on Erebus?), but I should have taken a panorama here instead.
The peak of Erebus. Clear days have been few and far between this season. Because it's so often obscured by weather, you sometimes forget that there's this enormous mountain right in your back yard. People have theorized that El Nino has something to do with crappy weather this year.
A movie file (.avi) of us taking off from Three Sisters.
I took a really crooked picture as we took off. But it's the only one I got with all three peaks, so here it is. Thoughtful of the crew to install their system and the GPS monument on the shortest one!
Third sister.
On the way back to McMurdo, we flew over this unreal area where the glaciers had these huge crevasses everywhere. Barry thought this was cool, so he got down a little lower and took a meandering course. Which was just fine with me.
It was amazing to me to see these huge ice sheets broken and fractured like this.
More pics of this stuff. Wow.
And more.
And still more.
Obviously I thought this was a pretty photogenic scene.
This is allegedly the 'exploding glacier'. I am told that recently, a field party radioed back to McMurdo that they heard a loud explosion-like sound from near here. This area has a lot of fractured glacier bits scattered around, some which are sitting on a very smooth ice surface. So the thought is, pressure must have built up here and finally buckled a part of this glacier, sending fragments out for a good ways. It was very bizarre to see these tidy little blocks of ice sitting in such strange spots, as if somebody had cut them out and arranged them.
A better shot of the supposed exploding glacier. There is also a very neat area cut out from the middle of the sheet.
More of this weird scene.
And more.
A little farther along, we saw this opening in the sea ice. In the water beneath, some hyperactive algae had taken advantage of the sun I suppose, and formed this deep green patch.
A picture of us returning to Hut Point Peninsula.
Another view. McMurdo is just around the point.