Weekend getaway....

One of the best things about living here in Antarctica are the opportunities we have to get off station when the weather is suitable. As I may have mentioned before, there are several huts scattered around our region that we are able to travel to for overnight stays, as well as several local features that can be visited during a day trip.

Last weekend several of us had planned to travel up on the glacier, as much to explore as to have a change of surroundings. As we are only a small community of fourteen we are somewhat limited in when we can actually be off station. Logistically we have to consider rosters such as the ER team (emergency response), slushy, Saturday duties etc. Along with this we have to consider other programs that may be planned for the same time. My escapes are restricted not only by the fact that I am leader of ERT Two, but also that we must have one plumber on station at all times. The maximum number of personnel off station at one time is limited to seven, just to add complication.

Luckily everything lined up in our favour and Saturday morning saw us scrambling around frantically organising food, our survival packs, alcoholic beverages etc along with fuelling up the Hagg (see the photo's to discover what this is) in order to make our get away at the earliest opportunity. Finally the wind dropped below the required 30 knots at 1pm and we were on our way.



The Hagglunds. Kind of like an Antarctic SUV. On steroids.

Rumdoodle Hut was our destination. This is a great little hut that sleeps six (at a squeeze) and sits below Rumdoodle Peak in the North Masson Ranges. The trip for me was about experiencing glacier travel in a Hagg, along with visiting a part of the ranges I've not been to before. The Hagglunds are quite awesome to drive. They can literally go anywhere, with a turbo diesel power plant that has HEAPS of horsepower. I'd love to bring one home to use as a hunting truck. The only thing stopping me will be the $300,000 price tag, and the fact they are only producing them to be used for military applications now.



What a beast.

The drive up was as much fun as I expected. We arrived at the hut in no time at all and then carried on to a peak known as Fearn Hill, which has a couple of small frozen lakes at its foot. A couple of hours was spent here exploring and taking photo's of all sorts of scenery and unusual features in the ice. It seems like every place you visit in this crazy continent has something different to offer. This location presented evidence of dust storms from who knows how many decades or centuries ago. These form layers in the ice which create sweeping lines as the ice flows along and around obstacles ever so slowly.

Painted Peak.

The next day dawned after a few rums (what else would I drink at Rumdoodle...), and not such a sunny day. The majority decision was to lay around the hut for the day relaxing before beginning our journey home. A great opportunity to unwind and get to know my two fellow travellers a little better.
Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I won't ramble on any longer.


Enjoy the photo's. In case you didn't realise you can click on the photo's and view them in a bigger format.

I.G.


Looking back at the North Massons, Hagg in the distance.

A frozen lake, with the layers of dust evident in the glacier ice.

Evidence of ancient dust storms. So I'm told....
 

WTF??

OBO (old bearded one) drives the Hagg.

Looking out over a frozen sea at the end of the journey home.

Fearn Hill.


 



Night time phenomena......

I thought I'd write a brief piece on the phenomena that is aurora australis. Rather than try and give an explanation of exactly what an aurora is and what causes them I've borrowed from Wikipedia.

Read on.....

An aurora^{[nb 1]} is a natural light display in the sky (from the Latin word aurora, "sunrise" or the Roman goddess of dawn), predominantly seen in the high latitude (Arctic and Antarctic) regions. Auroras are caused by charged particles, mainly electrons and protons, entering the atmosphere from above causing ionisation and excitation of atmospheric constituents, and consequent optical emissions. Incident protons can also produce emissions as hydrogen atoms after gaining an electron from the atmosphere.

So, if you didn't already know what an aurora was, you do now. I think that gives a good brief explanation of how they come to be also.

Aurora do not occur all the time here, in fact it is only in the last couple of weeks or so that they've really fired up. Certain atmospheric conditions create them , it's all to do with electromagnetic activity blah blah...... So when they do occur we tend to have a spate of them.

As this is my first time in Antarctica I haven't had the opportunity to see many, and those that I had seen were quite a disappointment, given the descriptions I've had from repeat expeditioners. Lately though, we have had them night after night. On Friday night at about eleven o'clock one of our guys came into the bar and advised us to look outside.

Finally, it was my time to see the show. I spent about forty minutes outside, in -20 degrees, gazing up at the most amazing light show I have ever seen. If I was to simplify it, I'd describe it as beautifully coloured wispy clouds performing a slow dance across the sky. The intensity comes and goes, but when one fades it's always worth waiting to see what's coming next. After the initial aurora that I was viewing faded, out I stood watching the eastern horizon as I could see what looked like beams of light lifting off the glacier. Kind of like headlights coming over a hill. After ten minutes or so it became more intense and colourful, and gradually spread itself across the sky. It was the most incredible sky I have ever seen. Words simply cannot describe how it appeared. It is just another incredible aspect of this amazing part of the world that I will remember forever.

As I said, words simply cannot convey the beauty. I can however admit that it was a very moving experience for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking tears here. It was one of the most peaceful feelings I've ever experienced. As if nothing else in the world existed at the time. Again, it's hard to put into words.

Credit for the photo's must go to Pete Layt, our BSS and chippie. I managed to get a few photo's of my own, but my camera is somewhat limited for scenes like these that require a longer exposure than the maximum of fifteen seconds that mine offers. I'll also add that a long exposure adds intensity of light to the colours, and what the naked eye sees is not exactly as what the camera records. What you do see with the eye still incredibly spectacular. I will add more photo's to this blog at a later date when I get more from Pete, but in the mean time, enjoy.

Major disaster narrowly avoided!!

The week just gone presented some major hurdles for myself and Charlie, the other plumber on station. I'll give you a brief run down on our water supply here before I get too far on with this tale.

Our water is pumped from a cavern in the ice. This cavern is created by circulating water from a "bell" (see the photo's) through pipework which, during its circulation path passes through a heat exchanger. The bell immersed in the cavern is therefore warm, which creates melt. This started many years ago as just some warm pipes on a depression in the ice, which gradually melted into a cavern. If repairs are required on the flow or return line in that system there is always a risk that pipework will freeze up before you are able to complete the repair and reinstate circulation. Worse still, if the circulation is interrupted for too long the cavern will freeze up.



The Melt Bell extracted from the cavern

The former is exactly what happened. The latter is what we narrowly avoided.

On Monday morning we set out to repair a leaking join in the site services pipework (heavily insulated fusion welded polyethylene pipes). This is no easy task as first of all we have to cut away the steel sheathing that encases the expanding foam insulation. This is also encased in heat shrink. Then, once that is done you chip away at the insulation, taking great care not to let any of the foam drift away on the wind, as we go to great lengths to avoid even minimal pollution. Finally, you expose the pipe itself, establish where the leak is, and then replace the offending section. Here is often where the real drama begins, and Monday was no exception. The cause of the leak was a poorly fitted bend, which not only required replacing, but pipework also required realigning. Long story short, the job took us all day and by the time we had the water back on nature had done it's -20 degree business and frozen parts of our pipework.



Team Mawson Plumbing, Charlie and I.

So as you could imagine, pipework encased in insulation does not make it easy to find the frozen part. Our first concern was that we had "dead headed" the pump by trying to circulate water  and stressing the pump, so now we had concerns regarding the integrity of the pump. Also we began to worry that if we couldn't defrost the pipework in a timely fashion the cavern would begin to freeze and thereby freeze the bell and pump. The decision was made to remove the bell the next day, break down as much of the system as we could and begin to thaw things out. In the end we were forced to replace some of the pipework which we'd not been happy with anyway, which will be a good thing in the long run. The bell was transported to the workshop and rebuilt with a new pump and check valve. Finally on Friday after five days of toil melting frozen pipes and keeping them warm, the bell was lowered down into the cavern, pipes were reconnected and tested as we pumped water through in stages, and the water supply was reinstated to near normal function. As we were lowering the bell back into the cavern we could see that an ice crust had formed on the surface of the melt cavern. Another day or two we'd have been in big trouble.

All of this was of course made even harder and more time consuming by the fact that when we were working in the vicinity of the cavern, Charlie and I had to be harnessed up and attached to a belay, attended by two others. This is due to the fact that the cavern is a small hole in the ice that undermines the surface ice, drops seven meters to the water surface, and ten to the bottom. Extracting someone from there would not be easy if you did not already have a rope attached to them. I'd conservatively suggest you'd be dead by the time a rescue plan was implemented. All in all it was a very labour intensive job. There were six of us involved for five days, plus another two for a part of the last day.



The melt cavern, it looks a lot scarier when you are standing on a platform above it winching a water filled bell that weighs over 150kgs out of it.....

In reality the weather saved our bacon. You see normally we have katabatic winds of around 30 knots to deal with every morning until around midday. Katabatic is the term used to describe to winds created by cold air flowing down off a mountain/hill/glacier which continue until the air space they are flowing into heats up and creates pressure of its own which forces the wind to stop, or reverse. Not only do we normally contend with winds, our weather is generally not stable. In fact it is more likely to be bad than good. Some how the weather patterns managed to provide us with five spectacular calm days, where the wind died by 9am each day, and in fact on the Wednesday and Thursday provided cloud cover which created two unseasonal -10 degree days.

Our potable water reserves total approximately 100,000 litres. On average the station consumes 2,000 litres per day. Enough for around seventy five to one hundred days if rationing was forced upon us. We also have another 300,000 litres in reserve for firefighting purposes (seems like overkill to me!!) so had we not been able to reinstate the supply we would have scraped through, but getting it going next summer when things have warmed up would have been a lengthy drawn out process as by then every part of the system would have been frozen solid.

So, all in all we achieved a good result after some creative thinking and problem solving. I guess that is one of the reasons the selection process for these positions are so thorough, enabling them to identify people who can overcome situations such as these when they arise. I have never considered myself as someone who was good at improvising to provide solutions and had concerns that I was going to be out of my depth down here.

Maybe they know me better than I know myself.



New Bell winched into place, mission accomplished..... Nearly.

Team Belay, J.B. and Robbie.

Herman Nelson, one of the big diesel fired heaters we used to defrost things.