I'm sitting in the living quarters at Davis station. It's 9:20pm and three other expeditioners are sitting with me; Adam and Nichol working on their digital SLR's, and Zupy (Mike Zupanc) opposite me eating a piece of toast with his frostbitten, bandaged fingers. Adam is the electronics engineer with whom I work closely on the lidar and other ice-related studies, Nichol in a communications technician who is the gatekeeper of our link to the outside world, and poor Zupy with his frostbite is a carpenter that was down here for the Summer of 2008/09 and decided to come back for a Winter. Zupy arrived on Voyage 4 with four other new Winter crew, which was the last voyage for the season that took all of our summerers away, including Bianca.
Our new station leader, Ali, arrived on the last voyage. She's the only woman on station for the 8 months of Winter. She's a very relaxed and friendly woman that sets a nice tone for the social environment down here. The crew this Winter comprise a range of characters; Frank the german painter who says a lot that isn't understood, Spaggers (Rob Lemme) "the youngest plumber to ever set foot in Antarctica", as it said on the walls of the recently-burnt smokers' hut, is always there to give Frank a hard time about it (though Frank gets his own back in what ends up being the kind of banter that money can't buy). Nichol is the comms-tech-cum-brewmaster and is often seen over at the now-deserted science building growing his special blend of Antarctic yeast. He is also often seen talking 4WDing with Wellsy, the PI (plant inspector, or head-dieso) who doesn't seem to do an
ything by halves. Then there's Matt Azzopardi, who is an electrician that I suspect is trying to create his own army of Antarctic heroes by prescribing his well-thought-out gym programmes to those of us who are keen to tear up our muscles on a daily basis by repeatedly lifting weights in the gym situated above the floor of the storage facility. I have completed a two-month workout programme with the view of conditioning my body for the 'Azzopardi Plus' workout programme that I just started last Monday. I'm already seeing improvements in my fitness. Here's a picture of the gym.There are 25 of us on station now. I recently learnt that in middle-aged agrarian economies that the average amount of space available to each individual at a given time is used as an index to quantify quality of life. I believe that this is true. This is paralleled here with the amount of living space that we all have to move around and socialise in being effectively tripled since the last of the Summerers left. This issue is not so simple though; I miss a lot of the people that were here over the Summer. We're all in a routine now and some of the vibrance of the Summer has gone. On the balance of things, though, I have to say that I prefer the Winter phase of my Antarctic experience.
A few days after
the last voyage left, the sea started to freeze in earnest, and over the following two months until now we have seen a steady increase in its thickness. Incidentally, it's one of my volunteer duties to travel out onto the ice, drill through it, and measure the ice-thickness one time per week. This has a dual purpose; one is to provide ice-formation data to Petra Heil, a glaciologist back at UTAS who uses it for her research, and the other, far more pertinent to life down here, is to provide data to the station leader so that she can open up the ice for vehicular recreational travel across the top of the ocean. In this picture you can see Adam with the sea-ice drill and Andy with his ice-axe heading out for an ice-drilling jaunt. It all paid off last week, when we finally got the go-ahead to hop onto the quad-bikes and burn out to the field huts that dot the Vestfold Hills around Davis Station (it was on one such journey this weekend that Zupy's fingers got frostbitten). My turn comes next weekend. I have my name on the whiteboard out in the foyer to head out on a trip to Platcha Hut, which lies at the end of Long Fjord at the base of the Antarctic Plateau. I'll be heading out with Ali the Station Leader, Kim the Chef, and Spaggers the Plumber. I'm really looking forward to it.
the last voyage left, the sea started to freeze in earnest, and over the following two months until now we have seen a steady increase in its thickness. Incidentally, it's one of my volunteer duties to travel out onto the ice, drill through it, and measure the ice-thickness one time per week. This has a dual purpose; one is to provide ice-formation data to Petra Heil, a glaciologist back at UTAS who uses it for her research, and the other, far more pertinent to life down here, is to provide data to the station leader so that she can open up the ice for vehicular recreational travel across the top of the ocean. In this picture you can see Adam with the sea-ice drill and Andy with his ice-axe heading out for an ice-drilling jaunt. It all paid off last week, when we finally got the go-ahead to hop onto the quad-bikes and burn out to the field huts that dot the Vestfold Hills around Davis Station (it was on one such journey this weekend that Zupy's fingers got frostbitten). My turn comes next weekend. I have my name on the whiteboard out in the foyer to head out on a trip to Platcha Hut, which lies at the end of Long Fjord at the base of the Antarctic Plateau. I'll be heading out with Ali the Station Leader, Kim the Chef, and Spaggers the Plumber. I'm really looking forward to it.I have been keeping in touch with my girlfriend Bianca on a daily basis. These conversations are a daily ray of sunshine that is much needed as the Sun starts to dip below the horizon toward the much anticipated six-weeks-of-darkness. This darkness will be characterised by long hours of twilight in the middle of the day but the Sun and his smiling face won't be seen during this time.
At the moment, the Sun is up for 3 hours per day and even then it is at a very low angle and often attenuated by cloud. I swear sometimes that I feel the effects of the lack of Sun, whether it be manifest as a lack of energy or a low mood. This fact was brought home this past week. I was rostered to attend the hydroponics shed once a day in order to ensure that the water levels for the plants were at a prescribed level. This job usually takes about 10 minutes. Often, while filling up the second or third water container I would find myself singing to myself or feeling a rising enthusiasm washing over my body. I reckon the sun-mimicking lights, humidity, and greenery were doing their bit to re-energise me. The sun disappeared so gradually it's hard to monitor the effects that its absence may have, but the sudden addition of Sun, artificial or no, is something that brought this home to me. I've decided that it will be a good idea to spend my daily reading time in the hydro hut. It can only be a good thing.
I haven't been running the lidar for the last month or so due to the excessive cloud cover that we've been experiencing. Instead, I've busied myself, with the help of Adam, in setting up and characterising POLAR, an addition to the lidar receiving telescope. The addition of POLAR will enable us to discriminate the polarisation of the light that returns back to the lidar after reflecting off clouds and other aerosols in the atmosphere. With this information we will be able to determine whether the light has been reflected by a solid, liquid or gas. This will be a nice addition to the data around characterising the formation of Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC's), clouds that appear in Winter in the stratosphere and play a catalytic role in the breakdown of ozone. The ozone hole is still under investigation. Before I started this job, I thought we'd more-or-less dealt with that, but atmospheric processes that occur above the troposphere are less well understood than those that occur in our home-layer.
Well, it's 10:10 now so I'm going to start thinking about bed and maybe putting some photos into this entry to spruce it up a bit. To all those who I have neglected to contact, I'm sorry, but it's so easy to get caught up in things down here. Please write to me and I promise I'll respond.
Okay, good night all. I hope you're enjoying life, whatever you're doing.
Andy and I having a chat in the smokers' hutbefore the fire.
