Seren's blog

Retroactive updates

 I've been adding some retroactive updates that I didn't have a chance to type up until now. Scroll down for them.

Also, here a google maps satellite view if you'd like to see us or get driving directions.

The wind is howling...

 The wind is howling all around the station at the moment. Earlier it was snowing sideways, but now it's cleared up and is gusting up to 60mph. It's making the whitecaps tear across the water. Very pretty under a bit of moonlight when viewed from through a window or the hood of a parka. I can see why a 4-season tent, tied to the heaviest things around was recommended.

 I got to see Terralab today, the new research building up the hill. It's nice and new inside, and the research is pretty incredible. There are a bunch of sensors and devices around the are that hook up to devices in the building that record or transmit data. There's a magnetometer, part of a network from the Arctic down that's reading changes in the Earth's magnetic field. There a spectrum analyzer for outdoor light which has the bonus of showing us what the UV index is currently (Palmer's right under the hole in the ozone layer). There are radio sensor that track lightning strikes around the world, seismic sensors for earthquakes, and a CNTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) setup that measures trace amounts of radiation in the air, looking for signs of nuclear tests. Finally, there are receivers for image data from the satellites that pass overhead and a GPS correction beacon that can give you GPS coordinates to within a centimeter, good for measuring glacier recession and bird nest locations.

 I'm going to flesh this out with some pictures tomorrow and put up some past entries that I've almost finish transcribing from paper. Night.

Whirled Series

Good day today: The break-time snack was orange-julius and home-made hotpockets. Our cooks rock.

A trouble light (but no alarm) appeared on one of the fire panels today which sent a few of the us on the fire team hurrying up the road to the radio hut to see what was going on. It was the one time I'd taken off my 2-way radio and forgotten it in the other building, so I had to grab one from my office mate's collection. Doh!

 We had Boating 2 training today, which is required to operate the Zodiacs here. However since the bay has filled up with blown-in brash ice , we couldn't actually get out on the water. Maybe tomorrow since it looks like it'll be clearing.

The Lounge

  The World Series is on tonight (yawn). Some folk are very excited and there a small but spirited rivalry going one between the Boston Red Sox camp and the Denver Rockies loyalists. After jumping through some hoops, we managed to get a short-term live feed of the game piped in. It's surprising how hard it is to not watch TV, even if it's showing a sport that's incredibly commercialized and boring. Thank goodness we're pretty much cut of from it. Any TV shows we watch are on DVD, sans advertising.

 Best line read today:
 SOME PEOPLE ARE LIKE SLINKIES. NOT REALLY GOOD FOR ANYTHING BUT THEY BRING A SMILE TO YOUR FACE WHEN PUSHED DOWN THE STAIRS. (note: this doesn't relate to anyone here. Maybe in 6 months.)

Full size pix:
The Lounge

Oktoberfest and ice

Brash ice

I woke up today to find that the crystal clear water around the station has become completely cover with brash ice. The ice ranges from small (walnut-sized) to big (cement truck-sized) and comes from bits calving off the glaciers around and getting blown in to shore. It's pretty cool; it forms what seems to be a solid landscape that you could walk across except that it slightly undulates with the ocean swells. It's a bit surreal.

 The seals seem to like it though. I borrowed some binoculars saw that what appeared to be a couple of black blobs on some larger clumps of ice were seals (either fur, crab-eater, or elephant) sunning themselves. I didn't get around to the Hero Inlet side of the Backyard, but apparently there were over 40 of them there, hanging out while there was an easy surface available. They do this on land as well, which we'll probably see later in the season.

 With the binoculars I was also able to see out to Litchfield Island and see the growing number of Adelie penguins gathering there. They've been spotted copulating and there's a station betting pool on when the first egg will be laid, now that the first penguin has been laid.

 The Adelie population here has been declining in recent years. Typically this Litchfield Island is completely colonized at this point in the year, but currently the colony is tiny. This correlates to the recent reduction in the local krill population which correlates to the recent lack of sea ice which krill forage underneath. Global warming at work...

 We had our second GSAR meeting, most of which was spent going over knots. It's weird that we have ultra-light high-tech gear that would have made Shackleton drool, yet it still comes down to a some sort of knot that makes the difference between a life-saving tool and a decoration at the top of the crevasse you just fell into. Knot's, like languages, are easy to remember provided you use them reasonably frequently.

 Why is it that certain useless bits of information remain with one till (and probably beyond) the grave, yet things which could potentially save one's embarrassment and pain slide right out one's ear during the night. Most birthdays would escape me without a calendar and I can never remember what to do during daylight-savings (Spring forward? Spring back? Fall sideways? Who makes this stuff up???). Even important stuff for camping, like which kind of bear you can climb a tree from and which kind to play dead around, didn't stick until I lived in the mountains for a year. "Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A" will get you far when playing Nintendo, but still leave you at hour late, scorned by loved-ones, and bear-mauled in the real world.

 So we're learning knots. There's actually a whole ton of study and science that's gone into knots which most people in urban situations never need to learn so I've got some catching up to do. Fortunately there's only a tiny fraction of the knot universe that we need to familiarize ourselves with, so it's pretty doable. The bonus of being on the GSAR team is that I've been told I need to take the snowmobile out onto the glacier and get comfortable with driving it. How many ways are there to say "hell yes"?

 

Oktoberfest

Oh yeah, Oktober-fest was today, complete with beer, and polkas, lederhosen (long-underwear under rolled up rubber coveralls). We even have a pumpkin, though we can't carve it because that would constitute playing with your food and you don't get to o many "fresh" "veggies" down here (pumpkins take about a month to get here and iceberg lettuce falls outside the realm of vegetable IMHO).

Full size pix:
Brash ice
Oktoberfest

Copacabana

All pictures from today

  One word sums up today. Penguins. Truckloads of penguins.

Camp placard

  We crossed the final stretch of the Drake Passage in the night and arrived at King George Island in the morning. There we were to drop off four passengers plus a ton of supplies at the Copacabana field station. This station is open about half the year and is located right next to a huge penguin breeding ground. We, the lucky ducks that we were, got to help unload the boat and dig out the station from under the snow, in the process literally crossing paths with hundreds of penguins.

 We gathered on deck of the LMG (Lawrence M. Gould) in our water-proof gear and mandatory "float-coats" (an up-and-coming style sure to sweep the survivalist demographic). The boat's crew then ferried us in groups across the stretch of water to the shore in Zodiacs (tough inflatable boats). It was on the crossing that I saw the best sight of the whole day: a flock of penguins bouncing through the water like little torpedoes, on their way back to the island. The sight is hard to describe; there must have been at least a dozen of them and since there were enough of them arcing out of the water to replace the ones who'd just re-submerged, they formed a steadily moving group, kind of like a slinky. I never realized penguins swam like that and apparently they can do this for hours (with occasional breaks) at a pretty steady rate of 5 knots. Apparently they have less-insulated areas under their wings so that they can use the frigid ocean water to cool themselves during these workouts. Wow.

Penguins on the move

  The penguins we saw were mostly Gentoo with a few Adelie thrown in (no Chinstraps yet). They arrive at at random spots along the rocky shore and then walk down it until they get to the large group next to the field station. This meant that our movement of supplies from the beach up to the station crossed their path. A sled of gear heading up from the shore would halt approaching penguins, causing a penguin traffic jam until either we were out of the way or they broke rank and went around behind us on the shoreline. When we were out of the way the line would resume, with a few of the braver penguins leading a wave of waddling birds.

Moving supplies

  We moved a ton (literally) of supplies into the station, from research equipment to canned goods, fresh vegies and fruit. We also had some supplies for a nearby Polish station whose residents swung by to collect them. There's a bit of a neighborhood going on there, with a Polish and Brazilian station nearby (both larger and better equipped), and quite a few further away. Apparently residents hike over the glaciers or boat across the bays to have parties with each other during downtime.

Dug Out

I discovered that part of the computer guy's job in snow-covered field camp involves digging out the buildings where the computers live. After almost a week on the boat, the exercise felt great. I also helped bring supplies up the beach, assisted our radio guy setup the wind-generator (the station is solar and wind powered), and dug out various other bits of the camp.

 By the time we were done setting up the electronics and supplies it was the afternoon and the penguin colony had grown in size quite a bit from when we arrived. There were even more than I realized initially, since they were also climbing up and gathering on the hills overlooking the beach. I'm surprised at how agile they are, and it's funny to watch them switch from waddling to sliding along on their belly when they want a change of pace.

 We left the folks on station, Zodiaced back to the LMG, and had a hearty dinner from our rockin' cook Bobby. Tomorrow we arrive at Palmer! I still have to stop occasionally to look around and realize that this is my life. What a change from a month ago.

Antarctic lessons learned today:
 IT work involves snow shovel and a lot of digging.
 Penguins are agile and personable little critters.
 Rubber pants are a godsend on an Antarctic boat ride.
 If you want a frosty beer, leave it outside at sub-zero temperatures.
 Red spots in the snow = Penguin poop. Look at the pictures closely.

All pictures from today

lost at sea 2

Pictures from the trip down

Pictures from the boat

Two more comments before I crash.

Firstly, I think that working or living on a boat such as this for any length of time will cause permanent hearing loss. There is noise everywhere, from the bass rumble of the engines to the vibration and clatter of equipment and furniture. The horror movies where some creature is lurking on a boat and the hapless victim-to-be is startled by a clinks or clunks around a corner are ridiculous. No boat is ever that quiet. Even if the crew were devoured by a giant man-eating sea turnip and the engines forcibly removed, there would still be constant clanging and rattling from things shifting around and various systems and pumps turning on and off.

Second, it is weird being in a place where energy conservation doesn't matter. The boat is actually electrically powered; the engines being diesel generators which power everything including the electric motors that drive the propellers. This is good because it simplifies things (you don't need a generator engine and a propulsion engine) and for ice breaking you can vary the speed of the propellers widely without having to have gears or worry about straining tons of moving parts. What it means though is that there is just a ton of electricity being generated on the boat and leaving things turned on has a negligible effect on how much fuel is used. It's hard to get used to leaving TVs and lights turned on but it's how things work around here, so time to adjust.

Alright, night again.

-seren

lost at sea

Ok, this is my first blog post and gonna be long since it's a bit overdue. This is mainly because it's the first time on this trip that I've a) had access to a computer, and b) said computer isn't waving back and forth in front of my eyeballs with the motion of the ocean. I'm posting this via email since we don't have actually have internet access on the ship and our email is send and received twice-a-day by a Rube Goldbergish process that occupies the computer guy for at least an hour (strangely though we have unlimited satellite-phone usage to the USA). So no pictures until the weekend when I should be able to get online.

I'm out in the Drake Passage at the moment, that bit of water between the tip of South America and the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It's known to be some of the roughest seas on the planet, but we lucked out this time and it was only rough yesterday (Wed) and it's amazingly smooth today. The ship is an icebreaker which means it's pretty flat on the bottom and thus rolls with every wave or swell that comes through (there's a great analogy to politics and the lack of pronounced backbones causing wild-swinging and general nausea, but I digress). I've heard stories of the ship doing acrobatic tilts of up to 45 degrees, so the 15-20 degree rolls we had that were sending things flying off counters, tipping over chairs, and turning some passengers a bit green seem a bit tame in comparison. The boat chugs along at a pretty steady 10-12mph all day and night, so we cover a pretty good distance each day.

We're doubly lucky that the water's becoming placid since we're going to have to get out into it tomorrow (Fri) and unload things at the research station on King George island. We're dropping off five folks who will be studying penguins (Gentoo, Chinstrap, and Adelie) during their breeding season. I expect we'll see a fair number of them since they walk along the beach to their nesting grounds so our paths will be crossing. We've been told to just work around them. Sweet.

The exercise will be nice after being stuck on the boat for four days where all you can really do is sit around reading and watching movies, whiling away the hours between the cook's excellent meals (tough life, huh?). There is an exercise room with weights and a treadmill, but to use either when the boat's in motion is potentially suicidal, at least to those of us who don't have our sea legs yet. The same goes for speed-walking around the perimeter of the decks, which one lady did when it was calm out. I'm going for the chrysalis method, where the boat is my cocoon and I eat, sleep, and sit around most of the time, emerging at the end of the voyage transformed from a lowly landlubber into a swarthy seadog, with facial hair and an extra 10 pounds to ward off the cold.

Everyone I've met going to Palmer or Copa (King George Island camp) has been pretty friendly and it's an interesting crew. Some people have been doing this for years while others like myself are fresh. The common thread seems to be a fairly dynamic skill set and an outdoorsy attitude. The researchers also vary in background; some are fresh out of college and doing research before grad school, while others have been doing NSF work for a long time. The boat crew is also pretty friendly, though scarce.

This is the longest I've been on a ship and it's pretty cool. We're welcome to go up to the bridge pretty much any time and check out the views, radar, and maps. The ship has a TV system running through it with some channels showing views from the outside cameras mounted around the boat and some channels showing instrument readouts, so you can find out your lat/lon, speed, depth, distance from destination, etc. from anywhere on board. Most people are paired into rooms, but I'm sharing with 3 other guys what is essentially a converted shipping container called a "berthing van". It's down in the cargo bay and is actually pretty nice. It's got 4 bunk beds, a desk, and even a bathroom at the end with a shower. It's definitely cramped, but when the water's rough, it's the best place to be since it's low and centered and thus moves the least. This is not to say that there haven't been nights when I've been seriously concerned about being ejected from my bed, but at least there's no free-fall feeling. The van is also air-conditioned and sound-proofed so that when you close the door the roar of the ships engines is muffled to the low rumble that permeates the ship.

It's about time for bed, so I'll wrap this up by saying that I'm now officially excited about this trip. A lot of people asked if I was exited when I told them about this job, but I was too busy getting ready to be excited about what seemed somewhat of an unreal adventure. Even going to DIA and flying to Dallas was still in the realm of the familiar. It was only when flying out of Dallas to Santiago (Chile) that what I was doing started to really come home. Every subsequent step, staying in Punta Arenas, getting geared up, boarding the boat and leaving the shore in the distance, added another spark of excitement. There are a myriad of things that have awed, startled, or otherwise woken me out of whatever trance I may have been in. The power and enormity of the ocean, the silent monolithic icebergs we've passed, the size and power of the tools we humans have built to transport ourselves across the planet and how they are dwarfed by so much else.

If you'd like to email, Seren.Thompson at lmg.usap.gov will work for the next day or two and is the only email I can access while on the boat. You should CC anything you send there to my normal seren.net address since this temporary address will be deleted after I get to Palmer.

Night night, folks.

-seren