WAIS

This sign should probably read, "Welcome to WAIS - I hope that you do not plan to leave anytime soon."

WAIS = West Antarctica Inland Site

Shelley and I headed out to WAIS last Monday. We flew out there on a C130 with our cargo. It was great because the pilot let me sit upfront in the cockpit for the landing. When I first got up there I looked out the front window and was worried that we would never be able to land in all of the cloud cover. It was a solid sky of white clouds. It took be about 5 minutes before I realized that it wasn't cloud cover and was in fact the snow covered ground. It is amazing, you can see white in every direction. Imagine being stranded out in the middle of the ocean with water as far as you can see in every direction. If you replace the water with snow and ice, you're stading in the middle of WAIS. Sometimes it is even difficult to determine where the sky ends and the ground begins. The horizon just looks like a blend of beautiful white to blue transistions.

The pilot motioned to me and said, "Do you see the white light out there infront? That is the field camp." We could see the field camp from probably 100 miles away. It literally looked like a white blip in the snow. The landing was smooth on the snow runway.

The plan was for us to service the Kamiko-Slade site that is about a mile outside of WAIS. This site was not transmitting and needed to get back on the air. Then we were suppose to wait for the Twin Otter to show up to service our Erin and Elizabeth sites which are south of WAIS. Both of these sites needed a tower raise. Then we were planning to fly back to McMurdo with the Otter. We would stop at the Siple Dome field camp so that the Otter could get fuel and we could raise the tower at our site there.

As I said, that was the "plan". We ended up batting a .250.

The afternoon that we arrived we got our mountain tents set up. This is quite the process because in order to secure the tent from blowing away, we had to dig down in the snow and anchor the tent with bamboo sticks. Here is a picture of my tent the first night that I was in WAIS. Notice that my tent is sitting very nicely on top of the snow.

Just a few days later, after high winds and blowing snow. My tent was no longer sitting nicely on top of the snow.

Luckily, I had an idea that this would happen and was able to get out to my tent in the afternoon and dig it out. It was better than finding it when I went out to go to sleep that night.

Below is a picture of the galley, where we ate our meals.

The galley is a Jamesway tent. It is a semi-permanent tent that is used for the entire field season and then taken down and stored for the winter. It is nice because it has two stoves used to heat the Jamesway and a full kitchen in the back. Camille and John were our cooks and the food was great.

The second morning at WAIS Shelley and I went out to Kamiko-Slade and replaced the electronics, moved the instruments up on the tower and checked everything out. We heard later that night from our team back home that the station was transmitting. That was our one success for the trip.

Later that day, the Twin Otter that was scheduled to make it to WAIS was cancelled due to bad weather at Siple Dome. From Monday to Thursday we waited for a Twin Otter to show up, but bad weather at either Siple Dome or WAIS prevented it from flying. After Thursday, we decided to cancel our work out of WAIS and head back to McMurdo. We have 4 more sites to visit out of McMurdo that take priority over the tower raises out of WAIS. It took 2 more days before a C130 had sufficient weather to fly to WAIS, land and take back off. Now we are back, have showered, no longer have to use an outhouse and can sleep at night without having to hide our heads inside of our sleeping bags to keep our noses warm (the temperature ranged from -15 deg F to 0 deg F).

"Tent City"

Pegasus North

Last Sunday, John and I went out to Pegasus North to reinstall the instruments that had been removed earlier in the season. This AWS is at the end of the Pegasus runway so it was nice because we got to see a C17 land. You can see the TransAntarctic mountain range behind the station (note - if you click on the picture, you can see it in full screen). We had incredible weather and spectacular views.

In the picture above you can see the size and significance of Mt. Erebus. The brown section infront of the volcano is the piece of land that McMurdo is on. On the right side of this land you can see Ob Hill. McMurdo is tucked into the small cove in the front. This view shows how small McMurdo is in the grand scheme of Antarctica.

Here is a picture of the C17 that we saw land. I love the mountains in the background. You can see the amount of cargo ready to be loaded onto the plane. The amount of cargo that can fit into these planes is amazing. Later that afternoon, Matthew flew out on this C17 to head back to Christchurch.

Twin Otter

I apologize that I have some catching up to do on the blog. I will get to more on that in the next post. Before Shelley and I went out to West Antarctica, we had a day trip out to the Vito and Emilia sites. These sites are farther away than the ones that we were visiting at the beginning of the season. Therefore, we got to fly on a Twin Otter. These planes are great. You can see in the picture above that they are ski planes. The pilots are a fun bunch out of Canada and have great accents. In these planes, the cargo is loaded right into the cabin with us and the seats fold down from the sides of the wall. We had a great flight out to Vito. We flew along the edge of the ice shelf and could see the open water of the Ross Sea. The darker blue part in the middle of the picture is the ocean. I could see an iceberg floating out there.



At both sites, Vito and Emilia, we did tower raises. Due to snow accumulation, the towers on our AWSs need to raised every couple of years (how often depends on the site location) in order to keep the instruments above the snow. This involves removing all of the instruments from the tower, adding a 7' tower section to the top of the existing tower and then reassembling the instruments. We were lucky that we had two morale people to help us on these tower raises. The morale group are a list of people who work in McMurdo and do not have a chance to get out into the field. If we have extra room on our trips, we can take a few people from the list. We had Levonne and Jason to help us and they were great! Here is a group pic.

AWS in the News

There is a new study out on Antarctica. The study used some of our automated weather stations for its research. It nice to know that what we are doing is useful.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090121144049.htm

Penguins...ALMOST!!

John, Nick (he works for Aerosonde which will fly an unmanned aircraft over Terra Nova Bay in September for one of John's other projects) and myself hiked up Hut Ridge Trail last night. Just past Scott's Hut we could see penguin footprints on the ice. Therefore, I know that they are out and about. Now I just need to catch them at the right time. I am not sure how well the resolution will come out on the web, but here is a picture of the footprints on the ice.

From the top we got a great view of Erebus. It was funny because when Matthew and I hiked this a couple of weekends ago, I did not even know that Erebus was back there. It was too cloudy to see anything. So this was a pleasant surprise at the summit.

We took advantage of the low sun angle to get a good shadow picture from the summit as well.

Back to penguin searching. To be continued....

Linda and Ferrell

Last night John, Shelley and I headed back out to Linda and Ferrell. This time we flew in an A-Star helicopter called the "3-6 Hotel". Our first trip, the day before, was in a 212 helicopter (these were used in the Vietnam war). The weather was hit and miss during the trip, but we were able to make it to both AWS sites.

At Linda we attempted to fix the electronics, but it seems that there must be something else not working. We replaced the old electronic box with a new one that we know works and it is still not transmitting. Therefore, it looks like we'll have another ride out to Linda. Shelley also dug a snowpit for one of her projects. Here is a picture of the Linda site with the A-Star helo.


After Linda, we headed over to Ferrell. At Ferrell Shelley fixed the ADG, which measures the amount of snow accumulation at the site. We also dug another snowpit here.


The light there was pretty flat, but it was cool because the clouds were causing the sky to give us the closest thing that we will see to a sunset for quite some time. Here is a picture of John enjoying it.

Helo Ride

Yesterday John, Shelley and I got out for a helicopter (aka helo) ride. It was a "ride" because we never got to our final destination, the Linda and Ferrel AWS sites. We took off, but the fog/clouds were so bad over the ice shelf that the pilot could no longer see the horizon to tell which way was up. It was a fun ride though.

Here is a picture of White Island and you can see some of the fog infront of it.

Here is a picture on our way back to McMurdo where the ice shelf meets the sea ice. There are some seals surrounding the meltponds.