The Waiting Game Begins

December 23, 2012

I am currently embarking on the long journey to New Zealand from Winnipeg. It was tough saying goodbye at the airport today after such a short visit. This is the first time I’ve ever been away from home for Christmas. At least it felt like Christmas for me last night having all the family over at our place. My route for the next 35 hours is Winnipeg to Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, LA to Sydney, and finally Sydney to Christchurch.

I’m hoping for this to be kind of a time capsule: something I can look back at in a month’s time once I am a grizzled Antarctic veteran and chuckle at my bright-eyed youthful optimism. David has told me that I should employ the policy of no hope: expect that nothing good will happen the entire trip, in order to avoid huge disappointment if things don’t work out as we planned. That sounds OK in principle, but I find it hard to believe that I will actually be able to adhere to it.  Antarctica seems like a wonderful place, but doing science there comes with huge challenges, the largest of which is the weather. Because of the dangers of being stranded, pilots have to be very cautious about choosing when they can fly, and as a result long flight delays are common. Sometimes the flight delays have been so severe that an entire season of science has essentially had to be cancelled. This is exactly what happened last year to the scientists involved with the PIG project (the project that I am participating in). They had planned on drilling through the floating ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier (PIG) in multiple locations and deploying an Ice-Tethered Profiler through the ice shelf to sample the waters of the ice-shelf cavity below. Unfortunately, they had huge delays in setting up the camp at the glacier (called PIG Main Camp), and then had even more delays when trying to get flights out to the glacier to deploy their instrumentation. They never had a chance to put the profilers out, and this year, the last year of the PIG project, is the last chance to do so.

Luckily, they were able to achieve at least one science objective, which was deploying five Seismic/GPS stations on the glacier. This is where I enter the picture. The main purpose for our trip to Antarctica is to find these instruments, dig them out, collect the data cards, refurbish them if necessary, and hopefully redeploy them for another year of data collection. PIG is an outlet glacier, meaning that there is a significant drainage basin of ice which flows into PIG and eventually out into the ocean. About 10% of the ice in West Antarctica drains out to the ocean through PIG. PIG is one of Antarctica’s fastest flowing glaciers, and the stations have moved roughly 4km downstream over the past year.

Each station has a seismometer, a high precision GPS, and a solar and wind power system, which powers the station year round. The solar panels are about 10 feet off the ground, so they will be the easiest item to spot when we are looking for the stations. There has probably been about 4 feet of snow accumulation over the past year, so that is the amount of digging we will have to do. We are projecting that each station will take about 2 days of work, meaning that we need 10 days of good weather to get all the work done.

Ok, time for some sleep! Catch you in New Zealand!

December 28, 2012

Hello from Christchruch! We were supposed to fly to McMurdo yesterday, but after many changes in departure time, the flight was eventually cancelled due to warm weather in McMurdo. The planes land on an ice runway in McMurdo, and the runway is currently too soft to land on. We are now hoping for cool weather, clouds and wind! I never expected I would be wishing for colder weather in Antarctica. Our new tentative departure date is tomorrow morning. We will now be on a C130 plane instead of an airbus, meaning that our flight time just increased from 5 hours to 8! The C130’s are old WWII aircrafts that the US now uses for Antarctic science.

The time has been pretty fun in Christchurch so far. Jenny (another scientist) and I met two American travelers on Christmas day and ended up having a classy Christmas dinner at Denny’s that evening with them. These guys recently bought a car and have been road tripping around New Zealand. They invited us to join them the next day, and we drove into the mountains in the interior of the country. We had a great day cruising around the beautiful highways and doing a little hiking. New Zealand has beautiful landscapes and feels incredibly quiet and untouched. I would love to come back here sometime to do a more serious hiking adventure.

This morning we went to the US Antarctic Center to pick up our ECW (extreme cold weather) clothing. They give you essentially a full kit of warm clothing, including the infamous minus 40 suit, which you need to wear on all flights. Here’s a picture of me testing mine out!

To give you an idea of where I’m heading, here is a map that shows McMurdo, which is pretty much directly south of Christchurch.

When we get to McMurdo, I will have to do three days of snow school, which teaches you the basics of surviving outdoors in Antactica. In McMurdo, we’ll be staying in dorms, but for our time at PIG, we will be living in tents on the ice. After snow school, our next mission will be catching a flight to PIG, which is about 2000km away. Catching this flight is notoriously difficult, so we will be hoping for some cooperation with the weather gods. PIG is marked on the map below. The purple and red parts of this map are the areas where ice velocities are fastest on Antarctica. PIG is a fairly small area but it has some of the fastest moving ice on the continent.

As I mentioned before, our main task is retrieving the data cards off of five Seismic/GPS stations on the glacier. Below is a google earth image showing the locations of our 5 stations.

Besides working on these stations, we have some other things we’ll be working on in our down time. There is a weather station at PIG main camp that David put in a few years ago which mysteriously stopped working this past August. The two photos below, one from Jan 2010, and one from Nov 2012, should give an indication why. We will be digging this station out and getting it back up and running.

At PIG we will also be collecting a 20m ice core for some scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The ice core is a way of obtaining information about the past. Like tree rings, each layer of ice contains data about past conditions, which people can determine by looking at isotopes in gas bubbles frozen into the ice. We will ship it back (refrigerated) for the WHOI scientists to analyze. Some of the most powerful global warming evidence has come from CO2 and temperature reconstructions from ice cores.

At PIG we will also be doing a tent experiment, where we set up tents in different orientations and test how much snow accumulates on them. PIG is known for high winds, so snow can accumulate very quickly, and we are hoping to learn about the smartest way for people to set up their camps.

Our last task is a job for back in McMurdo. David and Alon did a project at a place called Windless Bight last year, which is just outside McMurdo. We need to go pick up some of the leftover equipment, as the project just finished.

David has started planning a New Years party in Christchurch, but I am still hoping for an Antarctic New Years! Please send some chi down south :)

I'll try to update this blog throughout the trip, and hopefully add some photos if the internet is fast enough.

-Mitch