Looking at my calendar Wednesday morning I saw we had scheduled two workcenter appointments. The first was with Joni English, the fixed wing coordinator. This ended up being a fascinating look into the world in which she lives that lasted well over two hours.

When we arrived at her office for the meeting she was wrapping up some business with the Air Guard, so we chatted with Mike McClanahan, who has been joining us for some of the more important workcenter meetings. He mentioned a few more “pie in the sky” features he’d love to see in a future version of POLAR ICE. As I’ve discussed before, there are all kinds of training classes one needs to take upon arriving at station before certain tasks can be performed. Before you can leave station on a hike you have to watch the Safety Outdoor Lecture video. Before you can drive a truck you have to watch the driver's safety video. Before you can go to altitude you have to watch the altitude safety video, etc., etc., etc. Mike thought it would be great if we could somehow tie these into POLAR ICE, and offer not only streaming video but also have actual courseware with tests at the end so that people could take some of these trainings over the Internet rather than wasting their first few days on station doing the same thing.

This appealed to us a great deal, largely because in a former life Scott was a courseware developer and I used to work for IQDestination. At IQD we built an online Learning Management System component that tied several different types of courseware offerings together. The four of us discussed some potential applications, including tracking the views of the training pieces and the associated test results with the new training database we talked about last week. We came up with what I think are some really good ideas that should really expand the whole “software supporting science” concept and save people down here a lot of time.

Joni was late because of a problem that recently arose that kind of sums up her entire job here on station. Apparently when a plane (bird) flies there needs to be a certain amount of liquid oxygen (lox) on board. For some reason, a lot of the lox bottles have been damaged and we are running very short. If we run out of lox, all planes are grounded, which would be very, very bad. She was shuffling schedules around to free up a plane to go to Christchurch and get some more to bring down. The problem is that the plane can’t also accompany passengers due to some safety regulations, but it can take cargo. However, there’s not any cargo in CHC right now that needs to come down. Does she bump an existing mission to free up a plane to go to CHC, or does she risk it? Just one of the many dilemmas she faces on a daily basis.

Joni is in charge of scheduling all of the fixed wing operations, including ski-equipped LC-130 flights and lighter twin otter flights. A key aspect of her job is figuring out how much cargo and how many passengers (pax) can go on any given flight. Several criteria make the final determination. A plane can only carry so much weight. The most important weight consideration is how much fuel is on board; how much is needed to get from Point A to Point B, with the proper amount of reserve? Next, how much cargo needs to go and how many pax need to go, and what has priority? Which pieces of the entire cargo load have the highest priority? She has a custom spreadsheet into which she can plug the Point A & Point B coordinates and choose the airframe that will be flying the mission (LC-130 or Twin Otter). A formula then calculates the distance between the points and based on airframe how much fuel is needed. She can then play with different combos of cargo and pax to come up with the best load plan for that particular flight. Once the flights are all planned, the schedule goes to the appropriate people and Joni hopes everyone comes through for her.

One key difference between fixed wing and helo is that with helo, everything is handled right there at the hangar. The choppers are literally right out the front door, and the helo staff handles the weighing, packing, and loading of all cargo and pax. They also fly much more regularly, as helos fly shorter distances than the fixed wing flights. For the fixed wing operations, Joni relies on the weather guys, the Air National Guard (which operates the LC-130s), Ken Borek Air (which operates the twin otters), and the Movement Control Center (MCC), which is in charge of building the cargo palettes and getting them down to the appropriate runway. As you can see, she gets blamed when things go wrong but she has to rely on so many people that she has little control. There are always things coming up, weather moving into scheduled landing sites, etc. When there are so many groups involved in a single mission communication is huge. Joni shared the story of an Air Guard scheduler who hadn’t been told that one of their planes had recently gone in for a new paint job and that screwed up all of his load plans. What’s the big deal, you ask? The plane was fine; it was ready to go, but the new coat of paint on the huge plane added an additional 7,000 pounds to its total payload!

After showing us some of her planning tools we came up with a few ideas that could make her life a little easier through software, and then we took a tour of the building. She is in the same building as MacOps, the communications hub, and we poked our head into that fascinating facility again. She also showed us RavenOps, which is where the Air Guard is based, and it looked like a scene right out of Behind Enemy Lines. The meteorology department is also in this building and they have all kinds of cool flat panel monitors that show every possible current weather statistic, from satellite imagery to wind speed and direction. I love this building; I could just hang out here and watch the chaos all day long.

Next we headed to the Crary Lab again to meet with Kelly, the map girl and resident Geographic Information Systems (GIS) expert. We were about 40 minutes late but she didn’t care because she had just gotten back from a mass casualty drill. On station a “mass casualty” is defined as any situation that injures three or more people. There simply aren’t enough resources to handle more than that. Therefore, residents are asked to volunteer for supporting positions should such an event occur. If you’re on station for the entire season you could volunteer for roles such as ambulance driver or security personnel.

Kelly’s section in POLAR ICE is fairly small but highly interesting. Science groups can use a GPS receiver out in the field to take coordinates with accuracy up to a decimeter. Kelly can then generate all kinds of custom maps for the groups. Kelly probably generated just about any official USAP map of Antarctica that you’ve seen. We discussed her section and then she gave us an interesting lesson on compasses and GPS technology at high latitude. Apparently magnetic compasses don’t work well down here at all. I don’t remember all of the technicalities of why that is, but it has to do with the fact that the earth isn’t a perfect sphere, that we’re at the bottom of the magnetic field which is ear-shaped, and that the South Pole actually has a greater influence over the needle on your compass than does the North Pole once you get to these latitudes. In fact, the magnetic and geographical South Poles are quite a ways apart. The magnetic South Pole is in the ocean not too terribly far west of where we are right now. This led into an interesting discussion on how Amundsen and Scott first knew how to find the geographical South Pole, which is exactly 90 degrees south. Obviously their compasses did no good, and in 1912 there was no GPS, so how did they determine exactly where the South Pole was? (Note to physics teachers reading this back home – that would make a great extra credit question). I’ll give you a couple of days to ponder it before sharing the answer.

After dinner I watched a little boxing; the Armed Forces Network was replaying the fight that aired Saturday night on HBO. I don’t remember who it was, but HBO boxing is usually pretty high-caliber, and this was no exception.

Towards the end of the fight Rob came over, and then he, Scott, and I grabbed Josh and headed to the Coffee House for a round of Trivial Pursuit. This time we found the Millennium Edition, which is much more my speed than that old original 1982 version which we played last time. Josh & I teamed up against Scott & Rob in the battle of youth vs. experience (Josh and I were born a week apart). We immediately started kicking their butts, and then Kelly sat down to bail them out. She is a trivia master, and was able to get them to within a pie, but Josh and I came back with a vengeance and won handily. I am still undefeated in my Trivial Pursuit quests on the Seventh Continent :-)

At some point Kelly mentioned that there was a big TV sitting at the end of her hallway. After the game of trivia Scott and I decided to see if it was still there, and sure enough it was, so we hauled the thing back to our dorm to see if it would work in Club 316. We have a small 13” TV, but this thing is a 25-incher, so it makes a huge difference. The only problem is that it’s so old there’s no remote, and each channel has its own big push button that you have to press to tune to that station. It shouldn’t be a big deal since we only have 3 or 4 real channels, and it's kind of a piece of living history. Who knows how that thing got to the Ice or how long it’s been here. It’s archaic to say the least.

Each Sunday a new issue of the Antarctic Sun is published. This is the only newspaper published on the continent, and is also available online if you’re interested (see the link in the Antarctic Links section of the left nav). One of the more interesting stories in this edition described the Polar T3 Prevention project. Here’s a snippet:

A vacant stare. A perplexing midsentence pause. A general vagueness or malaise. These are some symptoms of a problem that used to be known as "winter-over syndrome." Now believed to be linked to thyroid hormones, the disorder is more commonly referred to as polar T3 syndrome. Psychologist Larry Palinkas and a team of others, including physiologist Kathleen Reedy, have been studying the effects of extreme cold on the body for more than a decade.

The researchers have discovered that people living in Antarctica commonly lose one degree in body temperature. They also consume 40 percent more calories and use 35 percent more energy when resting or exercising when compared to their routines in temperate environments. Research has also documented changes in the thyroid system, which is responsible for regulating the body’s metabolism. The T3 hormone and related hormones are decreased in the central nervous system and increased in the muscle tissue. While this extra thyroid hormone in the muscle helps create friction to keep the body warm, the deficit in the central nervous system makes people forgetful, sluggish and even depressed.