Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty basic, straightforward days, so I’ll try to keep this post brief. I’m treating this blog as my own online journal so that someday I can come back and have a nice detailed account of how I spent the trip. The problem with that is it sometimes makes for not so interesting reading for everyone else. However, Thursday’s installment will be a good one, I promise.
As I said, Tuesday was a pretty slow day. I woke up feeling more tired than usual, and that stuck with me all day long. After I posted my last blog entry I checked out the online version of the Antarctic Sun and saw a pretty cool feature that I hadn’t noticed before. They have a section full of movie clips capturing a wide array of topics on the Ice, many of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts. I haven’t had a chance to look at any of them, but if you’re curious, you can find them at http://www.polar.org/antsun/15SecondFlicks.htm. If you check them out let me know what you think. The connection here is too slow for me to look into them.
Our only meeting of the day was with Michael Gerasimoff, who is part of the Ice Core Drilling Services (ICDS) team. The ICDS is a division of the University of Wisconsin Madison, and they are contracted out by the NSF to handle all ice core drilling duties. I mentioned in my cargo post that ice cores are a huge deal around here. Michael gave us all kinds of good information on how exactly they cut these cores. There’s a project that will be starting in a couple of years called WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) where they’ll be drilling ice cores down 3.5 kilometers to the bedrock. These cores are removed in 1 meter segments, so that’s a whole lot of ice to be pulling out. The biggest issue with drilling deeper than 100 meters is the pressure of the ice and its tendency to crush the holes they’ve drilled. To combat this they must keep the holes full of bentyl acetate? (that might not be right, I haven’t had chemistry in about 9 years, but it’s basically nail polish remover). The reason they use this fluid is because its density is roughly the same density as the ice, so it prevents the holes from being crushed. The drilling mechanism itself is really quite amazing, it’s suspended from a cable and has a whole system for cutting out the cores (usually 4” in diameter), while storing the shavings in a separate compartment and bringing back up the 1-meter long cylinders of ice. We discussed what he needs to be captured in POLAR ICE for any group that will be drilling cores, but mostly got a fascinating lesson on the technology of what it takes to drill a 4” wide hole down 3.5 kilometers. Michael is also on the faculty at UWM, and he knows his stuff.
After that meeting we spent a bit of time doing some gap analysis. A lot of people have expressed desire to be notified if certain sections of the SIP (document that grantees fill out) change after they’ve already seen it. If deployment dates change, for instance, the housing folks need to know, as do the workcenters that are allocating inventory, etc. We drew a matrix of who cares about which sections and began the design process for this auto notification system.
The rest of the day was pretty quiet – just dinner and hanging out in the room watching a movie before calling it a night.
Wednesday was slightly more eventful, as we had several meeting scheduled for our day. We first met with the people in charge of housing here at McMurdo. They use POLAR ICE to find out when people will be arriving on the Ice and when they’ll be leaving to go to the field. This way they can better allocate what precious bed space we have available. We were shocked and amazed to find out that they actually get their data from not only POLAR ICE, but from over a dozen other systems as well. The data rarely “jives,” and their job is largely guesswork and manual data comparison. We left that meeting thinking that something needed to be done badly in order to correct this major issue.
From there we headed to the Science Support Center to meet with Mike McClanahan and his boss, Kirk Salveson. These two guys are basically in charge of all of the workcenters we’ve been meeting with. Our goal for this discussion was to come up with a high-level overview of what they’d like to see in future versions of our application and what their priorities were for the next version. They mentioned that their number one issue had already been solved, with us installing the local mirrored copy of POLAR ICE here at McMurdo. From there we went into all kinds of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” scenarios. Those are always fun, and get my creative programmer juices flowing.
We talked about a lot of features that would simplify the lives of the workcenters and grantees at the same time. That’s what we’re here to do, and we came up with some good ideas. These are two of our most important customers, and they seemed nothing but pleased with everything we’ve done so far. That’s always nice.
I spent my afternoon building a new-and-improved Helicopter Support Request application. I’ve mentioned before that the current web form that people use to request a helo flight on station is sketchy at best. It rarely goes through when it’s submitted, and when it does go through the format is almost unreadable. Since we’re supposed to be writing software to support science I figured this was a great application to take over. What I came up with should hopefully make Monika’s life much easier and provide her with some user-friendly tools for not only receiving these requests, but also the ability to essentially build on-the-fly custom reports about these requests. Hopefully we’ll be able to roll that out in the next couple of days.
After work I hit the treadmill again (I have my legs back and it’s a glorious feeling), then had dinner and went back to work for a few hours. There’s not much else to do here but work and drink, and when I have a project like the helo request form I usually get in a “zone” until I get it finished. I worked until about 9:30 then came home, watched Mystic Pizza, read a little, then hit the sack.
Tomorrow we’re scheduled to go dive tending with Rob Robbins. This will probably be our last venture outside of town before we redeploy, and it promises to be one of the more exciting ones as well. Stay posted..
By the way, there’s a drive on our network here where people can post temporary files to share with others. I peruse it occasionally, as it’s largely made up of people sharing digital photos. One guy had a couple of great water spider shots, and since mine got such a reaction I’ve posted his to the photo album.
