Every Sunday that I’ve spent in Antarctica has been pretty lazy, and this past Sunday was no exception. After the big night at the punk fest Scott & I slept in until 11:30, then got up and headed over to the best brunch south of 60.
I’ve been getting better about portion control, so for this brunch I elected to skip the luxurious Belgian waffles. However, I noticed that Jim Scott was one of the two people manning the waffle irons. Jim, again, is the station director, and this was just another example of how everyone here is pretty much an equal; it takes everyone pitching in and volunteering in order to make everything work smoothly.
There is no table service in the galley; everyone is responsible for taking their own dishes to the dishwashers and sorting the silverware, plates, bowls, glassware, and trays into the appropriate stacks. As I performed this routine I noticed that the National Geographic guys were filming me once again. So in 2007, when this documentary is released, check out the guy throwing his dirty fork into the silverware container. That’ll be me. Oh yeah.
We’ve wanted to go check out Scott Base, so we decided to meet at the shuttle stop (aka Derelict Junction) at 3:00. After brunch I thought I’d get in a few hours of jersey design before heading to Scott Base, so I headed up to building 175 to see what I could come up with. I realized I was a few days behind on the blogs and was fresh off the punk night experience so I ended up spending most of that time catching up on blogs and didn’t get any design done at all. This week’s procrastinator’s meeting has been postponed.
Once I was finally caught up on this here blog I met up with Scott & Josh and we hopped the shuttle to head over to Scott Base. This is the New Zealand Antarctic base located 2 miles southeast of McMurdo. Scott Base is much smaller than McMurdo, and is home to about 85 Kiwis. The base itself is a series of interconnected green buildings, set up so that you don’t have to go outside to get from one area to another. After taking a few pictures of the huge pressure ridge in the ice right in front of the station we headed inside to check out the store.
In the lobby of Scott Base is a guestbook with a globe sitting right next to it. We signed in and I played with the globe for a little bit. I’ve always loved maps and globes for some reason, and now that I’ve actually left the US I can appreciate the enormity of the planet a little bit more. I spun the globe around to Antarctica and someone had written “U R Here” with an arrow pointing to our location. I spun it back around to the US and once again realized just how incredibly far away I am from the comforts of home and everything I’ve known for the past 27 years. It’s kind of easy to forget where you are here. Basically everything you need is supplied in this self-sustaining community, and you become desensitized to the term “Antarctica.” Sure, it’s the 7th continent, the coldest, windiest, driest, highest, most remote place on the planet, it’s 10,000 miles from home, all that jazz, but you lose perspective on it until you see something like the globe, showing just how far away you really are from the rest of the civilized world. Check it out next time you come upon a globe. We’re far, far, far away. From anything. And everything.
The Scott Base store has a better selection of Antarctic paraphernalia than does the McMurdo store, so we bought a few things and then caught the shuttle back to McMurdo. By the time we got back it was almost dinner time; late evening in Denver, so I called Sara. It’s always the highlight of my day to talk with her, and we had a nice conversation once again. Our time apart has brought us even closer together, and I can’t wait to see her again. I’m overwhelmingly grateful for this Antarctic opportunity, but on the other hand I’m counting the days until we’re reunited.
After a hearty meal of roast beef and mashed potatoes we met up with Michael Davis at Gallagher’s once again. He had invited us there for burger night; a few nights a week you can go to Gallagher’s and get a burger and fries if you don’t feel like eating galley food. I’ve got no problem with galley food, and it’s free, so I elected not to spend the few bucks on a burger. We still had a couple of beers and played our bar games once again; Josh & I beat Scott & Michael in shuffleboard, then we beat them at pool, then Mr. Davis finally won a game of darts. I’ve noticed that when he loses a game he’s very quick to stop the smack talking and suggest a new game instead. The only one we didn’t play this night was foosball.
That was it for another lazy Sunday. Monday marked the beginning of another workweek, though this one will be a short five-day week. We observe Thanksgiving on Saturday the 29th, which would otherwise be a workday for us. So this is our last full week, then we leave on Tuesday the 2nd.
The first thing done on Monday was to run another report for the Crary Lab and housing folks. Everyone here is liking having the POLAR ICE guys on station, as we’re able to process requests immediately as opposed to having to deal with the time/date difference back in Denver. Once that was done I focused my attention on coming up with a simple installation package that we can use for future POLAR ICE updates. We’re planning on pushing down a fresh copy of the database and any new files about twice a month. The last thing we want to do is add an additional burden to the network ops folks here, so our install package is a simple double-click setup.exe that will take care of installing any new files, updating any existing files, backing up both of the POLAR ICE databases (the main db and the audit db), and then restoring the latest backup of the Denver database. It then restarts (or bounces) the appropriate services running on the machine and precompiles all of the files in the application. All of this is done with a simple double-click and a confirmation “OK” prompt. I think they’ll be pretty happy with this, especially as compared to other legacy systems that require them to do all kinds of manual database synchronization and other time-consuming tasks. The installation package also does a nice job of compressing all of the necessary files, so it’s small enough (even with the two database backups) that we shouldn’t have any problems FTP’ing it down this narrow pipe.
The big event of the day was the solar eclipse I mentioned previously. The eclipse was scheduled to begin at 11:08am and be at its fullest at 12:06pm. Here at McMurdo we were scheduled to see about 75% coverage, while at the South Pole they’d get about 90%. The medical department handed out old exposed x-ray film to use as a viewer so that we could see the eclipse without burning our retinas or having to use the old gradeschool pinhole technique.
This solar eclipse was only visible from the Antarctic, and a few companies around the world catered to the astronomy buffs with special travel packages. Qantas and an airline from Chile offered flights over the South Pole timed for the eclipse, and a Russian company charged $36,000 for a month-long Antarctic cruise onboard a Russian Icebreaker. Meanwhile, I was one of those getting paid to see the eclipse; I felt pretty fortunate once again.
All over station there were groups of people passing x-ray film around and checking out the progress of the shadow over the sun. A few of the lucky ones found welder’s masks, and some discovered that looking through a compact disc worked as well. Not the hole in the middle, but rather through the disc itself, and it only worked with commercial discs rather than CDRs. I attempted to take a bunch of photos by using the above filters in front of my camera lens; some turned out interesting, others not at all.
At 75% coverage the temperature had dropped an easy 10 degrees, and the first signs of darkness I had seen in over 3 weeks made a brief appearance. At 75% coverage it didn’t get too dark, or even dusky, but it was definitely the darkest it’s been since I arrived. All in all it was a pretty unique experience to see a solar eclipse in Antarctica. It’s just another of the experiences for which I remind myself every day that I’m incredibly privileged to have participated in.
Meanwhile, 10,000 miles away, my Broncos were getting beaten by the Chicago Bears. Wha?!?!? I think the solar eclipse must have changed the gravitational pull of the universe or something. I had the misfortune of watching a few minutes of this on the TV in the galley after eating lunch and couldn’t believe what was happening.
I don’t know if that was the main reason or not, but I discovered that from lunch through the rest of the afternoon I was incredibly cranky and irritable. Not wanting to waste a day being in a foul mood, I decided what I needed was to go for a run and get my endorphins flowing. At lunch there was a signup sheet for the Turkey Trot, and I put my name down for this 5K run that will be held Sunday at noon. I figure this week I need to lay off the ice cream, continue portion control, and do a few runs to get my legs back. I’ve also found that some of my best runs are when I’m really in a bad mood, as I push myself a lot more and once the runner’s high sets in my mood has shifted 180 degrees. After work I found an empty treadmill in the workout room and 4 ½ miles later I felt like a new person, no longer mad at the world for no apparent reason.
By then, everyone in my group had long since finished dinner so I ate alone and read the latest Antarctic Sun. There was an interesting article on the new 8-meter diameter telescope coming to the South Pole in a couple of years. I’d recommend checking that out if you’re into Astronomy at all. There’s also a good article on the eclipse.
Monday evening was spent in the galley listening to the second lecture in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration series. Ted Dettmar is our resident Antarctic history buff, and he knows probably as much as anyone else in the world about this continent’s past. He put on an interesting lecture. It was fascinating to learn about the origins of Discovery Hut, which resides just across Winter Quarter’s Bay from McMurdo Station and was the first structure built here. He also shared a story of a group of men on one expedition that were returning to Discovery Hut from Cape Adare and got caught in a storm. One of the men disappeared instantly, only to be found alive a couple days later. He had simply crouched down into a ball when the storm came and let the snow drift over him. The snow insulated him and kept him alive for 40 hours before the storm let up and he was able to stand up, brush himself off, and continue walking to the hut. Those early Antarctic explorers were a different breed.
There are a few new photos with this update, as well.
