Stuck in McMurdo Still

Hi all - we tried to go to the rig yesterday (Tuesday) and also again today (Wednesday) but the wind is too strong. No flights can get in or out either. So, a few things around here. We get our food at the 'Galley' (it used to be run by the Navy). The food is pretty good although it would be good to see something fresh - that will likely not be for awhile as other things will have priority when the planes can get down again. There are 4 meals a day - the last one is called 'midrats' which is at midnight - it is for the people who are working the night shift.



Basically, you can eat all you want. For lunch today I had a chicken burrito. Wednesday is also cookie day and the baker makes fresh cookies - Hey - Flat Stanley - don't be such a pig! Just take one cookie at a time! They also have a soft ice cream machine here - but it is so popular that they have to put a lock on it between meals!





Here are a couple of my colleagues in our little office at Crary Labs at McMurdo - the two Thomas's (Dr. Thomas Wonik and Thomas Grelle) both from Hannover. They have brought all of their geophysical logging gear from Germany to use when the coring is done. They sent two Thomas's so we only have to learn one name, that is very convenient. Can you believe I have to work with these guys :) - this is what they do all day! They kick back with Flat Stanley :) Now I better run before they catch me - but .....
Thomas (on the right) has been here before on a drilling project about 8 years ago so he will be very good to have around.

Oops - when I was running away look what I ran into - a CONDITION 2 storm, lucky that I ran to my dorm because as soon as I got there they made it CONDITION 1 which means that you are supposed to stay where you are and not even leave the building. All travel out is strictly forbidden as people can get lost in the blowing snow very easily (of course this is what Alberta can look like too sometimes in our worst blizzards). At least it is not so cold - only about -15 C with maybe -30 windchill, for babies after our survival course. Let's hope the weather is better tommorrow so we can go out to the rig.

Driver Training School

Hi all - our last day of training (finally). I learned how to drive a Pisten Bully - these are vehicles that are made in Austria and are mostly used for ski hills - but we will use them to get to the rig. They go a total 15 mph (about 25 km/h) top speed!!! It will take nearly 3 hours to get out to the rig in these.

The other vehicle is a modified 4X4 truck called a Mattrack - it has special tracks instead of wheels. It goes a bit faster (maybe 40 km/h) but it cannot cross very large cracks in the sea ice.

We were supposed to go to the rig today but the weather was too bad. There have been no flights in for some time and all the 'freshies' are long gone! But, the wind has abated and hopefully tommorrow we make it out to the rig to get going!

Sea Ice Training Day

Hi - almost done with my safety training. Today was sea ice - we need this to be able to spot cracks to avoid, to learn what cracks we might cross safely, and to measure the thickness of the sea ice. The pictures below show what when on today. The first one is of some the sea ice itself - a nice color of blue. In the second, Thomas Wonik and myself are bragging about how fast we were able to make two intersecting holes in the ice for holding a tent line loop (Thomas has his pizza lunch with him!).


We then went further out (about an hour out of McMurdo to the north to the edge of the 'old' sea ice that has built up over the last few years because of the blockage of a great big ice berg B-17 and some 'new' sea ice that was created this last year. We measured the thickness of both to be about 3.35 m for the old and 2 m for the new. This is important as they have to keep track of this for the ice roads.











Flat Stanley has been busy - but he is not too smart - Flat Stanley - come out of the Level 2 winds and put some warm clothes on!!! It is very cold and windy out on the sea ice.

Flat Stanley has also been checking out the exhibits here - he is looking at some of the meteorites that have been found in Antarctica. Grade 1's- why is Antarctica a good place to look for meteorites??

Happy Camping on the Ice Shelf

I am back and I survived although I am very tired. We had our Antarctic survival camp. It was a busy two days. First we learned about frostbite, hypothermia, etc. then we got trucked out to the field site and basically told to go build a camp! The camp consisted of building a snow shelter called a 'Quinsy' (I slept in one of those for the night - can you see the hole to crawl into it with steps leading up into the sleeping area), putting up some mountaineering tents, putting up what are called 'Scott' tents after the Scott in the last blog (who did not make it!), and a wind wall out of snow blocks - Phew - that was a lot of work but it was so cold (it may have made it to -50 C with the wind chill) that you did not want to stop working at all. There was no place to warm up either. Once that was done we boiled water to make hot chocolate and cider and to (yuk) try to make our dehydrated dinner palatable (I had rice and black beans but it got cold before the beans and rice were soft!) But we could eat as many cookies and chocolate bars are we wanted as your body burns a lot of energy just trying to keep warm. I think I was able to mostly keep warm during the night, the Quinsy is pretty sheltered but it was still very cold inside. It was amazing that none of us got frozen. Flat Stanley was not allowed to go as he could have blown away (plus he did not bring his ECW (extreme cold weather) gear). My heavy duty Sorels won the day - my feet did not get cold ever - the people with the bunny boots were not all so lucky.
When we got back to McMurdo we had to then learn about helicopter safety (how to use the cool helmets and how to buckle yourself in).

In my few spare minutes I made an Inuksuk (I was the only Canadian of course!). The picture on the left has a distance view of our camp. The 'pyramids' are the Scott tents, they are highly suited to the wind at the Antarctic. Grade 1's, I took two pictures of an Inuksuk (do you know what that is?) from the same spot about 10 hours apart. Why is the sun in such different places??? Can you see the smoking volcano called Erebus in the back of the sunny picture? It is a real volcano and that is actually steam coming out its top - it is quite a site! Erebus is one reason it is good to drill here - every so often it dumps some magma (ash, bombs, flows, etc) and this goes into McMurdo Sound as part of the sediments - and one can readily date these kind of rocks so they help the geologists build a model of the age of the rocks being drilled versus depth.

We get tommorrow off then back to the ice - Monday is a 10 hour outside course in sea ice safety training. I need to take this as the drill rig is on the sea ice this year.

By the way, they will be showing lots of pictures from here on NBC Today show on Monday and Tuesday as well as the Tuesday evening news on NBC. The camera crew went out out to the drill rig too so you can see a lot of the people I am working with.

Next blog after the sea ice training. I hope I get to drive a 'Pisten Bully' too - more later.

Some of the Sights

Hi All - have been busy with things here. Yesterday had the snowmobile course. Today and tomorrow is the big one - 'Happy Camper' school where we will be sleeping in a snow trench or a tent tonight. Then on Monday I have to take my sea ice safety course, then my driving course and then finally I can get out to the rig next week. We are anxious as there is a lot to do out there.

We are trying to get as much out of McMurdo as we can as once I go to the rig I may not be back to 'civilization' again for some time. Last night we walked over to Scott Base where the New Zealand station is. The night before that we walked to 'Scott's Hut' (really Discovery Hut - see Wikipedia article) and took some of these pictures. Scott's team was one of the earliest to visit - his ships got stuck in the ice and they put together the building in the picture in 1911. Twenty five men lived in there!

This is a picture of McMurdo from 'Hut Point'And this is a picture that looks the other way more or less to the North from McMurdo - not a lot out there except rock and ice!

On the Way and Arrival

Time to go to the ice! I packed my bags on Monday night and went to bed early as I had to catch the shuttle at 5:30 in the morning. When we got to the airport we had to get dressed into our ECW (extreme cold weather) gear to be allowed to get on the plane! Then we could get a bit of breakfast before they herded us onto the C17 Transport. It is a huge plane that you can move
tanks with but they had it filled with seats in the front and cargo in the back. We got off in good time and we landed on an ice runway close to McMurdo after about 5 1/2 hours of flying. Notice how big the plane is - that is a large loader taking palettes out the back of it on a ramp that lowers down.







The picture is of me with my colleague Dr. Thomas Wonik - he is a scientist from Germany. We will be carrying out a lot of wellbore measurements together with two other colleagues who you will get to meet later. We will all be taking 'Happy Camper' safety school together where we have to sleep in a tent or a snow trench so there will be lots of good pictures from that in a couple of days.




Here is another picture, on the left is the labs where my office is to share with my 3 colleagues in what is called Crary Labs. Can you see the mountain - it is a long ways away and is called Mount Discovery.













Here is another picture, this is of my small 'dormitory' room that I share with Dave from Salt Lake City - he is working on the well logging too - I will tell you about that in a few days. Grade 1's - why do I need to have such a thick cover on my window??? (Hint - it is spring in the Southern Hemisphere and I am south of the 'Antarctic Circle').

Oh - that is right - Flat Stanley also shares this room but he is messy and snores. Look, he left both beds unmade!





Finally - here is some of the exciting stuff - this is a picture of rock samples that the drill rig has brought up. There are many flags to show where different scientists are making many different measurements from the rock. The reason we are drilling here is to try to find out about what the earth's climate was over the last few millions of years. The rocks can tell you if the place we are drilling was open water (and the whole earth had to be warmer than today) or whether it was ice covered like today. So, it is very important to know how old the rocks are. Some scientists try to do this by looking at the tiny tiny fossils in the microscope, other do it by looking at the tiny magnets in the rock and how they line up can tell us something about the age of the rock, and others will do fancy chemical analyzes to see how old the rock might be. We are also going to get some of these samples (are my graduate students reading this :)) after they first go to Germany. We will measure how much of the samples are just open space - that is, we will look for how much pore space is in the rock. We will also measure how fast sound waves go through the rock - this is very important to try to better understand seismic measurements that have been made here.

Do you see the big stone that is in the rock at the left side of the picture??? How do you think it got there?? Let me know what you think (this is intended for the grade 1's but anyone is free to answer)

A few hours in Christ Church

By the way, one of my posts did not make it and many of you will think that I have gone crazy (or maybe crazier) with the little figure Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley has hitched a ride with me - he really belongs at Milk River elementary school but he made an escape in my backpack. I will ship him back to Mrs. Schmitt's class from McMurdo after he has seen some things.

Today we got into Auckland where we got some kiwi (New Zealand) money then we flew to Christ Church. We were in the line in customs and I met some lady who was going also to Antartica and she said she was a journalist - so I asked her if she worked for PBS - she looked at me funny and said, no - I work for NBC and then a bunch of people in line said 'We watch your show all the time etc. etc.' I do not think she was too impressed with me as I had no clue who she was (I guess I do not watch the NBC 'Today' morning show very much - really never - but then she did not know who I was either so we were even). Anyways, the film crew is going down to Antartica for her (her name is Ann Curry) and apparently this is a big deal - see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21487380/. They are all on our flight in the morning down to McMurdo - so check out the Today show for the next few days to see what I am also going through.

I was getting my EWG (Extreme Weather Gear) so you may see me on MSNBC in my underwear as they were filming while we were all testing out stuff out. Good news is that they let me dump the 'Bunny Boots' as I have my own Canadian Sorels!

I was really hungry and thirsty so had to get a big cappachino - yes Cheryl, this is as good or better than in Australia :)

After that I came back to the hotel and Flat Stanley and I went for a walk here in ChristChurch both downtown near the Cathedral and into the Botanical Gardens. It is just well into spring now so everything is really green and a lot of flowers are out. I went out for supper at Dux de Lux with a colleague I will be working with - lime/pepper fish + kiwi SavBlanc - yum!

A question for Mrs. Schmitt's elementary class - what is wrong with this street scene (well not wrong, just different from Canada) (hint - what are the cars doing?)

Next post from the ice!!!