Dry Valleys trip, WAIS, Erebus, LakeVostok, town notes

Happy Holidays to Family and Friends, Near and Far (mostly far), Old and New,

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday, though this time I was not in town for it. They serve a nice meal here, but climbing a peak and backpacking in one of the Dry Valleys, in the name of Search and Rescue Training, was more than worth missing pecan pie.

It was a trip planned by our Kiwi counterparts. Usually these trainings occur later in the season, but this year we have fewer field commitments so are not quite as crunched as normal. Oct and Nov are always exhausting with all the courses we teach, but now we are fully into our field season, meaning fewer courses and more direct science support.

There is a massive camp going in this year on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The goal is to drill a 4” ice core down 3500m (3.5km) to the base of the ice. They plan to bring the cores up in one meter sections… that’s a lot of ice cores going through town on their way north, carefully packed to ensure they remain frozen. Not sure what university or lab they’ll be going to. The site was partly chosen for it’s minimal ice movement, which will help the bore hole survive over the winters.

They are looking for climate data and have chosen this spot because of its high resolution, meaning that that each year is represented by a lot of snow compared to other areas. What this also means is that it snows there a lot and is overcast even more often. What this means in turn is that it is difficult to assess weather conditions at ground level with no one there on the ground. They need clear weather to land a LC-130 (a good sized ski-equipped plane, also called “Herc”).

This is a long term project; I hear numbers ranging for 7 to 10 years. It’s also a large camp, with up to 70 or 80 people at a time there, and they’ll even have 3 hard-sided buildings. Apparently there hasn’t been a camp of this magnitude in years.

Right now Larry, a field carpenter, is out there putting up some of the first structures. He was scheduled to go weeks ago, but there were lots of weather delays.

At one point they were getting desperate and discussed flying a smaller plane (Twin Otter) into an established camp 90 miles away, and driving with ground penetrating radar to the WAIS site. For a few days I was preparing to go on this mini-project as the GPR “expert” (it‘s all relative). But then some waiver came through from D.C. allowing the Guard (the NY Air National Guard, who contracts with the National Science Foundation down here), to land there without certain requirements… a very complicated bureaucratic situation (imagine that!). I was disappointed that I didn’t get to go out there with them, I’m sure it would’ve been fun and interesting. But it does illustrate how crazy this place is. How did they not anticipate this situation? It’s not like they didn’t realize that that area would make it difficult to get a runway in. Yeowza.

Setting up this project requires something like 50 Herc flights, and a huge chunk of the money the NSF’s Office of Polar Programs had for this year. Of course the NSF has had it’s budget cut given our national priorities, so we feel it down here as I know a few of you also do in your worlds. There are fewer small projects this season, and our dept (Field Safety) typically supports the smaller projects. The Field Equipment department is also having a lighter season, time to catch up on the many long term projects needing attention.

Given our schedules for the last two years, this is not a bad thing. Our To Do list is notable, and seems to grow daily, so on top of the projects we are supporting and all the classes we run, we have some time to actually be proactive and move some logistical and programmatic projects forward. And, to return to why I missed stuffing and cranberry sauce, we have time to sneak in an early SAR multi-day exercise.

This multi-day trip was as intense as unique. Me and two Kiwi SAR team members were dropped off by helo in a basin in the Olympus Range after a full day of work. Soon we headed out on what turned out to be a 10-hour peak climb. It was really fun, though I found it difficult at times to watch someone who looked a bit shaky on exposed terrain. Part of the value of the trainings is to get to know each other’s skills in the field.
Can you imagine the fall-out if something happened to members of the SAR team on a SAR exercise that most people see as a boondoggle? “Boondoggles” use government resources for personal fun; when they are official, they are called “morale trips“ of which there are fewer and fewer. There are people who essentially never leave the station and would donate a lung for the opportunities we get, especially these multi-day trips where we actually DO things (climb). We are highly discreet about what we do. There are numerous valid reasons for these trainings, but nonetheless, they are typically a ton of fun (as well as exhausting). Because it doesn’t get dark and the opportunity is so rare (and stress does mimic a SAR), we tend to do a lot in our time out there. We get one trip a year generally and we are told not to approach them as if we’re entitled; politics abound.

So we climbed a narrow sandstone gully up some steep snow, moderate-angled ice, and with a couple fourth class (not too hard, but exposed) rock. It was really fun. We walked along a broad talus ridge to the summit, then found our way down steep snow, across the bergshrund, and onto a small lower-angled glacier heading back to camp. Really fun to actually climb… we get so rusty in our jobs down here.

We got to bed around 8am. Who can sleep at 8am? We were up again at 1pm for our radio check-in and to get moving on our hike down through the Labyrinth, a convoluted and unusual canyon system below the Upper Wright Valley Glacier (which is below the very spectacular Airdevronsix Icefall, which careens off the East Antarctic Plateau in very snow motion. And remember, everything is large down there. The scale is beyond that of Alaska even.

Now let me tell you about “light and fast” (a style we enjoy in mountaineering) as it applies to the Dry Valleys.

It doesn’t. One must not leave anything in this fantastic and unique landscape. Nothing. This means we carried out our urine in addition to poop (which many of you have done on certain mountains). Do the math: high metabolism + 10 hour climb + two hot meals + “sleep” + 10 hour hike. We each had two pee bottles (liter each). Simon is experienced at dehydration so he had no problem. In his pee bottle, I noticed urine of a color I’ve never seen before; it made my kidneys hurt. We did have some heavy duty plastic bags, and, fortunately, well-below-freezing temperatures. Suffice it to say my pack was ridiculously heavy, at least for someone who has a part time desk job these days (though I do work-out on a cardio machine with a pack). And I was wearing double leather mountaineering boots: not exactly the best footwear for hiking on talus (rocks) in. Ugh.

The Labyrinth is amazing terrain. A wide variety of rock colors, textures, types (though mostly sandstone and a very old granite underneath), size, and configurations (some stunningly wind-carved: “ventifacts”), occasionally interspersed with tiny ponds long frozen and without the faintest hint of life at the margins. I recently learned that the Labyrinth is suspected to have been formed by the blowout of a massive subglacial lake far back in time.

The wind sand-blasts some types of rock surfaces into patterns not unlike the way it shapes snow. It also carves the sand and scree (gravel) around boulders like it does sand. In other places, it scours the sand out of gravel, leaving desert pavement like one sometimes sees in, well, deserts (this place is indeed a desert). There are small areas that are all sand except for large boulders; where are the mid-sized rocks?
The wind absolutely raged off the Plateau, down the Airdevronsix Icefalls, across the scoured smooth blue-ice glacier, and then down into the canyons of the Labyrinth.

Air masses flow from the mid latitudes to the poles, where they cool down and therefore become heavy. This cold dense air flows off the continent in some places nearly constantly. I know of one coastal location where the AVERAGE windspeed for a year measured over 70mph. The winds more than the cold or any other environmental variable inhibit human activity down here. It can really wear on people.

I have never hiked anywhere where I saw not a single sign, not one thing, of any life other than ourselves, pre-historic, historic or current. And I must say I have a pretty darn good eye for such details. Not a single footprint, pawprint, hoofprint, not the tiniest dot of lichen, no moss or even soil, no cairns (rocks piled as a marker), no tiny bit of trash, no scar from a vehicle, no ruins of structures or slivers of wood, no game trails across the slopes, no scat, no birds in the air, no planes or contrails splitting the sky, not the faintest hint that there was life on Earth other than ourselves. A very different feeling.

Yet it was much more complex and featured than being out in the Great White Expanse, where there is nothing in sight (360 degree view) other than the sky, sun, wind-carved snow, the shadows cast by it, and a very few of my tracks.

Antarctica is a very raw and wild place. How could I not be so drawn?
Think of how rich and vibrant, how alive every other wild place feels in comparison, even the Mojave desert. Perhaps the depths of the Sahara might give a similar feeling… the scorched version.

I do miss the company of other species, simply their existence. That spider on your wall, the ants on the pavement, that mosquito buzzing around your ear… we have none of that here. Zero. Now and then a dust-bunny scurries across the floor, grabbing my attention as if it were an alien tapping me on the shoulder. I’ll startle myself now and then thinking I just saw a cat or dog out of the corner of my eye. I am lucky to get my fur fix living with two dogs and a cat (and, of course, the chickens) at home.

Our route finding through the Labyrinth was facilitated by a flyover on the way, a satellite image (LIDAR) in addition to the traditional topo map (which was the least useful, actually). We have a GIS person down here who can provide amazing maps and imagery on just about everything here.

Our hike ended just before 2am at another world-class unique place: Don Juan Pond. This pond is located at the bottom of a basin where over the eons water has accumulated and evaporated during the warmer months of the year. It is about 35 times saltier than the ocean (yeah, thirty-five) and quite shallow. It’s surrounded by a 50’ to 150’ ring of white crusted salts on the sand; I suppose that when it’s warm enough for water to flow, the pond enlarges to swallow part of the ring. As saline as it is, it is said that Don Juan Pond never freezes. How crazy is that?
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of such a place since researching this continent before first arriving, so this was a treat. I wanted to taste just the tiniest drop of this water to actually experience, to believe, its saltiness.

Don Juan Pond is also a heavily protected place for obvious reasons. I did manage to very gently walk across the crustiness to the water. Larry had warned me that if the air was super cold, the water would also be super cold and could cause contact frostbite as can super cold fuel. It wasn’t cold, however, and I put a drop of the water on my fingernail. I touched my tongue to the drop. It was so salty that it seemed to sting. I wanted to spit it out, but one does not spit at Don Juan Pond. With the near-burning sensation on my tongue, I had to think quickly. I spat into my hand.

Tasting DJP water was up there with doing a headstand at S-Pole my first year, and my unmet goal of seeing the molten magma of Mt Erebus (see January ‘06 update!).

Let me talk more about Mt Erebus. You might remember that last year I referred to seismic data suggesting that the banging of Iceberg B-15 against Mt Erebus in effect “burped” the mountain, significantly reducing the eruptivity (how’s that for a word; I made it up) by not letting pressure build up within the magma. Well B-15 has moved it’s merry way north this year, and yes, it turns out that Erebus is again more active. Sitting here today planning the next Secondary SAR Team training, I overheard my two favorite scientists, both Erebus researchers, on the radio.

I was supposed to have flown up there yesterday with Nelia to assist her with her new grad students in acclimatizing and getting around safely. The bigger purpose was for me to gain familiarity with the terrain, esp as we have mostly new people in the dept this year. Search and Rescue is an amazingly good justification for many things. My boss remembers the week I spent 2 years ago, on weather-hold trying to get up Erebus with these same researchers. I ended up only getting to the acclimatization camp (9k’) and not to the hut at almost 12,000’, where the fumerole ice caves are and also access to the crater rim. The crater is probably a thousand feet by 1500’ across, and the magma pool is usually hidden in steam about a thousand feet down. I can hardly write about this I so want to see it.

So I heard Nelia tell Bill that the crater was erupting like it did in previous years (I am turning green with jealousy). It even threw volcanic bombs (that’s the Erebus version of erupting) up over the rim. Put your helmet on. The lab now has video clips from the camera situated on the rim of magma flying into the air, past the camera, and over the rim. The old explorers talked of seeing these bombs lighting up the winter darkness as red balls o’ fire.

I have seen these bombs in the lab. On the inside they are a deep rich shiny black with fragile threads that have solidified into rock, lots of threads showing how fast they solidified as the gases expanded, finally released from the deep earth. Erebus also produces unique, though not very dramatic, crystals which are lie all around the crater. I saw one polished and on a necklace, and it still isn’t as dramatic as any semi-precious stone, but it’s pretty darn precious around here anyway.

Sigh. Nelia and Bill will be on Erebus into January, so I maintain hope. The problem is that it takes a day or two to acclimatize at the Fang Ridge camp, and then another to adjust to the hut elevation, then two days to explore the ice caves and the crater. Five days is a lot of time given our dept schedule, but I’m willing to take Diamox in the traditional prophylactic way and go straight to the hut, suffer a couple days, then explore. Cross your fingers for me. (see Jan ‘06 update!).

Larry has been directly to the hut a number of times to work on it, but they only stay for the day, during which they typically feel pretty bad. You can imagine how carefully Helo Ops watches the weather on those days. To leave the carps up there, poorly acclimitized, could be serious.
Larry has been to the crater numerous times, seen the magma, and also explored the ice caves over the last few years.

End of digression. The Wright Valley SAR exercise continued for another day. We enjoyed a much less dramatic, but shorter and easier hike as we’d cached a lot of stuff at Don Juan Pond to later retrieve via helo.
The Kiwis maintain a small building at Lake Vanda, out of which much research has gone on for the last 3-4 decades, research on geology and also the lake (at the bottom, well below the meters of ice, is 68 degrees F water… something to do with the greenhouse effect through the ice and a lack of mixing within the lake layers).

I was fascinated to find old copies of the quarterly report put out by the international Antarctic association, based in NZ, describing all the news relating to what goes on down here. They dated back to the late ‘60s even. It was really interesting to read about many events and places I’d heard of (women coming into the US program, accidents, research areas, Mt Erebus activity…), and I was surprised that every issue included articles about things I’ve known about, and how many of the researchers are still coming down here. And to see photos of the gear they used was also interesting.

We arrived at Lake Vanda Sunday evening, and were picked up the next morning to return to McMurdo, where everyone was just getting back into work after our first two-day weekend of the year. Larry flew to WAIS that same morning, but did leave in some treats from the Thanksgiving feast… yum.

My boss has flown back to NZ for a week to attend a sea ice conference, leaving me as the interim supervisor for our department. I am ok with this for the time being, but all too well aware of the slippery slope at the top of which I’m standing. You may recall that I am the only returnee in our dept (other than boss), so have 2 years seniority on our 3 new folks. This puts me in an obvious position.

I have resisted getting involved in anything too close to the poisonous adminosphere of a corporation and government bureaucracy combined. Simple examples include filling out incident reports such as when the automatic shut-off on a fuel pump fails, causing a liter of diesel to soak into the snow. I answered the questions when Environmental filled out this computer form, but until recently had avoided the electronic form myself. A recent camp-stove pump meltdown requiring a fire extinguisher pulled me into this realm. Then of course is more paperwork following up on What Will Be Done Differently and Where This Will Be Documented… on it goes.

As close as I care to get to chronic office work is the new role I’ve carved out: Coordinator of the Secondary SAR Team. It was a role of the SAR leader, but he has more than enough to do running the Primary Team (and all the politics and admin stuff with that) that the Secondary trainings have historically not been well organized or run. I am changing that. It's fun especially as they are psyched. I enjoy developing curricula, seeing how it unfolds, then improving it, but I am also surprised how much butt time this requires.

I have also been drawn into more of what goes on in the bigger picture of the dept. Some of this is illuminating and helps me understand the ‘why’. Sitting through meetings with the big whigs, such as the one about the pager system for SARs, which came up when we had to drive out to find an overdue vehicle on the sea ice (He was fine, just forgot to check in. This was the most excitement I’ve experienced regarding SARs, and made it obvious to me how abstract the whole thing is: I/we knew he would be found fine. Good thing I’m not the actual SAR leader, because I am finding I don’t quite take it seriously enough. Someday when something really happens, I’ll be in for a major shock.)

But I have to draw the line somewhere, cannot let myself get drawn in. I know the pattern: I have seen it before. It starts with appealing phrases like “more responsibility”, “leadership” and the unspoken “more status” bit. It’s a lure into the dragon’s lair; one gets insidiously suckered in. You learn more computer skills… innocent enough, but now you are more useful so more paperwork falls into your lap. Pretty soon you start to feel important, you start coming in early to check email, and then staying late…. Your parents are pleased that you are finally growing up (no, I don’t get that stuff from my folks, thankfully, but I hear it from my friends sometimes).

Maybe you eventually hear “promotion” and get more money… how addicting is that? They aren’t called the “golden handcuffs” for nothing.
Then one day you realize you’ve slowly grown into not only an indoor job, but a desk job. And god forbid I end up committed to a desk job. In my narrow little mind, that sounds like the end of real living.
So I resist.

But I quite enjoyed the Power Point class I took earlier this week. Huge potential there for the indoor sections of our classes…

A few weeks ago my attention was pulled back to the light here, yet another polar weirdness that I have adapted to. I gave a Refresher course for night shift workers. It started at 8pm and went past midnight… not exactly dramatically different hours, but different enough to dramatic on this sunny day. Our “day” this time of year spans 3 months, so there are no significant changes of light/dark to mark the passage of time.

I realized how aware I am of where the sun is, where the shadows are, and how much that tells me what time of day it is. It was very strange to eat at mid-rats (midnight rations, lunch for the night shift workers) because it seemed so normal except for the small population and especially the sun/shadows being in the “wrong” place. It was disorienting to have the sun in the south, to have direct sunlight in the “wrong” places. I suspect had it been overcast, I would not have been nearly so affected by it.

I have found that in our room after dinner, I have to put the shades down and turn on a light to get the idea that it is night, to get mentally ready to go to bed (this is independent of how tired I am.)

The other day I noticed a “cold alarm thermostat” in a building. It appears that if it gets below a certain temperature in the room, the alarm will sound (either there or in another building), presumably to alert them that the heating has failed.

Most (all?) buildings have a red light sticking out from the outside wall. When the power is running the light is illuminated so they can tell from the outside whether all is well inside. Not so much of interest now, but during winter that could certainly matter.

In fact, it’s full on summer here: recently the thermometer has hit freezing. There are puddles on the roads (all dirt roads here, of course. Volcanic sand and gravel), and people are much more lightly dressed, sometimes in shorts. When there isn’t any wind, and now with the sun high (well, it seems pretty high; we are at 77 degrees latitude), an ambient temp of freezing can feel like in 60 degrees or more in the sun… quite luxurious.

As of about now, I have not been on station for the next 3 week time period during my last two seasons down here. For the first I was out at those Automated Geophysical Observatories (much research coming out of those, by the way) and last year on the Ross Ice Shelf with the South Pole Traverse. So to be here in town during the warm part of the year will be new, not to mention to see what Christmas and New Year’s, including the Ice Stock New Year’s outdoor live music and barbeque festival, look like.

Speaking of the change of years headed our way, consider sending your old calendar down here if it includes photos of wild places, wildlife, pets, flowers, trees… anything like that that we are in rather short supply of here. People post such pictures around town and I think it does matter to be reminded of the existence of life other than each other. I think it’s true that plants have a calming effect on people.

We are not completely alone: skuas, large brown heavy-bodied gulls, hanging around town now looking for hand-outs. They are known to be aggressive, and are generally looked upon poorly for their habit of eating penguin eggs and cute little baby penguins (what else they would eat I don’t know).

And of course seals and penguins frequent the sea ice not for from here. Once two seasons ago, an Adelie penguin made the rounds through town, and for a couple weeks that year an Emporer penguin hung out along the road to the ice runway. These were some highly photographed birds!
The Sunday Science lecture was fascinating as usual. It was about Lake Vostok, which is on the high east polar plateau, bigger than Lake Tahoe in CA, and under 2.5 miles of ice. There are at least another 150 subglacial lakes in Antarctica, and they are associated with massive rivers and a complex hydrological system hidden deep beneath the ice. The lakes’ internal turnover time is about a thousand years. The lakes we’re familiar with in the rest of the world turn over each spring and fall as the temperature regime shifts.

The Russians have long had a station that happens to be located above Lake Vostok (called Vostok, surprisingly enough) and they are a number of years into a project to drill down to the lake. This is actually a very big deal because the significant engineering challenges of maintaining the hole over time in moving and malleable ice are being met with kerosene as a drilling fluid (65 metric tons of it) above silicon deep in the hole. The international Antarctic community (treaty countries and all) have weighed in on the obvious concern about contaminating the lake. The lake water is under enormous pressure due to the abundance of “clathrates”: little nodules of water frozen around gas molecules. They say 30% of the lake water is composed of clathrates, and a one foot drill hole would squirt 1000’ into the air for months as the pressurized gases expanded. Of course there is much more to it than this, but it does give you some idea of the magnitude of the project and its ramifications.

There are also concerns about the research quality of the ice cores because of drilling fluid contamination. I think the Brits are working on hot water drilling techniques, so maybe in a few years they’ll have that figured out and the next lake can be violated without polluting it. To be fair, the Russians have addressed all the specific concerns of the international community, and I certainly can’t be sure the US wouldn’t blow off the world community if we already had a hole 95% of the way through the ice right below our station, into an area of study that has just barely begun (think of the number of doctoral theses and scientific papers these lake will provide in the next half century).

It’s a few days later and we’ve been having the strangest weather system, one I’ve not seen here before. We’re actually have ground level clouds, fog, whipping through town from the south. It’s intermittent enough to reveal higher clouds raging northward overhead, and still higher clouds indicating super high winds, those wonderful flying-saucer stacked disc looking clouds. Very strange to have a warm and DAMP wind. The absolute humidity here ranges from 10-30%, but it must be quite a bit higher now.

Today it snowed, actual snow falling from clouds as opposed to the snow that blows around and around as usual. They were even big fat clumpy flakes, and I saw actual water on a window where the flakes had melted, and some dripping off the roof. This kind of warmth and humidity are really weird.

And the other day when I stepped on some snow in town something very unusual happened: my foot went right through it! Normally the snow here is hard, very hard at times, and you can nearly always just walk across it. How strange that it could be so soft. Kind of the like the other world!

Then I’ll spend the rest of this evening sitting here working on the Sea Ice Powerpoint presentation… it’s been a lot of fun. Who needs a personal life?

Have a wonderful holiday season, enjoy the lights against the dark of night and the stars, and feel free to drop me a quick note sometime. I’ll be “having Christmas” (in that generic secular blasphemous way) for the first time in 3 years. I am sure there is also a solstice celebration here, which won’t be nearly as fun as winter solstice celebrations in the dark.

Love and wild winds, Susan