Saturday night was the Summer Camp Open Mic Night, and Daniel’s debut as a keyboardist/vocalist! He was nervous but did great… people keep coming up to me and telling me how awesome he sounded. I agree.
I have become entirely dependent on Sunday Lattes and cheese. I’m not sure I could function properly without them. 
Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!
Last night, I slept on the ice.
Many workers in the US Antarctic Program participate in the Field Survival Training Program (FSTP, pronounced F-Stop), better known as Snow School and even better known as Happy Camper.
The idea behind the course is to give us skills that could save our lives in the case that we are at some point lost or trapped in the Antarctic Wilderness, whether at a very remote field camp or traveling off South Pole Station to work with surveyors for a day trip (don’t worry Grandma, I don’t think either of these situations apply to me). There was some pretty tangible stuff in there, skills I feel I could employ winter camping at home, and some really intangible and theoretical stuff, like Risk Management. Which makes sense in theory and is really quite pragmatic, but if I were lost in a whiteout/blizzard/shark attack I doubt I would stop to consult this graph:
We did classroom type stuff for the first part of the morning and had calorie-intense lunches: Reuben sandwiches, chicken soup and french fries. After stuffing ourselves to the point of discomfort, we put on extra fleece pants, donned our balaclavas, used a flushing toilet for the last time and filled our water bottles. The weather was hazy and overcast, which was a good thing because weather like that usually traps warm-ish air above us. The actual temperature was somewhere between –20 and –30 F, with windchills between –40 and –50 F. Perfect camping weather.
We loaded up the Pisten Bully (car camping, Antarctica-style), and headed out past RF about a mile and a half, to the End of the World. The first thing we did was set up an emergency shelter in case the weather turned bad, a common and fast occurrence in Antarctica, although much more of a risk at McMurdo than here at Pole. This was a Scott tent, designed by Robert Falcon Scott himself, a ridiculously heavy yellow canvas monstrosity that can evidently withstand Antarctic storms, heavily drifted snow, 150 MPH winds, and atomic bomb detonations. We learned how to place a bamboo T-support to prevent tent stakes from ripping out in high winds, how to make an ice wall from igloo blocks cut with a saw from a little ice-quarry, how to best build a galley hole/wind wall, how to best build a toilet hole/wind wall, and how to dig and protect a sleeping trench.
Putting in a T-support. I felt like I was digging a grave for the family gerbil.
We had to stop for a body-needs-calories-right-now break. The chocolate was frozen, ridiculously hard. You had to suck on it for minutes at a time to warm it up so you wouldn’t break a tooth.
Then we set up mountaineering tents, which are more like what are in the off station emergency survival bags.
Trench digging:
Explaining the finer points of building/sleeping in a trench:
The galley (which was actually really nice: take note, winter campers).
Dehydrated dinner:
The loo:
And finally, we were finished working and ready for bed.
I slept in a Scott tent with Sven the Swedish Scientist, on an open snow floor on top of 2 mat pads, 2 flat sleeping bags, my parka, and inside of a sleeping bag with a fleece liner. I filled my drinking water bottle with boiling water and snuggled up to it. In the beginning, I felt the heat from my body seeping down into the ice little by little, and fidgeted for an hour dreading the night ahead. And then, I fell asleep so hard that I didn’t hear the LC-130 land or Sven get up to pee or other campers wandering around awake for no reason at 3am. I slept through the night, which almost never happens to me here.
In the morning when the other campers started to wander around, I awoke to the sounds of footsteps, deep, resounding creaky screeches in the snow, and a creak-creak-creak-FWOOMP as someone compromised the structure of the ice shelf beneath them and the whole ground shifted a bit.
Morning (the same as evening, but clearer, and the sun had rotated 90 degrees in the sky):
Antarctic Sunbathing:
We packed up and the Pisten Bully came back to bring us home to learn about HF Radio Ops and search and rescue techniques. I’m glad to be done, but Happy Camper was pretty neat.
The Norwegian Press began to arrive today: the centennial is only five days away!
Here are some historical photos to get you excited.
Today snow is falling: real snow. Fine, nearly imperceptible flakes that you can barely see unless you hold your head really still. Real snow is so rare here, mostly the ice crystals just blow around, and every time I see snow it makes my heart hurt because I feel so homesick for Minnesota. For winter, for snow, for sunrise and sunset, for family and winter bonfires and for dogs to play with and real evergreen trees, for frozen lakes and ice skating and hearing snowflakes fall by streetlight. I usually feel like I’m too busy to be homesick, except on Sundays, and this season has been no exception.
The Centennial of Roald Amundsen’s arrival is in just one week, and the first tourists have already begun to arrive. Some in planes, some in trucks, and they have started to set up little tents that we can see looking out from the galley windows over the ceremonial South Pole. The ski-in expeditions will start arriving soon, as will the Distinguished Visitors from Norway and beyond. The station is buzzing; the carpenters have built a visitors’ center, the head executive chef is planning a special dinner for the Prime Minister and his party, and the IT folks are busy preparing for a live broadcast to Norwegian television the morning of the centennial. It is so exciting.
Two weeks ago we celebrated Thanksgiving, which is really not the same as it is at home but still really nice. We slept in, showered, ate a ton like you’re supposed to, went sledding in our formalwear on a hill that has been removed by now, and went to a dance party in summer camp. I think I’ve been to more dance parties in Antarctica than I have even been to in my entire life combined.
Here is a panoramic photo of sledding behind the elevated station, taken by Daniel. More sledding soon. Click to enlarge.
We are reaching the height of the Antarctic summer, the solstice, in approximately three weeks. What that will mean for us is an ambient temperature of about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The air is already warming up quite a bit—yesterday the ambient temperature was only –26 F, and windchill was –42. Walking in to station from summer camp, I wore boots and overalls and normal face coverings, but only a t-shirt, two sweatshirts and a down vest. The barometric pressure is fluctuating down, causing the physiological altitude to go up. The actual altitude is 9,300 feet, and we are presently experiencing an altitude of 10,647 as you can see from the weather scroll. Higher altitude means more strenuous work and exercise, a longer moment to catch your breath after ascending the 92 stairs of the “beer can” stairwell, and sometimes trouble sleeping.
The warmest part of the season means the middle part of historical and present-day expeditions.
Here is what was happening this week in 1911, 1929 and 1959; we got this little history lesson from Comms and I thought you might be interested, too.
On November 28, 1929, Byrd and three others took off in their Ford Tri-motor and headed south. After a harrowing climb over the Transantarctic Mountains, Byrd and his crew became the first to fly over the South Pole at 1:14 in the morning on November 29, 1929.
The Antarctic Treaty was signed on December 1, 1959 and came into force on June 23, 1961. Among other provisions, this treaty limits military activity in the Antarctic to the support of scientific research. In essence, this treaty (ratified by all parties in 1961) set the continent of Antarctica aside for peaceful, scientific purposes and placed all territorial claims on hold.
100 Years ago…
Notes from Amundsen:
“On December 1 we left the glacier in high spirits. It was cut up by innumerable crevasses and holes. We were now at a height of 9,370 feet. In the mist and driving snow it looked as if we had a frozen lake before us; but it proved to be a sloping plateau of ice, full of small blocks of ice. Our walk across this frozen lake was not pleasant. The ground under our feet was evidently hollow, and it sounded as if we were walking on empty barrels. First a man fell through, then a couple of dogs; but they got up again all right. We could not, of course, use our ski on this smooth-polished ice, but we got on fairly well with the sledges. We called this place the Devil’s Ballroom. This part of our march was the most unpleasant of the whole trip.”
“On December 2 we reached our greatest elevation. According to the hypsometer and our aneroid barometer we were at a height of 11,075 feet — this was in lat. 87º 51′.”
Notes from Scott:
Thursday, November 30.—”Camp 26. A very pleasant day for marching, but a very tiring march for the poor animals, which, with the exception of Nobby, are showing signs of failure all round. We were slower by half an hour or more than yesterday. Except that the loads are light now and there are still eight animals left, things don’t look too pleasant, but we should be less than 60 miles from our first point of aim. The surface was much worse to-day, the ponies sinking to their knees very often. There were a few harder patches towards the end of the march. In spite of the sun there was not much ‘glide’ on the snow. The dogs are reported as doing very well. They are going to be a great standby, no doubt. The land has been veiled in thin white mist; it appeared at intervals after we camped and I had taken a couple of photographs.”
Friday, December 1.—”Camp 27. Lat. 82° 47′. The ponies are tiring pretty rapidly. It is a question of days with all except Nobby. Yet they are outlasting the forage, and to-night against some opinion I decided Christopher must go. He has been shot; less regret goes with him than the others, in remembrance of all the trouble he gave at the outset, and the unsatisfactory way he has gone of late. Here we leave a depot [31] so that no extra weight is brought on the other ponies; in fact there is a slight diminution. Three more marches ought to bring us through. With the seven crocks and the dog teams we must get through I think. The men alone ought not to have heavy loads on the surface, which is extremely trying.”
“Nobby was tried in snowshoes this morning, and came along splendidly on them for about four miles, then the wretched affairs racked and had to be taken off. There is no doubt that these snowshoes are the thing for ponies, and had ours been able to use them from the beginning they would have been very different in appearance at this moment. I think the sight of land has helped the animals, but not much. We started in bright warm sunshine and with the mountains wonderfully clear on our right hand, but towards the end of the march clouds worked up from the east and a thin broken cumulo-stratus now overspreads the sky, leaving the land still visible but dull. A fine glacier descends from Mount Longstaff. It has cut very deep and the walls stand at an angle of at least 50°. Otherwise, although there are many crowns on the lower ranges, the mountains themselves seem little carved. They are rounded massive structures. A cliff of light yellow-brown rock appears opposite us, flanked with black or dark brown rock, which also appears under the lighter colour. One would be glad to know what nature of rock these represent. There is a good deal of exposed rock on the next range also.”
When I was in elementary school, my dad found a broken welding mask in our alley and, after carefully removing the glass, taped it neatly into a crisp cardboard box, covering the chipped corner. He brought it to my class one day when we were due to have a solar eclipse, and the whole class got to look at the sun, one at a time, thanks to my dad. I felt famous.
Yesterday we experienced an eclipse here at Pole, with about 75% coverage, and I carried on the tradition.
The sun started to peek out just a few hours before the eclipse was to begin after a full day of icy haze. Excited, I went to the B2 Science Lab and a scientist from South Pole Telescope helped me attach a piece of welding glass to my telephoto lens to take pictures of the sun directly. You should have seen my bag; I looked like a one-woman band getting ready for a performance. A welding mask, blank CDs, hand warmers, aluminized mylar squares, a cup of coffee and a sieve borrowed from the kitchen. We went out to the ceremonial pole, cameras in hand.
The sieve was really neat. A scientist had volunteered to make pinhole cameras in the galley before the eclipse, and the sieve was like a hundred pinhole cameras put together. See how all the pinholes are crescent shaped?
One of my favorite things about Sunday afternoons is practicing violin in the conference room overlooking Destination Alpha, the dressy front door of the elevated South Pole Station. With the lights off to save energy and the sun behind the building from this standpoint, it feels a little like evening in the rest of the world, and I can stand looking out the window over the fuel line and down the road to the dark sector. MAPO and South Pole Telescope are out there, peering into the sky to look for information about the cosmos and galaxy clusters and how our universe was born. On weekdays there are sometimes LC-130s landing, bringing and taking away passengers and leaving us fuel for our reserve stock, humming at a high drone and accompanying my practice. It’s one of the things that reminds me, when I get distracted by the sometimes tedious workweek, to be grateful for this job and the simple fact of being here, right now.
About half of the population of South Pole Station sleeps in tents. They are semi-cylindrical canvas and plywood structures called Jamesways that stand on platforms a bit off the ice and are heated with AN8 jet fuel. Summer camp is about 1/4 mile downwind from the Destination Zulu exit of the main elevated station. There are 13 or so Jamesways in summer camp that have approximately 10 rooms each, and the rooms are divided by plywood walls and/or curtains.
You can smell everyone, dirty and gassy and covered in cologne, and you can smell the history of the last 30 years of shower limitations permeating the canvas walls. Some people are lucky enough to have doors, but many people have only curtains, and you can hear every spoken word, bodily function, and footsteps of a person passing through to their room. You can hear tractors groaning up and beep beep beeping back down snow mountains outside, plowing all night long. You can hear the military planes landing on late missions, sounding like they’re so close that the wing might just clip your canvas wall and take out your pillow. Oh, and the bathrooms are a shared facility that requires going outside to get to, which can be very disconcerting if it’s 3am and the sun is shining like midday, so many people pee into water bottles or salsa jars they get from the galley. I say all of this in the fondest manner possible: I really do like living in summer camp. You can read more about the little details about living at South Pole and in Summer Camp here.
This year we are lucky–we have a double room with a door AND a latch that works, a full bed and a window. Last year when we lived in J8, we had two twin beds side by side, which was okay until you tried to roll over to snuggle and then, with a little swish, the two beds would slide apart and down you would fall into the crack. And once last year we came home to a half inch of snow on our bed(s). Not cozy. Daniel had a coworker in Jamesway 5 (J5) his first year that would get bonked on the head through his curtain every time somebody walked through with a duffel bag. Privacy is a luxury.
Over the winter season the Jamesways are closed (because who wants to sleep in a tent when the ambient temperature is -100F and the windchill is -150?) and the summer camp area drifts over with blowing ice crystals.
(Pictures by Daniel–click to enlarge)
A typical room looks like this and is about this size:
Or this:
They’ve been a part of Pole housing for a long time–decades–and they have a lot of personality. Some of them have really bad personalities, but they are interesting nonetheless.
Some of the rooms are nicely personalized, and often people will request to come back to the same room year after year. 
On Saturday night around 7pm, just as people were settling down to their beers and cocktails, finishing dinner and showering to get ready for the summer camp dance party, a fire alarm went off. Now, fire alarms are not something we are unaccustomed to here at South Pole Station. We hold many drills and have many, many false alarms, all of which are treated as a real emergency until proved otherwise, but this was definitely not a drill, and the more we heard, the more we realized it was a genuine emergency.
“Attention South Pole Station,” said the breathless, shaky voice of the comms announcer, “a fire emergency has been reported in the power plant.” Alarms were blaring. The fire response team was suiting up in firefighting gear, donning boots and overalls and jackets and helmets and facemasks and SCBAs (self contained breathing apparatuses). First responders were already running down the stairs to the power plant arch, the trauma team was mustering in Medical, and the logistics team grouped to wait for the next instructions.
Our power plant has a carbon dioxide fire suppression system. A few seconds after the alarm goes off, the enclosed space of the plant can flood with carbon dioxide, displacing oxygen and suffocating the fire but also anyone in the plant, potentially killing them. Even a false alarm could claim a real victim. The power plant mechanic, Rick, was eating dinner in the galley between rounds, so we knew he was okay, but a utilities tech or another power plant worker (there are three—they make rounds reading levels in the plant every 2 hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) could be in danger.
Those of us not on a response team sat in the galley, nervously huddled around our land mobile radios listening to the talk-around channel, hearing smoke reported first in the plant between generators three and four, then widespread. We heard the fire team yelling their next moves (they have to yell because of the facemasks), going in, checking for victims, reporting a massive glycol spill.
Comms all-called again. “Attention South Pole. We are in a power emergency. Please turn off ALL electronics not required for life and safety.”
We needed to get our power consumption down, right now. Everyone got up, trotting the halls, turning off lights and unplugging treadmills, shutting down computers and televisions and any other thing we could find a plug or switch for. The galley turned off all the stoves and refrigerators, the IT staff remotely shut down all the auxiliary servers and all of the labs. The air was quiet.
There had been a massive glycol spill as a result of a mechanical failure (a small elbow joint that had reached the end of its life). The power usage shot up to extreme levels, the peaking generator was activated, and our power plant was flooded with propylene glycol, but not carbon dioxide. The whole area was dark and hazy, like a scene from a movie where something really bad is about to happen to the protagonist. We tracked down empty open-top 55 gallon drums, absorbent pads, and every mop and mop bucket on station. An hour or two later, once the air had been ventilated and the flammable liquids and gasses had been contained and dissipated, the clearance was given and additional volunteers were called for. We suited up with earplugs and disposable latex gloves to protect ourselves from the glycol, and moved around the power plant on absorbent pads, soaking up the extremely slippery chemical on our hands and knees while someone else followed behind with a mop.
One of the best parts of living here is the active community—our emergency response team is made up of firefighters and emergency responders, of network guys and cargo women and dishwashers and mechanics and doctors and station management, all working together, and the non ERT folk were from the same mixed bag. We cleaned glycol from the floor, under nooks and crannies and fuel return pipes, from storage shelving and water tanks and generator parts, and it was awesome to see the whole station working together.
And then it was over, aside from lingering power restrictions. It was close to eleven when everything had calmed down and less than ten people remained in the plant, cleaning up loose ends and trying to determine exactly what happened. The emergency power plant did not need to be activated, and no one was hurt, not even from slipping on the glycol and falling.
And that was Saturday night at the South Pole. Sunday now leaves us happy and safe, full of brunch and coffee and sitting in rooms lit only by the 24-hour sun.
brown paper blue ink 