A quick post unrelated to South Pole adventures.

I have just installed a new comment system on the site.  It should have a lot more features than the previous one.  One of the cool features is that you can respond to other people’s comments.  Next to every comment there is a reply link.  Just click on that and type away.  This also means that I can start responding to your comments directly.  Also, if you want to get notified by email if someone responds to your comment, there is a check box when you post that will do that.

Hope everyone enjoys it!  If something isn’t working right, just let me know.

A common question people ask:

“What are you doing after you leave the South Pole?”

The answer: Traveling the world!

The initial plan is to spend some time in New Zealand. IceCube pays for 4 nights of hotel in Christchurch, so I will definitely take advantage of that. On Feb 9th it is looking like I will head up to the mountains with a few other drillers. We will be taking a helicopter up to a remote cabin in the middle of the Southern Alps. Here is a map of its location and above is a picture from the air.  If you click on either picture, you should be able to see a bigger version.

After the trip to the mountains things are still in limbo.  The general plan is to fly to Brisbane, Australia to visit my friend Jack who is studying abroad.  Then fly to Singapore, take a train/bus to Phuket, Thailand to visit my friend Annie.  The train and bus system in SE Asia is very cheap, so I hope to travel around to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China if I can get a visa.  After that, who knows?

Of course if anyone wants to come join me in SE Asia there is an open invitation.  Getting there can be expensive from the US, but staying there is extremely cheap.

Along the way I will continue posting to this site, so look forward to many more updates.

Yesterday we didn’t have much to do in the afternoon, so I got to learn how to drive the Caterpillar 287 and 953.  The 287 is the smaller bobcat-style vehicle on the left, and the 953 is the large fork loader on the right.  They really aren’t hard to use when you get a little practice.  The 287 is a lot of fun.  I need to figure out how to get one for home.

I have added a little countdown to the right side of the website.   Only 5 days to go!  Many of the other drillers are gone now, and there isn’t much left to do.

Looking forward to:
Night sky
Not walking outside to go to the bathroom
70 deg temps
Different food.  Stuff here is pretty good, but it gets boring, need a change.
Humidity
Did I mention not walking outside to go to the bathroom?
Not waking up in the middle of the night because its freezing in your room.

Right now, every place in the world seems luxurious compared to
Antarctica.

Today was by far the coldest day since I have been here. Only about -25 F, but the wind was over 25 mph all morning resulting in -55 F wind chills and lower. Of course it came at the worst possible time. Today was the day that we moved the drill camp, so we spent almost all of it outside. Later in the morning it was blowing so much snow that we couldn’t see the station any more, and drill camp is only about ¼ mile away.

Moving camp involved brining in the big dozers and towing the building to the new location. We can tow up to 5 at once. The first dozer got stuck in a patch of really soft snow. We had to call in another bigger dozer to pull out the small dozer and all 5 buildings….at the same time. It was a pretty impressive sight.

The day was mostly spent hooking and unhooking tow hitches and chains. You can probably see why the weather was so harsh on our team. Frequently my baklava would freeze to a part of my face and I would have to rip it off. In addition my goggles kept fogging up on both the inside and the outside. The fog turns to ice nearly instantly, so you can’t just wipe it off. You have to jump in the van to warm them up, or try and scrape the ice off. Pretty soon, I just gave up and spent most of the day looking through a hazy ice layer and trying not to run into things or crash snowmobiles.

Hoping that today is better weather…

Today I wanted to post some pictures of what we do for fun here at the Pole.  Not much time before work this morning, so I  will be brief.

Here is where we eat.  The Galley.  Food is all served buffet style.  For more on the food, see my previous post here.

The station also has a grow room for fresh vegetables.  I usually go here to make telephone calls.  It is quiet, there is a couch, and best of all it has a normal humidity

There are two lounges on station where we watch movies and can play video games.  The station has  a pretty imense library of DVD’s, VHS, and even BetaMax.

One of the lounges also has a pool table

There is an arts and crafts room.  I haven’t made it in there very much.

Twice a week I play some basketball in the Gym.  Playing basketball at 10,000 ft is quite exhausting.  The dry air also makes it difficult to breathe.

The last room rec room is a music room.  They have some pretty nice music gear.  Several Fender American guitars and a Gibson SG.  They even have two carbon fiber acoustic guitars.

But, even with all the stuff to do, the drill crew spends a lot of time just sitting around, talking, and drinking.

Every Sunday night at the Pole is the “Sunday Science Lecture”.  This past Sunday it was on the South Pole Telescope.  I won’t get into all the details, but they are using it to find evidence of dark matter and dark energy.  It was quite interesting, and it is really cool to hear these cutting edge scientists give informal talks about their work.  Of course, the best part was they gave everyone free South Pole Telescope t-shirts.  Later this week I might head out to the telescope site and see if I can get a tour.  They are located really close to IceCube, so I might be able to do it right after work.

Two nights ago was the annual South Pole In-Da-Continent Film Festival.  Otherwise known as SPIFF.  They show a bunch of short films made by people here at the station.  One of the films was very interesting, even though it was just a simple interview.

Earlier this season a skier arrived at the pole nearly about to collapse from exhaustion.  He started cross country skiing from the edge of the continent, but broke his ski binding on the 4th day in.  Instead of turning around he decided to keep going – to walk to the pole.  He ended up making it on Dec. 23rd and in the process broke the world record for walking to the South Pole.

The video shown at SPIFF was an interview taken soon after he arrived at the station.  I found it very interesting.  He is still extremely in touch with all of the emotions associated with his trip and it was really cool to hear him talk about what he went through when it was still so fresh in his mind.

IceCube has been kind enough to post it on their website here.  I recommend checking it out if you get the chance.  A warning though, the file is over 2 GB in size.  It may take a while to download, so be aware.

First off, I should apologize.  I haven’t done a post on work yet, and for the most part there isn’t much left.  Some of you might not know that I work for the IceCube project.  I have linked to their website, so if you want to know more about the science, check it out.  I will try and do a post on the science behind the project a little later, but it can get pretty complicated.

What you should know is that my job mostly revolves around drilling extremely large holes.  Holes in the ice sheet that are roughly 2500m deep and 0.5m wide.  To make these holes, we heat water up to 190 F and pressurize it to 1000 PSI.  Then we pump it down the hole to melt the ice.  If you are wondering what a 2500m deep hole in ice looks like, an example is above.

So what kinds of daily activities are required to run this operation?

Taping is one of the most critical and boring parts of the job.  The hose we use to pump water down the hole cannot support its own weight, so it is necessary to tape a support cable to it.  This happens roughly once every minute for the entire drill operation.  On the way down we have to put the tape on.  On the way up we take it off.  It takes roughly 36 hours to drill a hole, so that equates to over 2000 taping operations.  Everyone on the team takes turns doing this to ensure that no one is going insane taping.  But I have taped for over 5 hours straight before.  To pass the time we frequently make things out of the used up tape.  Earlier in the season I made a bull head and horns.  Unfortunately one of the horns broke off and it looks a little sad now.

The other critical job during drilling is running the computers.  This takes 2 people.  One person runs computers that control the flow, temperature, and pressure of the water.  The other runs the computers that control drilling speed.  When this drill is running smoothly, this is fairly easy.

As you can see, it really only takes 3 or 4 people to run the drill when it is sailing smooth.  The real work takes place between holes and when things go wrong.  The entire system that heats and pressurizes the water contains hundreds of valves, miles of piping and hose, and thousands of gallons of water.  Heaters stop working.  Hoses burst.  Generators break.  Water tanks overflow.  Stuff breaks and needs to be fixed quite often.  Many of the parts we use were never designed to operate at such cold temperatures.

Between holes it is also necessary to move the entire drilling portion of the operation.  This is multiple huge hose and cable reels, a two story tower, a support building, several hundred feet of cable, a supply hose, etc.  The drill head also has to be pulled from each hole and weighs over 800 lbs.  This is the time when having 10+ guys around is extremely handy.  During the move we have to shut down flow to the entire system, which we can only do for a little over an hour or else all the water will start freezing in the hoses.

That is a quick summary of what I do down here.  The exciting news is that drilling is done!  We completed 19 holes over the course of roughly 2 months.  We did this way ahead of shecdule.  As a result, we have today and tomorrow off.  The rest of the week will be spent packing up the camp, winterizing everything, and moving stuff to next years site.  Because we finished so far ahead of schedule, I am also out of here 5 days early.  Originally scheduled to leave Feb 9th, I am now leaving on the 4th.

That is it for now.  There is a big end of season party tonight, but hopefully I will get to post some more updates with the couple days off.

A couple days ago we had some interesting people arrive at the pole.  They actually drove right up behind our drill camp.  Some other people and I had the pleasure of welcoming them to the South Pole.

Turns out it was a team of Norwegians supporting a ski race.  The cool part was that they were driving modified Toyota trucks and had driven them all the way to the South Pole.