Sorsdal to Slushie and Still Cloudy

On Tuesday Adam, Matt A and me headed out to Kazak Island, which is about 10km South of Davis, on the quad-bikes, as part of Adam's work programme to download data from an automatic weather station there and to change the flash card in an automated SLR that takes photos of the ice in front of the Sorsdal Glacier when there is enough light. I've put a map here of the route we took. This photo was taken in summer, so all the dark blue water has been replaced with white ice, and would appear similar in colour to the Sorsdal Glacier at the bottom of the picture. The ice to the West of Kazak seems to break out all the time and at the start of our Summer season here I saw a cool timelapse video from this camera of it breaking and reforming again and again. This is for the same glaciology project for which I gather ice-thickness data every Thursday from the front of station. The area around Kazak is littered with islands and the ice in those parts usually takes a little longer to form due to tidal pressures around them, so as we went we had to drill every so often to make sure we weren't liable to fall through to a cold watery plight. We pulled up to the island, almost got bogged, backed off, and parked the quads about 100m from the shore. We left the engines ticking over to keep the quads warm and proceeded by foot to the island. As with every piece of land around here, Kazak is characterised by brown rocks with blown-snow making 'blizz tails' on the lee-side of them. During the summer, Kazak island is home to a large Adelie penguin rookery and, as is the case with such islands, is also completely covered in guano. Mmm, that old smell from the Summer, though somewhat muted, was there to grace our nostrils as we traversed. The thick guano is sprinkled with the corpses of dead penguins that gradually fade into it over the course of the seasons.

The AWS and the camera are on a small peak on the island, and when arrived the top we could see the huge whiteness of the frozen sea extending to the horizon to the North broken by the many islands surrounding.

Adam and Matty taking in the view while the data downloads.

To the South was the Sorsdal Glacier which was just visible behind another Kazak peak as a beautiful blue crumbly mess of broken, pressure-rended ice. It's interesting that the ice of icebergs and glaciers seem so much more blue under the light of clouds. After leaving the island we got some photos of us in front of the glacier and here I am standing in front of it.

Getting back from such a trip it's absolutely imperative to get yourself into the living quarters, sit in the 'wallow' and grab a cup of coffee. I know that the engine of the quad did most of the work, but trips out from station in the Winter really take it out of you.
On Thursday I was up until 2am or 3am the next morning sitting with station leader Ali, deputy station leader Mark and cross-dressing met observer Linc chatting and having a bit more of a get-to-know you session. That was a bad move because on Friday my alarm tore me from my comfy bed to crawl down to the kitchen and get started on my Slushy duties at 6:30. Every 3 weeks or so each person on station has to work a day in the kitchen, helping the chef wash dishes and keep the kitchen running. This time, though, I was reponsible for feeding all the pundits because 12 of the 25 of us, including chef Kim, had gone up to the Antarctic plateau to rehearse for the up-coming traverse to the Russian and Chinese stations. The idea was to find the most miserable, barren place possible and set up polar pyramid tents to simulate the conditions over their journey. Sounds like they had a rough time and we couldn't help but wonder about them that night as the winds at station, typically more calm than the plateau, were gusting about 40 knots (70kph).

Looking like some sort of ghastly pirate with my red eyes and striped shirt, I got to work making about 8kg of bread dough. The fruits of this were 6 fluffy loaves of bread, 12 cheese-contaminated bread-rolls, 24 pepperoni and cheese scrolls and 12 vegemite and cheese scrolls. Check out my baked-goods in the photos below. It all went down a treat. That night, for dinner I made, with the help of Ole Geoff Brealey and young Chris Wilko (two of the dieso's on station), bangers and mash for all of us, including the exhausted field party who had returned 2 hours beforehand. It all went really well except for the 'orange delicious' pudding I decided to make 90mins before dinnertime that ended up being a mess of coagulated egg and watery stuff. I got Kim to do an autopsy and the verdict: not enough flour! Bugger...

Me with my unbaked scrolls, wondering if they're too scrawny...

Some delicious loaves fresh from the oven.

The scrolls turned out to be pretty good

Saturday night was good with the usual delicious food. I wore more stripes, striped shirt, striped tie. Nichol told me that the stripes clashed with each other. I said I liked to 'buck the trends'. He replied with stunned silence. The crowd at the candlelit dinner table soon thinned and I was left among a small group of people for some good candid conversation about some of the events of the past Summer. It was interesting to get other people's views on some of those. At one point in the conversation, our resident coffee connoisseur, Nick "the rodent" Roden, walked in with a long black that he was sipping on. He is one of the pundits tackling the long traverse in a couple of weeks, and has been talking at length about how he's going to miss his beloved espresso coffee. Excusing himself to go to the bathroom, a few at the table became inspired and quickly got to work replicating his espresso coffee with a cup of instant. The amount of coffee in the glass was matched perfectly, and water from the cooler was added in appropriate proportions to the boiling mix in order to make the temperature just right. When Nick came back, Wellsy, Plant Inspector for the Winter, was interested to hear more about the coffee. As Nick sipped his 'espresso' Wellsy asked him "So, is it really that much better than instant coffee?"
It was totally suss, the whole table had gone dead silent and everyone was staring at Roden.
Nick: Oh yeah there's no comparison.
Grins widen. Roden sips.
Wellsy: Really? THAT coffee is really a lot better than instant.
Roden: Absolutely!
A short beat, then contained laughter erupted around the table.
Wellsy: You're drinking instant coffee!
Hahaha, but to Roden's credit he took it incredibly well and an explanation was offered: "You guys shouldn't take advantage of a drunk man!" haha it was too good. He really did take it with style though. I compared the two coffees and the espresso was a lot better. I guess unfortunate Roden didn't expect us to stoop so low.

Later on we were talking about the overnight jaunt that half the station had arrived home from the previous day. It seems that Frank the Tank* and Hellboy, while bailed up in their tent with a blizzard outside, had failed to fully seal the outer shell of the tent from the elements. They both woke up in the morning almost buried by snow-weighted tent-walls and they were certainly trapped in there. They thought about radioing for help, and Frank had a battery but no more of the required hardware. If only they'd buried the flaps of the outer shell of the tent in the snow, none of that would have happened. While laughing about this at the dinner table I said, completely innocently, "looks like Frank and Hellboy needed some more weight on their flaps.". Linc, wearing his usual Saturday dress, jumped up from his chair, went to the bar and wrote that straight in the Davis quote book.

You really have to watch what you say around here....

Until next week my friends, don't forget to keep an eye on your coffee and keep your flaps under wraps. Adios!

*Frank is our resident German painter. Every day at smoko break Andy, our senior comms officer, brings out short summaries of the Australian and world news. Earlier this week an article appeared in the world section entitled "Uproar! Germany Out!". Apparently, half the German team had been caught using a banned anabolic steroid and wouldn't be playing in the up-coming world cup. We all know this isn't true do to the complete flogging they gave the Socceroos last night, but it was all Frank could do to keep a weak smile on his reddened face. He was seen taking his smoko snack straight to his room to jump on the internet in order to verify this 'uproar'. Andy had cleverly doctored the article according to a scheme that the four of us had come up with while we were bailed up in Platcha Hut a few weekends ago. Tonight, Frank got his own back by presenting Andy with a box of tissues painted Aussie green and gold, with 'socceroos' carefully printed on the side, so that Andy would have something with which to wipe his loser Australian tears up with. We're still waiting for Roden's revenge.

Blog Time Again

Hello internet,

So it's Sunday, and I'm going to write in this every Sunday. Just when I thought there was no chance that could keep a regular diary or journal I surprise myself by sitting down to my third entry in as many weeks. As Spaggers would say in his Italian accent: Not too bad.

The past week was a bit of slack one, work-wise, but I managed to get off my monthly report to all concerned. I also went back out onto the ice and did my drilling duties again, this time with the station leader, Ali. That was cool and we're still convinced, despite popular opinion going against us, that the holes that we've seen in the ice are not from a seal, but rather from meteorites. I think rejecting the meteor theory is like Kafuka in Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei saying ""How could [fantastic thing], something I've only seen on TV or in the newspaper, exist so close to me? This is obviously [improbable explanation]." I'll have to get some photos next time and put it out there... I mean how could a seal wear its teeth down grinding through 600mm of ice for a breathing hole and then just leave it to freeze over again, so that it would have to go and do it again? Anyway, that doesn't seem like a good habit to get into if you want to survive with your teeth intact, live and procreate.

Also, It's likely that I just want to believe in the meteor.

So the last few days of my life on station have been pretty social. We had Friday night in the bar, sitting around having a great laugh. Not much to speak about there. I tried to relay a description of the conversation that night to Bianca and the only thing worse than telling a 'had to be there' joke to someone face-to-face is writing it in an email. I still sent it off anyway. By the end of the night, there were five of us at the bar, practically in tears!

Then the next day, after I went to the gym, Hellboy put on a game of 'Beersbee' in the Green Store building, which is the storage facility for practically everything on station. Inside is an electrically-powered compactus that moves at the push of a button, which is fortunate because each of the aisles is about 3 stories high. Hellboy and Spaggers had moved all the aisles to one side and set up the playing court. Now, Beersbie is a game that combines two of Hellboy's favourite things. As Roachy, the electrician who lives in the room next door to me would say "three guesses as to what those things are and the first two don't count". So, first two PVC pipes, about 1.2m in length are stood up on their ends and opposite ends of the corridor. Then an empty can of carlton draught beer is placed gingerly on each of the upright pipes. Behind these precarious structures stand the participants from each team. Each team usually had about three people, and we had two frisbees that flew beautifully and a bucket lid that flew fairly well when hurled at dangerous speeds. The object of the game is that the teams take turns and each member of the team throws a frisbee (or bucket lid) at the upright PVC pipe, knocking it over. If you knock the can and it hits the ground, you get two points. If the other team catches the can, that's nothing, and you have to drink. If you miss the pipe, the frisbee wasn't 'uncatchable', and the other guys don't catch it, it's one point. The game was cool. I think Adam was the best wickie keeper and caught about 3/4 of the cans we knocked off, which was "f'n annoying" whined Hellboy. Yeah it frickin was. It was perfect timing though one time when the timed lights flicked off when Adam was in mid-dive for a classic catch of the carlton can. Tom the Plumber said "hey, we all play with the timed lights!". That we do, Tom, that we do.

Anyway after those shenanigans it was time for Saturday dinner. Every Saturday at Davis the tables in the mess are moved out from their lineup and pushed together to make one huge table. The tablecloths, candles, collared-shirts, ties, wine, and sometimes even station-supplied liquor come out, and the chef puts on an extra-special spread for all of us. This time it was slow cooked pork fillet, a chicken dish that I've unfortunately forgotten the name of, huge king prawns with seafood sauce, and vegies, finished off with a rich chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, cream and ice-cream. When I was doing my training in Hobart, I remember hearing that most of the people that come down here put on weight during the course of the year. Now I can see why. I didn't imagine that I'd have to come to Antarctica to eat this well. We then went to the bar and watched Sam Stosur lose the tennis. Bugger. Yeah, we aren't doing it that tough; we can eat prawns and pudding and stream TV and radio.

When I get back I reckon I'm going to be totally useless in the kitchen, not having made anything on a regular basis for 17 months. Other things that I will unfamiliar with: paying for things, not saying hi to everyone I see, walking on concrete, trees, humidity, traffic, most of the music from the past year, anything new from the past year. The list goes on but being deprived and separated from the things that I'm familiar with has given me so much food for thought and allowed me a realignment of perspective. I won't go into my intimate thoughts, but I will say that my time down here has been, and will continue to be, a life-changing experience.

Laser Broke So I Went on a Trip

During the Winter it is one of my obligations to run the lidar for a few sessions that comprise more than two full days of consecutive observing each. Adam, electronics engineer that I mentioned in the last post, and I decided to get an early start last week when the forecasting models predicted a 3-day break in the clouds. May at Davis Station has been marred with constant cloud so this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

The lidar is capable of recording data that will give temperatures up to about 80km, though the higher you look, the more sensitive-a-detector you must use, and so are more likely to damage the detector with strong backscatter from low-altitude signals. We're still interested in the whole atmosphere; from tropo-, through strato-, into a big chuck of the meso-sphere, so we run a 'combined schedule' that spends about 48 minutes gathering data at altitudes at 20km-80km then quickly switches to gathering data from about 5km-40km for 8 minutes, just to make sure there aren't any sneaky clouds hovering around 20km. You see, in the next few weeks, we expect to see increasing detections of Polar Stratospheric Clouds (or PSC's) at this altitude. These clouds are interesting because they act as a catalyst for the breakdown of ozone. The small particles in the clouds provide surface area for chemical reactions to take place that allow the chlorine free-radicals from CFC's to snatch one of the oxygen atoms from the O3. I think I mentioned something about this in my last post. The more clouds we see, the bigger we should expect the ozone hole to be. By comparing our detection of PSC's with the ozone-concentration data gathered from the big ozonesonde weather-balloons that the slackers from Met let off once a week, we get more data about the relationship between the two.

So we ran the lidar doing some haphazard kinds-of shifts that somehow had me working till 6am the first morning, and then switching so as to be up at 7am the following morning for slushy, aka. kitchen duty that each station member does every 25 days. It didn't help that upon finishing up at 2am the night before I decided to join Chris the Dieso in getting pissed for his birthday and retiring 2hrs30mins before I was required to start said duties. Well, I was only 40 minutes late! Thanks Adam for backing me up on this too.

During the guts of the Thursday (we ran lidar from 5pm Wed to 6pm Fri) I went out and performed my weekly duty of ice-drilling at 7 sites out the front of station with Nick "the Rodent" Roden, a met observer and amateur film-maker that keeps putting cameras in our faces. Bother us now it may, but I reckon we'll be pretty stoked to have his footage when we get back home. Anyway, wrt to the sea-ice drilling, I'll put up a map of the location of the sites where we drill because it'll make it seem real to you. I really enjoy doing this because it's a weekly reason to get out on the quad bikes for some fresh air. Our measurements show that the ice has been growing consistently and is now about 85cm thick in places. This is more than enough to support heavy machinery, let alone people, quad bikes, and hagglunds.

So anyway not long after I got back from the ice-drilling and got some more sleep and then took over from Adam (to begin the evening with the finishing at 2 and the drinking and the like), the laser power started reading 13W, as opposed to its usual 25W that I'm so comfortable and familiar with. Shit. I shut down the laser and blasted all the optics with high-pressure air so as to remove any bits of dust etc that may be diverting some of the laser power from its path up the chimney and into the sky. This didn't seem to have any effect. I checked that the laser power meter was not playing up by substituting the spare detector-head and this didn't do anything either. Bugger. This isn't something that you want to deal with; there were a range of possible problems that may be causing this and many of the solutions involve painstaking hours twiddling mirrors with an ever-present feeling of futility looming overhead. Adam and I decided that the twiddling and the futility could wait, and that we would take advantage of the rare clear skies and finish our marathon observation, worrying about the tiny problem of the laser being half-broken at some other time.

So we finished our observation, limping along at 13W. I packed things up, sent off the data, and went down for some dinner and sleep. The next day I would be going out on a jolly, or field-trip, to Platcha Hut and I made sure I got a lot of rest. See, you can see my name on the whiteboard to the left. The ailing laser was in the back of my mind and I felt a slight but easily-suppressed twinge of guilt the next day as we rode out over the sea-ice away from the colourful buildings of the station. The sun was rising/setting the whole time we were riding, providing some amazing fiery reds and oranges that complement the blues and whites of the icebergs and sea-ice. The air was nice and still, and I think it was about -15 that day, which isn't so cold when you've got the right gear on and the electronic hand-warmers on the quad hand-grips are firing away. We drove north up the coast and then diverted into Long Fjord, which is just as thick as the frozen sea-ice, all the way east towards Platcha Hut. The ride went smoothly for the most. Exception: at one point, while pushing through a geographical bottleneck so determinedly, with visors down and heads to the howling wind, the two of us at the front had forgotten to turn around and perform our regular check to see how our companions were travelling. By the time Ali and I looked back we could barely see Kim and Spaggers, far behind us in the narrowest part of the wind funnel. Turning, back we returned to this now inexplicably calm section of ice running between two hills to see that the two stragglers were utterly bogged; snow up to their footpegs. It took the muscle of 4 people and a barely-gripping quad to reverse the thing out of the slush, but we did it. The most concerning thing about this was that under the snow the wheels of the quads were splashing up water, which implies a breach in the ice underneath at some point. Nobody fell through, but we have noted that it would be better for other travellers to take a mapped-detour to the right next time. We just don't know where that water came from.

So we got to the hut and spent two nights there. We were all treated with wonderful food from our excellent chef Kim and with good conversation from each other. Good weather wasn't so forthcoming so we spent the whole weekend holed-up in the tiny cabin reading, doing puzzles, chatting and sharing meals and drinks. It was a wonderful and relaxing time, and I was sorry when it came to an end. We headed back to station yesterday and arrived back at 2pm. I did nothing for the rest of the day and found it pretty hard to do anything today as well. Going out the hut had put me down a gear and I was still trying to spin-up until about 3pm today. Here I've added a picture of Kim, Ali, and Spaggers enjoying some warm chocolate custard for dessert. You can see me bowl behind Ali's, waiting to be set upon by me right after I put down the camera.

Now here I am and I've gone and written all this which has caused me to become alert and enthusiastic at 11:30pm. Ah doesn't matter. If there's something I hardly ever have trouble doing, it's sleeping, which I'll go and do now.

See ya later. I'll put some photos up later on. I didn't take too many though. It takes you outta the moment too much and I don't like it.

Also, at noon today I discovered that the laser is fine, and that the problem was some sort of glitch with the power meter. Crisis averted.

Goodbye. May delicious chocolate custard warm your bellies this Winter.

Really, Really, Really tasty