Taylor Dome Recovery

Our flight to recover ANITA was canceled again today, due to weather at the crash site. Hopefully we'll be going tomorrow.

Yesterday, because my flight to Siple Dome was canceled, I was able to tag along on the recovery of the pulsers at Taylor Dome.

The recovery crew. The pilots brought over our deep field survival bags just as I snapped this shot, and I think Rich is just about to help grab them. Shows what a .3 second delay can do.










You may recognize McMurdo in this shot. If you look carefully you can see the icebreaker working through some of the broken ice. It has to do this to keep the ice from refreezing.










Regardless of what you may think, there's a lot to talk about in this shot. You can see the path the icebreaker cleared, and then you can see the deep blue of open water. From the top of Arrival Heights, which is short hike that gets you up high, you can barely see the blue of the first bit of open water. When I hiked it recently, I had thought that that was the edge of the ice pack but as you can see it's not, and neither is that second bit of deep blue.




Mount Discovery in the background. I believe it was a volcano some time ago, and so this would be the lava flow from it.











And here is that lava flow.













Looking down at the sea ice. The deep blue is open water, the light blue is probably an area where wind keeps snow from covering the sea ice.











Here is Taylor Dome as we found it.













Here is a shot before we left the first time.













Here's how it looked yesterday. As you can see that solar panel wasn't doing much. This was part of our back up pulser, which was not working but not only because of the drift.










Before.













After.













The remains of our snow wall.













Some of the items were buried pretty deep, but thankfully the snow wasn't too hard.












And this is how it looked when we left it yesterday. I don't know that anyone will ever use that borehole again, but it should be clearly marked for the next five years or so.










The icebreaker leading the tanker out. The cargo ship is due in next week, I'm hoping some curious penguins will follow it in.

Antarctic Treaty

Our trip to Siple Dome today was canceled due to weather at the site. I did go on the flight to Taylor Dome, to recover the gear left there. I'll hopefully get around to posting pictures tonight. We will likely be on the schedule for tomorrow, so hopefully the weather gets better.

I meant to discuss this in the blog on Scott base, but here it is.

Rumor has it when the Prime Minister of New Zealand visited Scott Base a few years ago, the Kiwi's took down the Scott Base sign, because they didn't want anybody to get a picture of her by it, due to political implications. Different countries lay claim to different parts of Antarctica, there is some overlap, but according to the Antarctic Treaty, none of those claims are recognized. There's a good map of the claims here. The whole bit about being the capital of the Ross Dependency is half-joking half-serious.

Update

Some of you may have noticed that the altitude on our payload seems to be changing, but hopefully that really isn't the case. GPS isn't very accurate that far South, so the fluctuations are to be expected. Then again it is possible our payload is getting dragged and we don't know it.

CREAM has been able to get two recovery flights in, they weren't able to go today however. They may require up to four flights, as they only get about 4 hours on the ground because of restrictions on how many hours a day the pilots can work.

At this point it appears a CSBF employee and I with the possibility of another member of ANITA will go to Siple Dome to recover ANITA. Siple Dome is a camp of three people about 100 nautical miles from the site of ANITA. It sounds like we will go to the recovery site during the day, and possibly ferry items back to camp throughout the day if we have plane support. I am scheduled to leave on Monday, with a possilbe return sometime between Wednesday and Friday with emphasis on possible. The return flight has not been scheduled and weather can always enter the picture. They warned us that weather can change in a matter of moments, which I have yet to see, but plans can change even quicker. As it stands, a C-130 should be going ot Siple Dome to recover the camp and our payload will be included.

Hopefully we will be able to recover the Taylor Dome items not long after my return from Siple Dome, but we will still have to wait for the C-130 to return to McMurdo with the gondola remains. It is possible that they will not be able to get a C-130 out there, in which case the gondola will remain through the winter at Siple Dome, but of course we won't be leaving until they it is recovered or it can't be recovered.

In other news the fuel tanker made it in a couple days ago, and has finished offloading all the fuel for the next year. The offloading took about two days with five 6 inch lines pumping diesel fuel, gasoline, and a lot of jet fuel into the storage tanks around McMurdo.








I would hope the sign would not be necessary. Apparently the tanker is a U.S. naval ship.












Not only was I impressed that there was that much ship below the waterline, but also that the water was that deep at the shoreline as there's still another 18 feet under the waterline at the bow. That is the icebreaker next to it.









LDB now has functional flush toilets. It's taken over three seasons to get them working, with a total cost in the six figures. Earlier this season the chemicals used to treat the waste had degraded in such a way as to produce some sort of volatile gas that eventually ignited. I personally don't see much value in the toilet, as the waste now just goes down a hole just like the pit toilets around LDB except these toilets use water that has to be trucked in.

Scott Base

ANITA was cut down last night. It started heading South and the decision was made to terminate the flight before it went over rough terrain or went too far South. Now it's just a matter of scheduling our recovery flight.

Some Kiwi humor. A number of Kiwi's actually stay in McMurdo because we have a much greater capacity. We also provide all the logistical support for Scott Base. However, they are now starting work on the construction of three wind turbines to reduce the fuel consumption of our generator.







The American sign across the road from the Kiwi sign.












A different perspective of Scott Base. The Willy Field road is on the left, and it's about 5-6 miles as the bird flies from LDB to Scott Base. The pressure ridges and Willy Field/LDB can be seen.










Their emblem on the door of a Haglund. The New Zealanders have black and orange suits, with a patch version of this emblem on the back.



























The main entrance.













One of their hallways. The buildings on the base are just about entirely connected by indoor corridors, which is nice.











There was no toothbrush.













The bar on American night.










































































The Travelodge on the road back, in case the 1.5 miles is too far to walk. Actually, I don't know what these buildings are for. There is regular shuttle service as Scott Base is on the road out to Willy Field and LDB, so I ride past it every day.









This was taken just before midnight, so you have an idea how low the sun gets.

203C

All the 203 buildings are connected, and on the back of 203B is this sign. Nobody ever refers to these buildings as Shackleton's Hut, and few people walk around the back.










That is my building, 203C. To the right is 203A. In the back between them is 203B. Real exciting.












The backside of 203C













Our hallway.


















Each building as a lounge. Each lounge has a tv, and something else, our something else is a pool table. It has disappeared on at least one occasion.











The TV with our trash sorting bins. Those aren't all the different types of waste, but it's a good representation of options. The TV has two movie channels, a sports channel, two mixed military channels that have various shows on, a weather channel, and a base info channel. The movie channel actually has some real recent films on it, some of which haven't been released on DVD or anything yet.





My room. I'm in the back. there's a desk on the righthand side and the window in the back.

















And the view out of my window. It's only snowed like that a couple times since I've been here. The weatherstripping around the window isn't that good, so I can feel a draft when I sleep, which I don't mind. I can also feel cold air coming in through the electrical outlets. People on the second floor keep their windows open because it gets so hot upstairs.

First Penguin Sighting

When I first got to Antarctica, on the trip from the airfield to town, people saw a penguin out of the window of the delta, but I was sitting on the opposite side and the windows were all iced up, so I didn't see it. After that though I assumed that there would be penguins all over the place.

I just saw my first wild penguin. I was convinced I wouldn't see one, but even though it wasn't up close, I'll count it.





























It's interesting, most of the people I'm with came down two years ago for the first launch of ANITA. I had heard stories about how much they had hated it here, and so I had low expectations. I had also heard about some of the activities they had and was looking forward to them. There was the polar plunge, whale watching on the ice breaker, Cape Royd's trip, and masses of penguins following the ice breaker. Well there was no polar plunge this year, the Coast Guard didn't send down their icebreaker so there likely won't be any whale watching, there never was a tour of Cape Royd's offered, and there have been few penguins. I have since spoken with people down here, and all those occurances are pretty rare. The people that were here two years ago didn't even realize how lucky they were. One of the members was even able to go the South Pole twice as part of recovery, and so as much as I felt that it was unlikely it would happen to me, I had hopes of going. I would have liked to have done all those activities, but I don't feel that my trip has been anything less than truly amazing. I guess I have reasons to come back.

Update

I have just received word that ANITA will likely be cut down in the next few days. It is on a path that would bring it back relatively close to McMurdo. NSF just wants it on the ground, we obviously would like it to land as close to McMurdo as possible. I'll let you know what happens with it all, but it will likely be a chaotic period for me, and it is likely that I will be out of here in less than two weeks.

CREAM still has not been able to get to their payload. Their recovery flights have been scrubbed at least 8 times, all due to weather at the recovery site. The location is at the limit of the range of the planes here, and because of restrictions on the number of hours the pilots can work in a day, the recovery team will only get two hours on the ground. They have scheduled 4 trips to recover the payload. A plane on another mission was able to do some reconnaissance of the payload, and told the recovery team to "bring shovels." It is conceivable that CREAM may not be able to recover their gondola this year, especially if there is much time between flights as they could spend a considerable portion of the ground time just digging it out of the snow.

Stitched photos

I finally got around to stitching together some photos. They all have flaws, but that's the way it goes.

This is a 360 from the top of Castle Rock. I have been limited on the size I can upload, so I had to reduce the image size substantially. I wish I could post the original.


This is a shot from the backside of LDB. Again, I had to reduce the image size, the original is pretty neat if I may say so myself.


Our camp at Snow School.






The backside of LDB when ANITA was out on the pad for GPS testing. Yes, the land is flat there.


Launch day.




Practicing a hook to hook transfer. That is a 22 degree arc. I didn't realize how well it would come out, so I should have taken photos at Taylor Dome when there was the arc, sun dogs, and a parhelic arc.















The inside of one of the apple shelters on the trail to Castle Rock.