Dieses und jenes

So, since all good things come to an end, this trip couldn’t last forever. Today is my final day, after a night without much sleep my stay here is down to a few hours. Currently, it is 6:45 local time, my flight out of here is scheduled for 13:00. That gives me sometime to wrap up some stuff, take a few more pictures and eat some final South Pole food.

This also means that I will be gone for a few days from this channel. Obviously, the next adventure is just awaiting, so stay tuned for more crazy stuff from me!

I nice Sunday nears its end. Got up late, had my shower (omg, that was soooooooooo good!), had brunch (omelett with tons of stuff in it, sticky bun, hot chocolate, mmmmhhh, yum!), and then we went out to the field. Today, I managed to walk up to every station and take some last pictures before the close-up. After dinner (roast beef, mashed potatoes, some veggie patties, apple cake), we went out again to move some remaining boxes out of our blue Icetop tent, so that is finished, too.

Now I am ready to go to bed. Tomorrow, I will bag drag (= bring my check-in bags for weighing and storing) and then have my final night here. Tuesday, I am flying out around noon local time. So, last opportunity for some outrageous pics!

For now, enjoy some I took today:

My, my, the last few days have been long and tiring. Since the season is slowly coming to its end, we had to pack and wrap a lot of stuff up. Of course, the packed and wrapped boxes also needed to be carried from one place to another! So, it has been quite a bit of work and I am soooooo tired, you won’t believe it! Furthermore, temperatures are slowly crawling down, today we hit the -50C mark with windchill! I have only two more days left, but I might see the ambient temperature go down to -40C, which will make the nightly trip to the bathroom, well, difficult.

Otherwise, I took it easy this evening. The non-science people here have Sundays off which makes Sats a party day. So, I was watching “Sin City” in one of the TV rooms and slowing a bit down…

Even though the station will be open for almost two more weeks, all the heavy equipment is already stowed away. When it gets too cold, most dozers and trucks will not run, so the construction work has to end around first week of Feb. Icecube deployed its last string one week ago, now the whole drill camp is ready to be towed to the winter over position, where it will await the next season.

The station population is still rather high, 247 women and men are currently living here. When the station closes around Feb 17th, only about 50 will remain as winter overs! This means, that starting next week, flights outbound will carry a lot of people back to Christchurch.

My flight back is scheduled for the 6th. It will be straight through, so in McMurdo I will be changing planes only, no stay over for one night. This is partially a pity, since there is one or two things I would have liked to do there, but on the other hand, I am ready to go home! Or have my vacation…

Today, Mike and I climbed up the stair to the roof of the station. Puh, that was a rough wind up there, so I didn’t linger too long! Here are some impressions from the highest vantage point at the Pole:

Alas, the weather was strange today, a lot of wind and ice crystals in the air. Yesterday and today, I was out for a few hours on my own, checking our tanks and it was so cold! Even though the ambient temperature hasn’t been below -32C yet, we had -45C windchil both days. After two hours out there I was cold down to my very bones! Back in the station, it took me hours to really warm up. Even couple of hot chocolates didn’t help at first.

Otherwise, things are fine. Food was especially good today (Coconut curry soup and Peanut sauce chicken with rice noodles), and I even switched off a bit watching a movie (Trainspotting). That was fun! Tomorrow, the central event of the day will be cleaning the restrooms…

Today, I won’t write much. What I tried today is taking a small movie with my camera. It is low res and not very exciting, but might give you a little glimpse on how things look like here when we ride from one place to the next one on our ski mobiles. In this case, Serap is driving and Im standing on the sled in the back. You can see my shadow here and there and never mind the shaking: Those rides are usually a bit rough.

Ok, here it is: Riding the sled! Enjoy!

So, just a short update before bedtime: I got extended! I gonna a few more days at the Pole, flying out on the 6th of February. The way back, I won’t stay in MacTown, but hop right into the C-17 to Christchurch. Anyway, I am looking forward to stay a bit longer and saviour this very unique place!

Again, in reverse order:

5. Do not shop all the neat memorabilia at once! The shop, full with shirts, mugs and caps, opens for one hour each day. Now, it is a tiny thing, so getting what you want is a matter of minutes. But you don’t wanna do that! Let’s face it, besides work, there isn’t much to do here. So, shopping a little bit once in a while, extending that satisfying feeling over a long period of time, makes you happier! And that is a good thing, especially here!

4. Don’t touch metal objects outside with your bare hands. Or any other body parts, for that matter. Two incidents: In the first I picked up a wrench that was lying outside, I didn’t have my gloves on. The instant I touched it, I had a burning sensation as if I had touched a pot boiling water! I dropped the wrench immediately and could prevent freezeburn, but my thumb hurt for a bit longer… Later, I was coming out of the “Ice Palace” (our restrooms) and had slightly wet hands. When I grabbed the outer door knob, my hand almost froze onto it! Nothing bad happened, but just feeling my hand sticking to the handle reminds me of drying my hands properly…

3. Never face forward when being pulled by a snow mobile. The snow mobile have sleds that can also carry passengers. When you have a mad man driving those little toys at 30-40 km/h, two things happen: You get a lot of small ice pieces thrown at you from the tracks. And the exposed parts of your face freeze. Now, neither are good feelings, let me tell you.

2. No urinating outside! That SEVERELY violates the Conservation Act of the Antarctic Treaty! Sure, getting up at night and tunning over to the toilet, or using one of those solar boxes in the field is inconvenient. But if you get caught urinating into the snow, you migt get seriously into trouble, I guess.

And finally, the most important thing NOT to do at the South Pole
1. Never take a 3 min shower! Ok, this sounds a bit ridiculous. But believe it or not, a colleague got yelled at because someone thought he was too long in the shower! In a situation, where everyone gets 2min showers twice a week max, everyone watches everyone else, I guess. So, staying longer in the shower than allowed is a bit foolhardy…

Of course, in reverse order:

5. Eat! Man, you gotta eat. Don’t skip meals, don;t even think about it! Since I can’get up for breakfast, I started going to Midrats (Midnight Rations) to get a third meal during my day. You burn so much calories here! It is not only doing manual labor with all the clothes on, it is more the fact that even with that special gear you body is still working hard to generate body heat. I read somewhere that an average person needs around 5000 kcal when he is living at the Pole. Now, I am not so sure about that number, but I can imagine a 1000 kcal more than at home. That is a lot!

4. Drink! Being such a dry and high place, the need for water is immense. I am trying hard to maintain 4l a day, which might be still a bit too less. The moisten my hands, I used more of my hand creme than in the past two years! And they are still like sand paper. My nose is just a big wound, though I am glad that the nose bleeds stopped. Man, that was a real mess!

3. Drink beer! Beer keeps your spirit up and makes you sleepy. That is good in an environment, where even in my dark Jamesway hole my body knows, that there is the sun shininh out there. Always.

2. Drink even more water! Beer (as coffee) dehydrates the body immensely! I had one beer (sic!) the other night and had to go three times to the loo! Awful!

And finally number one:
1. Drink hard stuff! Keeps you happy, too, but doesn’t dehydrate as much as beer! 😉

After a long day out in the field, I got a little tour around the old station on the way back. Reminder: Die old station is the Dome. It is the second one, the first one dating back to the fifties and being buried deep under ice about a kilometer from here…

The dome is probably know by everybody. It used to be completely above ground, but now it is buried almost halfway in snow in ice. The Dome was more or less a wind shelter, inside were a few buildings with labs, living quarters, lounges and galley, storage, etc. Now, it is completely deserted, expect for some of the storage. Soon, they will start dismantling a building, that not only served practical purposes, but also had a visionary and non offensive architecture. It seems to date from a time, where mankind still was careful, yes even reluctant, to invade nature in one of it most unique forms. The Dome is round, smooth, it ducks under the ever blowing wind of the Pole, a kind of reverence to an irresistible force. The footprint of human presence here at the very end of the world was not that much smaller during those times, sure, but it was paid with hardship and restrain. Even though the Dome is a world apart from the experience of the every first Antartic explorers, the new station has clearly ended an area and started a new one.

This new area is dominated by a station that thrones over the timeless Antarctic plateau. Build on hydraulic columns and facing the wind with its tern, reverence was the last thing in the mind of the designers and builders of this third station at the Pole. No, the message here is: we have come to stay. Year for year, the projects and scientific programs grow more ambitious, the summer population larger. Who knows what will become of this place in 10, 20, or 50 years?

In addition, the Pole is becoming a tourist attraction. Planes fly the eager explorers from Patriot hills to 89deg south, so that their passengers can ski the last degree (about 60mil = 100km) into the Pole. Don’t get me wrong, on the plateau even those 5-6 days are a dangerous undertaking. Still, the whole business has a strange taste to me. In way it is suppose to prove some sort of achievement, but than again it is probably folly.

Whatever. It is time for me to retreat again, so farewell for now…

Well, it is time that I straighten out something here: I did not travel to the South Pole as a tourist. No, sir, I am actually on work here. What’s worse: when you are going to work on your detector, your work becomes pretty much your life, 24/7. In that regard, being here is not different from being in Uppsala or Jülich during beamtime.

What is it exactly that I am doing? The part of the Icecube experiment I am working on consists of tanks filled with frozen water (yes, I mentioned this earlier, but anyway….). Altogether, three crew were down here. The first supervised the digging of the trenches and the placement of the tanks. They also made sure that we have all the components that we need. The second team installed the electronics for the tank and supervised the filling with water. Then the tanks get their sunshades and are opened to start freezing. The third team (yep, that’s me) babysits the tanks, supervises the backfilling of the trenches and does calibration measurements for the tank deployed in the last year…..

Now, doesn’t sound like much, doesn’t it? But in Antarctica, everything has the Antarctica factor multiplied to it: Ten times harder, ten times more difficult, ten times more intense. We need two hours to make one station (= 2 tanks) ready for the closing operation, there are ten station we have to handle. Sounds like an job easily done in two days. But in this cold, with all the snow and the wind, we are glad to do one per day. Plus the calibration measurement on an old station, which takes easily thesame time, and you are done for the day. And all this calculation is only valid, IF you got some sort of transportation. We can borrow either a skidoo or sometimes even the Icecube van (a minivan on tracks!). Without, one of those tasks just kills you. Walking 200m or so, pulling a sled full of equipment, your done. It is incredible, but both the cold and the altitude/low pressure just makes everything a huge task!

To make things more complicated, we have to decommision an old experiment. that means decabling, deassembling the electronics crates, packing things in boxes… This is not done outside, thank goodness, so it is sat least bearable for quite a few hours.

So, everytime I get “home”, I am completely exhausted. And since I don’t sleep well, getting up two times a night to pee (I have a bottle now, though! No more running through the cold…), I am more and more tired every day. Which is good. Gives me the feeling to get a glimpse of what the pioneers of the Antarctic exploration might have felt working here at the end of the world….

Good night!