Sunday
3rd December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
 John
and I arrived at Terra Nova Bay just yesterday and we are
scheduled to leave for Dome C on top of the Antarctic Plateau
at 8 pm today (Sunday 3.12.00). We should reach Dome C one
day *earlier* than originally planned.
Unfortunately, our instrumentation
will not come with us in the Twin Otter.
The bad thing is that 3 toilets will
be loaded instead of our instrumentation. This is something
that should prompt us to reflect on the way that we think
about scientific instrumentation. The good thing is that the
people there didn't get confused as to which one was our experiment
and which one was the toilet. In the end, there will be on
the aircraft: 4 people + the pilot - and 3 toilets. Better
than on a 747.
I tried to contact Dome C's Head (Augusto
Lori) by radio to get permission to send the SUMMIT, but he
convinced me otherwise in just one minute. The idea was that,
as John suggested, we will arrive too tired to start with
the SUMMIT installation, but not too tired to use the toilet...
In any case, the weather is not so
bad and we should receive the instrumentation by the next
flight, tomorrow morning. The Twin Otters allow us to bring
1 ton each flight. Today we have been involved in an introductory
meeting for all the people that arrived on our flight at the
"Pinguinattolo" (literally... well, there is not a
direct, literal translation, but in Italian it sounds like
"the penguin's place"). It is a wooden chalet where
people meet trying to get funny. The meeting could be boring,
but I was so happy - after a year and a half unsuccessfully
trying to understand people talking Austr... English - to
see Prof. John Storey, Head of the School of Physics of UNSW,
unable to understand the easiest word, that, at the end, I
felt very well.
 In
my previous mail, I wrote "it has been a short trip"
in the Subject. That's actually not true: it has been, for
me, a very long trip, starting when I left Terra Nova Bay
Station last time in 1991, promising myself to get back, soon
or later. When I arrived here yesterday, just 9 years later,
I felt as comfortable as I would had I left only a few weeks
before. Despite my memory not being outstanding , I recognized
many details of the place, any door, any stone, and I could
write down the map of the station with millimetric accuracy.
I was also able to find the nest of the Skua living close
to the station, a station that probably looks to the Skua
something like King's Cross does for Sydneysiders.
The station lies in a wonderful spot.
On one side there is the Campbell ice tongue, a white strip
underlying the horizon, on the other the Melbourne mountain,
just a tall white cone, with a cyan crevasse on the side.
After an hour, I reached the top of
the hill with John and then proceeded to the harbour on the
other side of the hill that is still iced in this season.
Sometimes John would get some footage with his camera. When
he filmed, I tried to be silent, to let him record the "noise"
of Antarctica. The temperature was mild, and the wind just
a gentle breeze. When he stopped to get footage of the stones
that the wind has worn in unusual but delicate profiles, it
was possible to hear the absolute silence. In front of me
there was a mountain, lying around a frozen harbour. A small
iceberg was locked there earlier this summer, waiting ice
melting to disappear definitively. A small depression surrounding
the iceberg was unexpectedly green.
The surprising thing when you get to
Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica, -74S latitude, is how such a deserted
and remote place can look friendly and gentle in the summer.
Forget Shakleton and frightening stories. A part of me would
like to feel like an "antarctic hero", as somebody
once called me. But unfortunately, this is just not the case:
I could spend years in Terra Nova not getting annoyed, as
the Italians have choosen a region in one of the best places
on the coast to build their first station.
When I was coming here in the 90's,
the organization was still not perfect and most of the results
were due to the skills of individuals. Now, after several
trips to the US stations, I was feeling that things have to
change, and the Organization be improved to deal with the
needs of the group. But when I stepped out off the C130 onto
the thin layer of ice with the other fourty people flying
with us, I found just about all the personnel of the station
waiting like it was the only aircraft that had ever landed.
I probably embraced 30 people, anybody was recognizing and
greeting anybody else, a lot of neurons in my brain were co-operating
to recognize people lying there (sometime successfully, more
often not).
That's what it is to belong to a nation.
Or a group. The same things you have been considering a defect
(e.g., a natural tendancy to lack in an organization), can
transform into an exceptional skill in another situation.
And you realize that people are essentially the same and the
only real difference resides within ourselves.
Paolo
Sunday
3rd December 2000 - Pt 2
From
John Storey.....
The story so far:
 Paolo
and I arrived at Terra Nova Bay just after 6 pm last night.
It is the quickest trip to Antarctica either us of has ever
made---in Paolo's case just 23 hours door-to door from UNSW.
This is considerably faster than he could have gotten to Rome...
My own trip was a few hours slower,
simply because I took a flight to Christchurch earlier in
the day so I could visit the Whispertech company. This proved
a very enlightening visit---the Whispertech Stirling-engine
power generator is a wonderful piece of technology that could
one day be an excellent replacement for the thermo-electric
generator (TEG) we currently use in the AASTO. (Regular readers
of the South Pole Diaries will know that the TEG is not one
of our favourite things. This stems mainly from its habit
of spitting the dummy on a regular basis and spewing hot hydrochloric
acid and HF over our electronics.) The Whispertech donk may
well prove to be one of the best things to come out of New
Zealand since Andre.
The Managing Director spent a couple of hours showing me around
their research and production areas, and was very optimistic
about their possible application in Antarctica.
The Whispertech co-generation unit
consists of a four-cylinder double-acting Stirling engine
directly driving an alternator. Part of the extreme cleverness
is in the wobble-plate crankshaft, which sort of gyrates around
like a belly-dancer's hips while the pistons go up and down.
More of the cleverness can be found in the fact that all the
moving parts are fully sealed, keeping the working fluid (in
this case nitrogen) from leaking out and turning into hydrochloric
acid or whatever. The whole arrangement produces 750 watts
of electricity and a handy amount of heat, all the while burning
modest quantities of propane or diesel fuel and making less
noise than your average fridge. I want one.
On Saturday morning Paolo and I arrived
at Christchurch CDC (Clothing Distribution Centre) at 8 am.
We were fitted with our gear in record time and went straight
to the flight check-in for a scheduled 10 am departure. There
was the usual last-minute delay (this time to add more fuel
to the Hercules, after a fuel gauge had mis-read), and we
were away by 11:15. Being unable to understand any more than
a few words of Italian I was able to relax completely during
all the announcements, even finding words like "incendio"
and "emergenza" quite soothing. I must find out what
they mean some day.
We landed smoothly on the sea-ice runway
after what seemed a very quick trip. The unloading of both
passengers and cargo from the plane was extremely efficient,
with the result that we were quickly settled in to the station.
(That is, I was quickly settled in. Everyone else was hugging
and kissing and greeting long lost friends. It was great to
see.) Unfortunately the station was temporarily a bit over-crowded.
Paolo and I (and, as we later found out, the other two folk
travelling with us to Dome C tonight) are sleeping in a modified
refrigerated shipping container---one that has previously
been used as a dormitory on an overland traverse. Oddly enough
it is fitted out with Australian power points, useful enough
under the circumstances.
After a quick breather Paolo and I
took a stroll up the valley and over some small hills. It
was a crystal clear day and the view was spectacular. From
the hilltop we could see how the ice was receding back from
the ocean as summer proceeds, eventually to engulf the runway
on which we had just landed. The runway will only be useable
for another few days. The scenery was breathtaking; the hills
dotted with extraordinary rock formations where the wind had
undercut rocks to create quite implausible overhanging structures.
Terra Nova Bay station itself is built
on the rocks next to the sea, in what is possibly the most
beautiful location of any Antarctic station. Dominating the
horizon is the active volcano, Mount Melbourne. The station
itself consists largely of shipping containers bolted together
and popped up on stilts, giving it the appearance of a giant
Lego model. Every room is the same size and shape (modulo-n),
though it's remarkable how different the character of each
room can be. As befits an Italian station, there is an industrial-strength
coffee machine in the common room, and the washrooms are thoughtfully
provided with a hair drier alongside each basin.
Just above the station are a small
group of buildings modelled along the lines of Tyrolean ski
lodges. Some are dormitories, others are just so you can get
away from it all, play guitar, sing and enjoy the view.
Dinner was full of cheer, helped along
by the wine and an enormous (and delicious) cake baked by
the chef to celebrate the birthdays of a couple of team-members.
This was washed down with Prosecco (an agreeable Italian sparkling
wine) and strong coffee.
 This
morning all the new-comers had a 90-minute briefing by the
station leaders. I suspect it was not particularly riveting
even for those who speak the language. For me, I was happy
to pretend I was at an Italian opera for which the music was
yet to be written. Occasionally everyone would laugh (usually
after the station doctor had just said something) causing
me a moment or two of concern about what potential medical
disaster I might be about to unwittingly expose myself to.
On the way back to the main building we came across an Adele
penguin who was wandering around the station---just checking
it out and completely unconcerned about the human inhabitants.
After lunch we discovered that we'd
been bumped up to tonight's flight. Unfortunately our equipment
won't accompany us immediately: our flight will be fully loaded
with the four us, three high-tech electric toilets and a bandsaw.
Oh yes, and a few boxes labelled "Eiskernkiste". I'm
not sure what this means but "Eis" is German for ice-cream
and "Kern" is German for nucleus, so I think what we
have here are a couple of nuclear-powered ice-cream makers.
When we arrive in Dome C we won't be in a fit state to start
work immediately on our equipment, so as long as it follows
us tomorrow we'll be fine. We may even have tried out the
toilet and the ice-cream makers by then.
John
Monday
4th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
 Sunday
evening saw us wolfing down an early dinner and walking down
to the skiway to climb aboard the Twin Otter to Dome C. The
Twin Otter is a remarkable aircraft, able to take off and
land on a handkerchief. Because of this they've built a short
Twin Otter skiway just a couple of hundred metres from the
dining room. (The Hercules runway is many times longer, and
is much further away to put it on thicker ice.) We were delayed
from taking off for a few minutes while about twenty Adele
penguins wandered across the skiway. Normally birds are a
real problem around airports because they get sucked into
the engines once you're airborne. With penguins this is not
an issue, you just have to steer around them on the ground.
We then had a most enjoyable flight.
The Twin Otter has much more space (per person) than the Herc.
It has windows---lots of them. You sit facing forward, as
in any proper means of transport, whereas in a Herc you sit
across the plane in long rows, your boots crushed against
someone's shins and someone else's boots delicately resting
in your groin. In the Twin Otter the noise is tolerable without
earplugs and flying at 500 feet gives you a great view. The
fact that it only flies at half the speed of the Herc is no
problem because you're having so much fun.
After about 2 hours we landed at "Mid-point
Charlie" to refuel and stretch our legs. Here the enormity
of the Antarctic plateau began to sink in: we'd flown over
a completely featureless landscape for two hours and still
had two hours to go, and Dome C itself is barely half-way
across the plateau. Mid-point Charlie is exactly as I had
imagined it---a short skiway delineated by 44-gallon drums
and black plastic bags full of snow, a cluster of fuel drums,
and a small patch of yellow snow.
We arrived around 1 am only to find
that Dome C considered this to be 8 pm, which wasn't such
a bad thing because we then had a second dinner. Dome C is
a wonderful place; from the air just a tiny group of buildings
in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The word "dome"
implies some kind of geographical feature, but in reality
the ground is flat to within 50 metres elevation over a 75
kilometre radius of the station. There are around 35 people
here at present, mostly Italians, somewhat fewer French and
a handful of other nationalities. There is one woman. The
atmosphere is very friendly, the food is terrific and the
sky is unbelievably clear and blue. It's a great place for
an observatory!
We've been allocated part of a laboratory
that the EPICA ice-drilling folk had planned to put ice cores
in until their drill got stuck 800 metres down last year.
At present it's -20C in there; we've turned the heaters on
and it should be quite toasty by the time our instrument arrives.
This morning the station paramedic
grabbed me and clamped a thing on my finger to measure the
amount of oxygen in my blood. The resulting reading was apparently
such that in Sydney under normal circumstances they'd hurl
me into hospital and put me on life support. Here, at 3,800
m pressure altitude, such readings are considered only as
a mild source of amusement for the medical staff. They write
them down in a little book along with your pulse rate and
weight, no doubt to be eventually published somewhere in a
learned treatise on whether or not Diamox is a Good Thing.
An unfortunate effect of the lowered
oxygen content in the bloodstream is that your brain functions
poorly at best. One side effect is a loss of judgement. You
can write something that you think is incredibly amusing,
only to find that the Microsoft Humour Checker has just underlined
it in red and the little twisted paper clip thingy is ostentatiously
throwing up in the corner of your screen. I guess I just have
to learn to live with that.
Speaking of Microsoft, things had gone
so well today that I even attempted to connect my Mac to the
NT network. I had brought with me a clever little piece of
software that I knew would make the task trivial. Anyway,
with the help of the station IT guru we got the Mac and the
NT server to recognise each other (the server even allocated
me an IP number!), but apart from trading insults the two
computers steadfastly refused to communicate. Plus ca change...
Late this morning saw the arrival of
an overland traverse from the French coastal station of Dumont
D'Urville. These traverses are known locally as "raids"---a
term that implies we were about to be sacked and pillaged.
If so we were in big trouble, our only means of defence being
a bandsaw and the nuclear powered icecream makers. Fortunately
these raids are entirely friendly and bring with them all
the heavy supplies for the station. This one consisted of
a couple of dozen large trailers and sleds, pulled by massive
Caterpillar tractors. This trip had been unusually slow, taking
14 days instead of the usual 11, as a couple of tractors had
broken down and had to be left along the way for later recovery.
Most of the station came out to watch the arrival and to greet
the new-comers. For the rest of the day the various containers
were unloaded and stacked on berms. Many of these goods will
be used in the construction of the new station.
Just after dinner the Twin Otter appeared
again on the horizon---first the small arc of a vapour trail,
then a black dot and finally the bright orange and white plane
slithering down the skiway. It brought with it our instrument
(SUMMIT) in five boxes, some fresh food, and what appears
from the labelling on the boxes to be a French experiment.
Each flight can carry up to about a tonne of stuff. Within
fifteen minutes everything was out of the plane and loaded
onto a skidoo or into the bucket of a bulldozer. Our lab is
now piled high with stuff---tomorrow we will unpack and get
to work.
By the way, the high-tech electric
toilets turn out to be a great disappointment. From the description
on the boxes I was expecting technology so advanced it could
only have been reverse-engineered from the dunny of a captured
alien space craft---possibly involving antiproton beams that
would turn the waste material into pure energy and incidentally
provide power for half the station. Alas, it is a simply a
cremation process that sends puffs of unpleasant-smelling
smoke out the chimney. Always black smoke, never white.
John
Tuesday
5th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
 Today
I saw my first 22 degree ice halo (with sun dogs) since arriving
at Dome C. Now I feel at home.
We got the day off to a good start
by borrowing a cordless drill, unpacking all the boxes, and
setting the instrument up. By lunch we were able to communicate
remotely with it using the HP800 Omnibook and we were looking
unstoppable.
The highlight of a superb lunch was
the asparagus soup. I will do a proper write-up later of "Chez
Jean Louis", the only 5-star restaurant in Antarctica,
but suffice to say this chef is extraordinary.
Nemesis overtook us in the early afternoon
when we realised that the static shocks we had been getting
all morning had also fried one of our PC/104 computer boards.
Grounding (earthing) things in Antarctica is always a problem
(the nearest decent ground to Dome C is 3250 metres below
us), and working in a plastic building doesn't help. Nevertheless,
I should have been more careful. We've now tied everything
together with heavy copper wire that Paolo stripped out of
a mains lead, but this is too late to save our ADC card. Not
to worry---we have a spare.
Speaking of mains cables, we were so
mindful of the fact that European plugs are different to Oz
ones that we brought no fewer than 24 Australian outlets.
What makes this amusing is that we have only about three things
to plug into them, having left behind all but one of our Australian
IEC leads! What's more, the station is liberally sprinked
with Australian outlets anyway, for reasons that presently
escape me.
By late afternoon Summit was performing
all of its functions and we were thinking of where to set
it up outside. The lab we are in couldn't be better---it is
just a short walk from the other buildings of the station,
is large, warm and comfortable, with good bench space etc.
We think we will leave the Omnibook there all season, and
simply pop Summit out the door. There's even a cable duct
to run our wires through!
We hooked up an RS232 link between
Summit and the Omnibook because it may be easier to operate
in an automatic mode that way. Andre had thoughtfully supplied
a cable with two connectors on each end, but it was still
in its original plastic bag---giving me little confidence
it would work. In preparation for the impending struggle with
this most recalcitrant of all computer protocols, I ratted
through the boxes looking for various things I thought might
be helpful. One looked like a null modem but turned out to
be an Autocad dongle. Things weren't looking good.
Anyway, for the first time in my life
I was able to see an RS232 link work first time. Probably
this was because Paolo did it.
Dinner included a champagne toast to
the departing traverse team, who will spend the next 11 days
getting back to Dumont d'Urville.
All that remained to do prior to the
final assembly was to tame the stepper motor that drives the
scanning mirror. This works, but vibrates and jumps around
in a horrible fashion. Such is my irrational dislike of stepper
motors that one part of me would have been perfectly happy
to leave it to vibrate itself to death, scattering across
the snow the springs and magnets and ratchets and whatever
other pieces of junk its misguided designers had thought to
build it out of. Paolo, however, took a more sympathetic approach
and by the time I arrived back in the lab he had adjusted
the various drive parameters and had it humming like a bird.
Getting Summit out the door will be
an interesting challenging because it weighs 250 kg or so.
We were hoping there'd be a forklift lying around but there
isn't. There is however a sort of ride-on elevated platform
thing that we might be able to use as a crane. The ride-on
controls are broken so you have to walk along beside it using
the external controls, giving the impression of someone taking
a giraffe for a walk.
We shall see.
John
Wednesday
6th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
We spent the morning learning more
about the rotator, and contemplating observing scripts for
Summit. After lunch we moved on to the final assembly of Summit,
which proved to be remarkably challenging. I will not bore
readers with the technical details of which parts fitted and
which bits didn't, nor will I indulge in graphic descriptions
of just how horrible silicone heat-sink compound is when it's
smeared over everything. We were very grateful to have such
an excellent lab space to do it in, it would not have been
much fun in a tent.
 We
even found a fork-lift! It was actually sitting at the end
of our lab, cunningly disguised as, well, a fork-lift. We
had of course noticed it but decided it was unsuitable because
all its things were in the wrong place. (I'm sure there are
some specific technical terms for the various "things"
that fork-lifts have on them, like forks, bit that holds the
forks, legs, little wheels, and sticking-out-bits that stop
it falling over. Suffice to say these were all in the wrong
place.) Anyway, it turned out they were all adjustable and
so now we have a fully customised fork-lift better adapted
to our purpose than anything we could have dreamt of. As I
type, the Summit instrument is poised 2 metres above the ground
waiting to be lowered onto the Summit electronics rack.
Here at Dome C we are some 1700 km
away from the South Pole, or 15 degrees. At this time of year
the sun never sets, but at midnight dips to within 8 degrees
of the horizon, rising to about 40 degrees elevation at noon.
There causes a significant diurnal temperature variation,
from a high of nearly -25 C at midday to well below -40 C
at midnight. On some days there's quite a bit of low-level
haze, and on other occasions it's more generally overcast.
But most of the time it's just a crystal clear blue sky from
horizon to horizon.
It is very striking just how low the
wind speed is here. It hasn't been more than a couple of knots
the whole time we have been here, and it's always from exactly
the same direction.
Speaking of which, this afternoon Luigi
led us on a tour of the wind generator and energy storage
facility. This is still at the experimental stage. A 5 kW
wind generator has been modified for the low wind conditions
by changing the blade pitch angle and replacing the gear-box
driven alternator with a direct-drive high efficiency unit.
Several metres below the ground a well-insulated shipping
container holds a bank of lead-acid batteries and two large
cylinders of glycol. The latter act as thermal storage---any
excess energy from the wind generator is used to keep the
chamber warm. This is where we will place Icecam, which will
arrive at Dome C around Christmas.
Tonight's dinner featured home-made
yoghurt with a variety of liquers available to jolly it up.
The glazed pear tart wasn't bad, either.
John
Thursday
7th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
So what happened to today's diary entry,
you ask. Why have John and Paolo failed to submit a report
by the midnight deadline for transfer over Intelsat B? Have
they lost interest? Do they have nothing to report? Or have
they simply become, to use the expression Paolo found in the
Dictionary of Australian Slang, a "pack of bludgers"?
 Quite
the contrary. Thursday was the big one; the day when we got
everything assembled, wrestled the software to the ground,
solved a whole bunch of problems we didn't even know we had
until today, and crossed off almost all of our "to-do"
list. It was a very long day that started at 5:30 am for me
and finished at 1:30 am on Friday for Paolo. It began with
the Summit instrument poised over the electronics rack on
the tines of a remarkably versatile forklift, and finished
with the completed instrument sitting on the floor by the
doorway, ready for its first foray into the great outdoors.
Along the way we met and overcame a
series of unexpected challenges. One difficulty was that the
software automatically measures the temperature at 18 points
around the instrument once every 60 seconds. When it does
so it generates enough interference to---as Paolo put it---bring
down a C130 Hercules. That being the case it could probably
down a smaller plane, say a Twin Otter, at a range of up to
20 km. That could explain why we haven't seen one for several
days. Fortunately Michael Ashley was able to send us a software
work-around. We're still measuring the temperature of a 10kg
lump of copper every minute, but at least it's not completely
trashing our data any more.
My relationship with Eric also became
a little strained because of a misunderstanding between us
over the use of semicolons. (Eric is the fine young program
that actually runs Summit. He's a likeable lad, but somewhat
pedantic and a little unforgiving.) Anyway, semicolons are
not something I normally use much---my writing style being
characterised---so I have been told---by excessive---possibly
even profligate---use of the m-dash. It turns out that our
stepper motor controller is into semicolons, while Eric is
not. Sorting this out took a couple of hours.
Paolo set up a blue-foam customising
plant at one end of the lab and produced an excellent insulating
jacket which will keep Summit warm in temperatures that could
later dip to -80C.
At 8 am Friday a bulldozer will come
and drag Summit out of the building, ready for first light!
John
Friday
8th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
At 8 am the bulldozer arrived to take
Summit from the lab and set it up on the snow. (Actually it
was a little after 8. As Paolo explained, "8 am" translates
into Italian as "Some time after 8 we will arrive and do
what you've asked of us, plus anything else that needs doing
and we'll all have fun doing it". And so it was that the
bulldozer (a D4, for the technically minded, equipped with
forks) first levelled the snow with its forks, then poked
those same forks through the door of the lab (which was open---you
need to be careful how you specify these things where bulldozers
are concerned), gently lifted Summit up and backed it out
into the sunshine. We placed Summit on the ground, then used
a spirit level to align it. (You can use a spirit level in
Antarctica if you're quick. If you muck around too long the
bubble freezes. At this point either everything or nothing
appears to be horizontal.)
With the power cable and RS232 line
poked through a convenient cable duct into the lab, we were
taking data within 30 minutes. Once the calibration cycle
was over, the mirror in Summit turned so that it was looking
straight up through the sky. In Sydney, the instrument would
see only a few tens of meters through the dense, moist atmosphere
to record a signal corresponding to something like room temperature.
Here at Dome C the signal dropped to something like we see
in the lab when looking at liquid nitrogen. Instantly we knew
that we were seeing right through the atmosphere and looking
at the cold of interstellar space! As predicted, the cold,
dry air of Dome C, combined with its considerable altitude
(3,250 metres) endows the sky with a transparency that is
probably better than that at any other observatory site on
earth. It is that "probably" that the Summit experiment
is designed to quantify.
After making our first complete "sky-dip"
with Summit we dashed off some emails to the team back at
UNSW who had worked so hard over the past 18 months to make
Summit ready.
Next we had to look at the data to
see that they were making sense. This turned out to be surprisingly
difficult because even a quick analysis requires a well-oxygenated
brain. I believe that the maximum permissible safe altitude
for any calculation involving exponentials should be set at
about 3,000 metres. After a few false starts we concluded
that indeed the data showed the sky to be at the right temperature,
and to be about 75% transparent (ie, tau = 1.3) at our observing
wavelength of 350 microns.
A few worries remain with the instrument,
not the least being that the beautiful little Swiss-made chopper
motor sounds like it's thrown a con-rod, and that Eric (the
data-taking software process) gets bored after about 30 minutes
and just sort of stops. I suspect that the Eric problem somehow
revolves around semicolons, and that Michael Ashley will sort
it out in a flash. The chopper is more of a concern, and we
are having a spare flown out from UNSW asap.
The demise of the digital output driver
chip on our PC/104 ADC card is not proving too restricting.
The only thing that really needs to be switched off and on
automatically is the chopper motor, and that only because
it's sick and we don't want it to scatter its windings across
the snow. To solve the problem we've installed a makeshift
plug to perform this function manually (the on/off thing,
not the scattering). So, when the software says "chop on",
we have to rush out the door, open up the electronics rack,
unplug the plug, close the rack and rush inside again. It's
not as bad as it sounds, even at -40C.
In any case we have asked Andre, back
at UNSW, to send us some more of that special blue smoke that
they put into computer chips. It seems that the static electricity
spark that hit our digital driver chip caused all of its blue
smoke to leak out, and now it's not working any more. Replacing
the chip here is not really an option---it's one of those
tiny surface-mount things with a gazillion legs and the only
tools we have are a Dick Smith soldering iron and whatever
we can persuade the cook to lend us from the kitchen.
Meanwhile Paolo is stoutly maintaining
that there is nothing wrong with our chopper motor, that it
always made that noise, and it's just that it's so quiet here
you could hear a pin drop. He may be right---I notice that
the fan in the electronics rack sounds like a gas turbine
on full throttle.
In the morning I was also able to talk
briefly with Jon Everett at the South Pole via the HF SSB
radio (see glossary).
The signal was very weak and it was difficult to convey any
real information, but it was a useful experiment. The HF antennas
here are fairly basic. Given that there's no shortage of space
around here, it's tempting to imagine putting up a large rhombic
antenna. In future, this could give us an excellent, instant
communication link with the rest of our team. We also talked
to the Australian coastal station of Casey using HF. The signal
here was much stronger, but still not quite enough. Looks
like we need two rhombics.
Communication is more usually made
from Dome C via Inmarsat B, a geostationary satellite that
can handle both data and voice. An email transfer is made
twice a day, while the telephone is available 24 hours a day
for anyone with US$2.80/minute to spend. Unlike Iridium, the
Inmarsat satellites are far enough away that a largish (1-meter)
antenna is needed. Balanced against this is the fact that,
again unlike Iridium, they still actually work.
Life at Dome C continues to be very
pleasant. The waste heat from the diesel generator is used
to melt snow and heat the resulting water, so there's sufficient
available for hot showers. Perhaps the least satisfactory
aspect of Dome C is the "Free-time Tent", which is
where the sole computer for email use resides. The Free-time
Tent is a pleasant enough structure in itself, but is also
the main smoking room for the station. Australians are unused
to the level of cigarette smoke that Europeans find perfectly
normal.
Sleeping accommodation at Dome C is
mainly in large, Canadian-made "Weatherhaven" tents,
which have a rigid aluminium frame and an oil-fired heater.
They are very large and rather grand after the "Jamesway"
tents of the South Pole. The space is shared by eight people
in an open-plan arrangement, though fortunately there are
only four of us in our tent. Like the Jamesways the only real
inconvenience is the lack of acoustic shielding. It would
be an interesting project (perhaps for an undergraduate) to
calculate the minimum number of sleeping males you need to
place in one room to ensure that there is at least one person
snoring all the time.
There is a lanky Englishman visiting
Dome C as part of the EPICA ice-drilling project. When he
found he was too long for his bed the staff here quickly made
a customised bed with an extra 30cm of legroom. It seems nothing
is too much trouble to keep the scientists happy.
For the rest of the day we experimented
with different observing macros and tried to accumulate as
much data as possible. Our data are showing a funny zig-zag
pattern which I would like to get to the bottom of before
I have to leave. We have been plotting our data up using Excel
on poodle, and making attractive graphs in lots of colours.
Data always looks so much more convincing after Excel has
finished with it.
John
Saturday
9th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
Today was the day of the zig-zags.
After the initial excitement of making our first ever measurements
at Dome C began to fade, we had to confess to each other that
the data did look a bit on the weird side. Instead of the
signal from the sky smoothly increasing as we looked at ever
greater angles from the zenith, it was jumping up and down
in a completely regular but nevertheless inexplicable pattern.
Naturally we had lots of theories as to what might be going
wrong, but as the day wore on we seemed to be making little
progress. Finally we tracked it down to the stepper motor
that drives our rotator mirror. We were running a small current
through its windings to keep the mirror rigidly fixed at each
position where we took data. This current was interfering
with our extremely sensitive detector, and basically messing
everything up. Switching off the current solved the problem
completely.
I have never been a fan of stepper
motors, as their deceptive simplicity hides a capacity for
pure evil. Today's experience has done little to change that
opinion. In fact, I may go so far as to write a glossary entry
on stepper motors.
With that problem solved a new one
has emerged; namely that our signal becomes very noisy at
one particular elevation angle. At first we thought it was
just the sun getting into our beam, but then the sun moved
on the way it does and the noise was still there.
 Just
after breakfast a Twin Otter arrived with Karim and Jean-Michel
from the University of Nice. They are here to perform a series
of balloon launches to measure the microthermal turbulence
of the atmosphere as a function of altitude. This will complement
the work done a few years ago at the South Pole by the late
Rodney Marks, in collaboration with Jean Vernin.
This is the first Twin Otter we've
had for a few days, and it was good to see several boxes of
fresh fruit and vegies being unloaded as well.
After lunch I spent some time discussing
my impending departure from Dome C and return to Sydney. It
will involve a Twin Otter flight to McMurdo, then a flight
in a US C130 back to Christchurch. We called McMurdo on the
HF SSB rig, and with any luck they are now organising a seat
on a Hercules for me.
Tomorrow I have been asked to give
the inaugural Dome C Science Talk in the Free-time Tent. As
there are no A/V facilities I will have to just stand up and
speak, and maybe get Paolo to do some street theatre to accompany
the talk.
John
New
glossary entry!
Stepper Motor. An electromechanical
device which is very simple in concept yet surprisingly complicated
in detail. Failure to appreciate this has been one of the
greatest sources of human misery since the invention of Lotto.
Were it not for the fact that they are extraordinarily useful
little devices I would have nothing to do with them.
Sunday
10th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
I awoke this morning at 5 am after
a strange dream in which I had just finishing giving a lecture
and started on question time. The first question was from
someone wanting to know how to write some complicated expression
in LaTeX. He was definitely asking the wrong person. While
trying to think up a plausible answer it suddenly occurred
to me why our instrument was recording a huge amount of noise
at one particular position of the mirror. It just had to be
that stepper motor again, oscillating back and forth about
its requested position and unable to settle down because we'd
turned off its holding current. All that we had to do was
to persuade it to be content with getting the position nearly
right, and to stop being so obsessive about the last decimal
place or two.
Sure enough, with this more laid-back
approach to life, the stepper motor has performed faultlessly
all day and all our data points are nice and clean.
Meanwhile Michael Ashley has come up
with some good ideas about the "Bored Eric" problem. These,
together with our own experimenting, mean that we can now
actually walk away from Summit for hours at a time and be
confident it is still recording the sky for us. Paolo has
written a macro called "nice_dreams" which allows us
to catch up some sleep while Summit goes about its business
of collecting data.
The remaining problem concerned the
ADC board that we had blown up on the very first day within
the first hour of switching Summit on. The only essential
function we had lost was the ability to turn the chopper motor
off under software control. This we had worked around by installing
a manual switch, and now all that could go wrong was the mains
power could fail in the middle of the night, switch back on
again, and cause Summit's chopper to fry itself. Power outages
are bound to occur, if only because the two diesel generators
are swapped over once a week. In the end we decided to leave
the faulty ADC board in place, and to rig up a magnetic switch
that would keep Summit switched off should the power fail.
This appears to work well, and means there is one less thing
for us to worry about.
We could replace the ADC card, as we
have a spare, but I am loath to do so. For one thing, we are
not well set up for the job and risk further static damage
to the PC/104 computer. Secondly the PC/104 computer hardware
is a stupid fiddly thing designed by ex-stepper-motor engineers.
Thirdly, it's sitting outside in the electronics rack where
the average daily temperature is around -33 C.
Today being Sunday we got on with a
few housekeeping jobs. I did my laundry, using one of those
amazing European washing machines that take about four hours
to wash a pair of socks, only to reduce them to their component
molecules during the spin-dry process.
 Sadly,
it was also time to organise my departure from Dome C. My
itinerary now is complicated by the fact that I will fly to
McMurdo as an Italian, metamorphose there into an American,
finally to revert to being an Australian once the NSF have
taken me by C130 to Christchurch. All this was negotiated
over the HF SSB radio, a process that involved using the powerful
Rohde & Schwarz transceiver with the crook antenna to talk,
and the weaker Motorola transceiver with the good antenna
to listen.
Chef Jean-Louis threw his all into
Sunday lunch, handsomely exceeding even the high expectations
of the station. It was the usual sort of affair: saumon fume
(smoked salmon)on crisp toast on a bed of fresh salad for
starters, followed by a pasta course of ravioli and then sauteed
NZ mussels with herbs accompanied by an excellent unwooded
Australian chardonnay. The main course was roast crocodile,
with a good Coonawarra cabernet/shiraz. Dessert was ile flottante,
which is a soft meringue floating in caramel sauce and drizzled
with toffee. The Berlucchi was, according to Paolo, not one
of the better vintages, but to my palate this Italian methode
Champenoise wine was perfectly acceptable complement to the
dessert. Lunch slowly wound down over a fresh fruit platter
with Kiwi fruit, assorted cheeses, individually made espresso
coffee and biscuits.
After lunch we checked the email and
decided to carry out some more tests. We took a break to watch
our colleagues, Jean-Michel and Karim, from the University
of Nice launch a weather balloon and radiosonde. They have
about 11 balloons, and their next flights will include microthermal
sensors to measure the turbulence of the atmosphere. Launching
the balloon invovles first inflating it with helium until
it can lift the 375 gram weight it is tied to---in this case
a can of VB beer. Next the batteries of the balloon payload
are activated by dunking them in water for a few minutes,
and finally the payload is swapped for the VB and away goes
the balloon. The signals from the payload are received in
the balloon-launch tent, and consist of jolly little tunes
not unlike the ones our sodar plays. The computer can then
interpret these as temperature, pressure humidity and wind
speed (which it gets from a little GPS).
After dinner I gave a science lecture
in the Free-time Tent, using poodle to drive a 20-inch monitor
(which was the biggest thing we could find). Being able to
use Powerpoint avoided the need for Paolo to do street theatre
and made for a colourful presentation. I think it went over
ok; at least no-one wandered off out the tent saying "I may
be some time..."
Around 10:30 pm we were taken on a
tour of the new station by Augusto Lori, the station leader.
The present station is really just a construction camp for
the permanent facility, which will consist of two 17 metre
diameter cylinders linked by a walkway. The cylinders will
be three stories high; one will be the "noisy" building
and one will be the "quiet" one. At the present moment
one cylinder has the frame almost finished, and the foot pads
for the second have been laid. Scheduled opening date is 2003,
after which time Dome C will be ready for year round operation.
John
Monday
11th December 2000
From
John Storey.....
I awoke early and went to see if Summit
was still working. Just because Paolo and I were both asleep
was no reason for our instrument to be. As it turned out it
had stoppped shortly before I arrived---not because of any
lethargy on Eric's part, but simply because we hadn't typed
"go" enough times the previous evening. That's an easy one
to fix, and Summit is now doing about 100 sky dips per day.
The remaining problems appear to be
trivial. The UNSW team are now arguing vociferously about
the best sequence to take data in. These are good arguments.
I like them much more than the ones that begin: "Oops,
that's blown up the last one of those. What the hell do we
do now...?".
As one more check we placed a special
wide-angle blackbody source (otherwise known as a C-130 orange
carry-on bag) over the entrance window of Summit. If everything
was working properly the signal should have been much the
same at all elevation angles---it was.
However another problem is the sun.
Even though the outside temperature is averaging -30C, we
are so high and the air is so thin that the sun is really
packing a wallop. There is no wind to speak of, and so anything
the sun shines on gets quite warm. This includes our cold
reference load, which is bolted to the case of the instrument
and is supposed to sit at the ambient air temperature. After
a morning's dose of sun it can reach +8C! We (ie, Paolo) will
fix this problem by moving Summit closer to the building,
where it will be in the shade for the critical part of the
day. This move will require a bulldozer. I can think of a
right way and a wrong way to use a bulldozer for this purpose;
I am confident Paolo will choose the former.
The sun can also melt the snow alongside
buildings where a natural sun-trap forms. The result is slick,
icy surface that is very slippery.
 The
station also melts snow to create the water for washing and
general purposes. This is done using waste heat from the diesel
generator. Drinking water is brought from Dumont D'Urville
by traverse. I asked the station manager why this was so,
given that we are sitting on about 3,250 metres of the cleanest
(frozen) water in the world. Apparently it's hard to get the
diesel taste out of the water---the system needs some minor
upgrades.
The Twin Otter to take me to McMurdo
was due at 8 am, and this turned out to be 8 am Italian time---in
the best possible sense. I filled in the time doing some filming,
including an interview in Italian with the station doctor.
(Paolo did the Italian bit; I did the filming.)
Did I mention that we are making yet
another block-buster movie? Tentatively called "Paolo of
the Antarctic" and shot entirely on location, it is expected
for release some time soon after we've found a producer, an
edit studio and a whole heap of money. Watch out for it on
the big screen!
 Anyway,
once the plane landed a substantial fraction of the station
came out to greet the new arrivals and to help off-load the
cargo. That's one of the great things about Dome C---everyone
just chips in where they can. It is very much a village. Several
people came and shook me warmly by the hand to wish me farewell,
even people I had barely met. Jean-Louis packed me an in-flight
lunch, and then it was time to leave. The plane was returning
to McMurdo, and had just myself and a Twin Otter engineer
as passengers. The pilot agreed to do a slow lap of the station
at 400 feet so I could get some good aerial shots and then
we headed up to 13,500 feet for the cruise back. Since the
plane is unpressurised this was a heady altitude---I was glad
I was already well aclimatised. Unfortunately poodle was not.
Some goose had turned the heater in the tent last night down
to the point where the temperature dropped below freezing.
Sitting in a bag on the floor, poodle's batteries had gotten
cold enough to temporarily stop working. (Rechargeable lithium
batteries are surprisingly sensitive to temperature. This
is in stark contrast to the non-rechargeable lithiums (lithium
thionyl chloride) that we will use to power Icecam, even at
-55C.)
 We
stopped again at Mid-point Charlie to refuel and to load six
empty 44-gallon fuel drums into the plane. (Americans call
these "55 gallon drums" because of a misunderstanding about
gallons. Other people call them "200 litre drums", but very
few and no-one listens to them anyway. It's all the same drum.)
Nearing McMurdo the weather was exceptionally
clear and we had a fabulous view of the dry valleys and various
glaciers. This has been rather warm summer and at least one
of the "dry" valleys had a little stream running through it.
McMurdo is the same as ever except
that the food has improved out of sight. The McMurdo canteen
used to be one of the major hazards of Antarctic travel. Now
it serves tasty meals with abundant fresh
salads. They've even remodelled the dining room to include
large picture windows. My only complaint was the mislabelling
of some urns at the end of the room as "coffee", when they
in fact containing nothing of the kind.
The other
disappointment was the discovery that Eiskernkiste means "box
for putting ice cores in". In the end I was grateful for
this---no machine, nuclear powered or otherwise, would be
able to make icecream like Jean Louis does. That brings to
an end my diary for this year.
Over to you, Paolo!
John
Monday
11th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
"It has been great fun",
was the last statement I heard from John (Storey) before his
flight back to McMurdo, the largest station in Antarctica
and the US gateway to the cold continent. The Twin Otter taking
John back home will be in McM in a few hours. Then he will
be moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, in a noisy and crowded
US Hercules.
Actually I never understood exactly
what the word "fun" means for the Australians. Does
it means "it has *just* been fun", or "it has also
been fun". Maybe "It has been a great experience to
work with you, Paolo, as you are a great scientist and one
of the most pleasant people I ever met in my life".
In Italian, the translation of the
word fun - "divertimento" - is a bit too "light",
has an intrinsic lack of diligence, maybe due to our approach
a bit too cynical to candidly admit you are having a lot of
fun while working.
 Anyway,
the light and edgy Twin Otter took off after a slight delay.
The truth is that one of the pilots had to go to the toilet
for some natural needs (that demonstrates that, despite their
belief, that they are pretty different from God. At least
at the gastrointestinal level), but the toilet door handle
dismantled and he had to wait until the next person came to
use the bathroom before he could return to the aircraft.
This probably doesn't happen easily
at JFK or Sydney Airport, but let me say that here there are
no queues, you are not bothered by rapacious Duty Frees and
McDonalds. To board you have just to walk from a warm room
for about 30 meters on the snow to the aircraft, after the
pilot has switched off both the propellers, give a hand to
discharge the cargo, take some photos and board in.
This issue of "aircraft photos"
is a typical reason why I argue with my wife Jolanda when
I return from my Antarctic trip or, in general, from any trip.
The fact is that I'm impressed by any aircraft, just like
a kid, so I like to take a lot of pictures of the most disrupted
DC10 still available in the world. So, quite often I get pictures
"of my aircraft after landing", and some days later,
more pictures of "the same aircraft just before take off".
When I get back, I ask Jolanda and my son Leonardo, my predesigned
victims, to be chained to a chair for a couple of hours to
watch my pictures or my slides, of which there are usually
several hundred. The problem arises because "an aircraft
where I was sitting down after landing" and "the same
aircraft before take off with John Storey inside", despite
what I thought at the time, look just the same. The result
is a boring sequence of trivial aircraft pictures that could
put anybody to sleep faster than a hammer on their front.
Anyway, John is now heading North,
and I am now the only person left here in charge of the instrument,
with a lot of colleagues in Sydney (Michael A., Andre, Michael
B. and some others) just waiting for results, data quick looks,
checks, updates, information, questions, documentation and
replies to their questions......and the previous questions
I replied to so late that they thought I didn't reply at all.
When you are in Antarctica and there
is somebody else relying on you for instrument management,
quite often you find that they feel that you are just sleeping
and wandering around all the day, feeding yourself with huge
quantities of good food, playing cards and watching porno
movies.
The problem is that you feel exactly
the same about your colleagues back home, except for some
slight differences: they are just wandering around in a warm
breeze, in short pants, maybe swimming at Bondi Beach, browsing
the web, replying to hundreds of useless friend's e-mails,
playing Barbie's with their daughters, and at the end, enjoying
the easy life the moment you closed the door of the lab to
fly to the pole.
Both of these approaches are bad for
sure (except, perhaps, for that part about the huge quantities
of good food and something else...), but why would anybody
change their attitude a minute after you leave? No-one will
ever get to demonstrate it, like no-one can actually convince
you that you are snoring all the night as loud as a Wind Band
- the result is a slight complaining approach to your overseas
colleagues, a voile of tension made even more visible by the
delayed replies to e-mails that make people even more crazy.
Luckily, the instrument we brought
here "is a ripper", as the Australians like to say.
The first time I heard this word at UNSW, for some reason
I misunderstood the meaning of the word, thinking that "ripper"
meant something faulty from the beginning, a rusty piece of
metal, a swick. I replied with alot of suggestions which seemed
quite intelligent to me but that, in the end, turned out to
be completely silly, unrequested and meaningless.
Now I am very proud to say that the
instrument we installed just a few days ago here at Dome C
for atmospheric site testing, alias the SUMMIT, the submillimeter
tipper, is really a ripper (please note the lucky assonance).
The instrument is quietly acquiring his data, and a process
in the background, on the same computer I am currently writing
this email on, is safely transferring data to the hard disk,
for processing later.
How do they look? Are you interested
on this issue? Well, if yes, go ahead but, later, see a doctor.
Otherwise, just move to another less
boring web site like http://www.MargharetAlbreightfans.com.
I am not sure it exist, but it is probably more interesting
than the following.
For the survivors, this is the way
we receive rough data from our instrumentation:
[...]
waiting up to 120.0 seconds for rotator; hit key to abort:
R -2000
0.9957+/- 0.066
1.0166+/- 0.072
delaying 2 seconds; hit key to abort; time remaining:
z -2001
1
0
waiting up to 120.0 seconds for rotator; hit key to abort:
R -1000
0.4026+/- 0.071
0.3824+/- 0.089
delaying 2 seconds; hit key to abort; time remaining:
z -1001
1
0
Warm blackbody 16.29 C (raw = -2.76 V, 1482 counts) delaying
2 seconds; hit key to abort; time remaining:
1
0
[...]
Yes, this is the way Michael
Ashley, one of the most perverse researchers I have ever
met in my life, formatted the data throughput from the instrument.
To analyse it you will probably lose some of the remaining
diottries on both of your eyes, watching tiny characters quickly
flowing across the screen, ready to take note of the relevant
parts......but let me confess that this approach has demonstrated
itself to be reliable and safe, and able to run data acquisition
and instrument control programs on a computer with memory
more or less like the former ENIAC,
in order to reduce power consumption, a quite important constraint
in developing instrumentation for Antarctica.
For today, that's it. I have to get
to lunch.
See you tomorrow.
Paolo
Tuesday
12th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
Today's most noticeable
event, after John Storey's flight away, was the arrival of
a "bird".
 Yes,
a bird. There are a lot of things specific to life on a Scientific
Station placed on the Antarctic Plateau. Some of these are
related to life away from a civilized place, some others to
life in a cold place, others to being in the driest - yes,
it is - desert of the planet, and so on.
I arranged a tentative
and chaotic list of them, hoping to share with you, dear reader,
my deep feelings.
1) You spend all your
time within a region with a radius of 200 meter for months
To live on the Antarctic
Plateau is something similar to life on a wedding cake. Except
there is not a huge blade coming down soon or later to destroy
everything and cut the landscape in slices.
You look around and your
sight easily reaches the horizon, as the atmosphere is incredibly
transparent. Apart from the station, the horizon is a perfect
circle, about 4.7 Km away from your eyes - actually, a bit
less for John - that could leave you thinking there is a cliff
just over there, like the Ancients thought about the ocean.
Everything, up to the horizon, is white, flat ice, with the
sastrugi, continuously remodeled by the winds, shadowing the
surface and the view.
Well, if you leave the
station behind you, walking away from the station in any direction,
you feel a bit uncomfortable, thinking that you are going
to the actual "nihil arbor", or Null Harbor, as the Australians
call the most desolate regions of their country.
I noticed that noone likes
to feel like this way without good reason. There is just too
much silence when away, a feeling of "lack" and "emptiness"
that everybody dislikes. The consequence is that nobody will
try to just walk out of the Station without reasons, and you
will spend all your stay, that means 2-3 months, if there
is not a reason to get out, like to get ice samples, within
a 200 meter radius around the station.
2) There is no life
except you
That's obvious, but this
is something which can puzzle you. You leave a piece of cake
on the table, but no ants will come to get a bit. No cockroaches
to be cracked on a corner to annoy your woman, no noisy flies,
no cats or dogs barking in the neighbor's yard. No yards at
all. The Chef, as a joke, put a cat bed on the ground in the
kitchen, to prompt novices like John and myself complain about
it, as to bring animals or plants here is strictly forbidden
by the Antarctic Treaty, in order to avoid potentially catastrophic
consequences on the local fauna and flora (which flora, you
ask? Just a bit of lichens and moulds on the coastal region,
so far as I know). You see a shadow or a shine on a building's
wall, but it can't be, as your brain immediately suggests,
a rat or a cat.
There is nothing alive
except you on the Antarctic Plateau. And also you do not always
feel that you belong completely to the "life" category,
sometimes.
This is why, as I wrote
at the beginning, it has been a great experience to see a
bird (a petrella, or a skua according to others) fly over
the station, heading South. We are about 1000 Km away from
the sea, there is a "dead circle" surrounding us, about
this size.
What would a bird want
to do here? Probably he is annotating exactly the same in
his dairy, about a strange encounter with busy, red, unknown
mammals during his yearly flight to visit grandma.
3) There is no money
This is the common opinion
about scientific research in Australia, but I mean, in this
case, that we do not use money at all in the station. Everything,
at least in the Italian-French station of Dome C, is free.
At the South Pole you have to pay for alcohol, but the Italian
don't get drunk easily, or, perhaps, they put all their efforts
towards reducing excesses on this of the three classic vices.
Or, as somebody seems to think, they are just always drunk.
Think as you like, but
alcohol is free here.
4) You see the same
people every day
Every morning you get
the lift to your office, and meet different people, incredibly
interested in the screws that are holding in the lift button
panels, or to some invisible detail on the overhead light,
or just with the typical expression of "Well, I can't really
come out of that incredibly complex and important problem
I have been involved with for the last few weeks?".
Here, it can't happen.
Not only because this is the only continent with no lifts
(right, I haven't noticed it). The problem is that, apart
from people boarding out of the Twin Otters quite rarely,
you already know all the people you can meet here. Everybody
is available for a chat, all the people will ask if you want
to share an expresso when they are about to prepare it at
the Saeco Express machine.
Simply, there are no unknown
faces for two or three months or your life, and this, in my
opinion, removes some uncomfortable stress provided by civilization.
5) there is a huge
amount of light in summer
Yes I know that you know
that during summer there is no night around the polar region.
What I mean is that the common feeling is that the sun, ever
low above the horizon, just can't provide enough light and
you are embedded in a permanent dim light, in Antarctica.
Nothing is more false
than this. Summer Antarctica is the realm of light. You could
use welding glasses all the time and still naturally tighten
your eyes. Outside is the triumph of the light, with an incredible
UV excess that makes it impossible to withstand direct sunlight.
Think that everything around is white for thousands miles,
and that the atmosphere is outstandingly transparent, and
you'll understand what I mean.
The problem is that a
photographer may come to Antarctica and take pictures. Then
they have to sell them, but nobody will pay a buck for apparently
overexposed pictures. Moreover, a shadowed landscape looks
hundreds times more mysterious and fascinating than a place
looking like a beach at noon in August (in the Northern Hemisphere,
I mean). Automatic cameras, too, "normalize" lighting on any
pictures, making the rest of the game.
Not a real diary today,
but I hope you will enjoy it.
Paolo
Wednesday
13th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
The instrument is still working fine
and collecting his data, unaware of the passionate debate
that started at UNSW about the following question: which is
the best strategy to measure Dome C atmospheric transparency
at 350 micron wavelength?
To understand why people should spend
days on such a cryptic issue, instead of chatting about sex
or cricket (soccer for my countrymen), you have to understand
that scientists are really just kids that have never grown
up, with the only relevant difference that their toys are
a bit more expensive and provided by taxpayers, not their
parents.
If you work in the field, and I like
that, or spend years in labs worldwide, sooner or later you'll
get it. It is a continuous game to show your colleagues you
are the smartest, the more competent, the more "quick-witted"
(I hope I have accurately copied this strange word from the
Collins Italian-English Dictionary). Not only for career problems,
as if you were interested in money and success, you would
be opening a layer office, not wasting your time in the freezing
cold. Just because you can't avoid it. Is part of our nature.
I have a theory about science, still
not popular like the Popper's one to tell the truth, that
the two most important engines for mankind's restless progress
are laziness and childishness.
The importance of laziness is evident.
Suppose you are a Neanderthal man pushing a squared stone,
several hundred kilos heavy, to make your bed a bit more attractive
for the girl (actually a bit hairy) who has agreed to meet
you after sunset. Thinking requires a bit less energy than
pushing a stone, so you sit panting on it for a while and
start to think about how the hell to do the job with less
effort and, above all, within due time, without loosing all
of your energy (Prozac was not available at that time).
Under these conditions, it is quite
easy to understand how you can invent the wheel, the rope,
and a lot of other funny and useful things, just because you
are so tired of destroying your backbone just to do what Mother
Nature asked you to try to do tonight.
Think now about childishness. This
is a little bit harder to explain, but one of the most powerful
engines to make your lazy brain do work, is to do something
not alone but with a colleague, like to develop a new instrument.
At the beginning, you start dressing your best smile, but
it is likely, that after some time you will have to decide
if the hole for that damned screw should be done there or
5 mm to the left. Despite the fact that it is exactly the
same in most of the cases, you can easily start to argue with
that ignorant mate of yours, trying to demonstrate something
which is impossible to demonstrate, clinging to your ideas
as if it had suddenly become the most important thing in the
world, exactly like a 5 year old kid could feel respect that
flat balloon that never touched up to the moment the neighbor's
son comes home to play with him and start getting it.
But this is the way science makes progress.
Forget about sages, white hairy scientists with a visionary
views of the future, it is just a question of pure humanity,
I mean, childishness.
So, the instrument is acquiring his
data, not informed about the harsh battle ensuing via email
between here and several offices at the University of New
South Wales. Everybody has an excellent point of view, and
is asking to me to change the observing strategy (that means
to make some adjustment on the instrument control program)
following their suggestions.
The friendly atmosphere, the ingenuous
jokes of the past are quickly over and everybody searches
in others email for certain signs that the problem is no longer
just about science progress, but a personal vendetta against
him.
The problem is that we have to measure,
to say it roughly, how much radiation is emitted from the
sky at a given wavelength, actually, 350 micro-metres. Yes,
the sky emits radiation, infrared light, light, otherwise
it would be completely dark, and we are here because of that
(also the daily blue color is quite a different phenomena
with respect to the thermal emission we are measuring, that
doesn't expire at night). This radiation is important, because
it can tell us, and a possibly not very interested world,
if this is the outstanding site we hope to build an infrared
astronomical observatory on.
Well, the instrument we use here, the
SUMMIT, features a rotating mirror, that allows US to look
at different directions above the horizon. If you look just
over your head, the beam will travel across the atmosphere,
collecting all the radiation emitted by it, that represents
just a lot of unwished noise for the never satisfied astronomer.
If you look toward the horizon, the instrument will look toward
a thicker layer of atmosphere. This is why, for example, the
sky is more foggy toward the horizon than toward the zenith
(the, I guess, Arabian word for "directly above your head"
or something like this).
By looking in different directions
above the horizon, you can "easily" compute how transparent
the atmosphere is. You can't do it with just one measurement
though, because two different parameters determine how much
radiation is emitted by the sky: the opacity and a sort of
"average" sky temperature. A warmer body radiates
more than a cold, and a more transparent body is emitting,
for definition, less radiation than an opaque one. You have
to get both the parameters out of your data, that can easily
be done by looking at, at least, two different directions
through the atmosphere as, these two parameters play a slightly
different role at different elevations above the horizon.
The problem is "how much easier"
can the job be done. Up to about fifty years ago, it didn't
matter, there were no computers available anywhere, and scientists
spent days and days just manually computing and verifying
the theories behind the small amount of data available. It
was natural that the main effort was to find the less elaborated
way to reach the goal.
Today, computers allow us to think
in a different way. As soon as you start reflecting on how
to explain a natural phenomena, or to measure some physical
quantities, or to design a washing machine, your trained brain
starts thinking of the most complex and absurd strategies,
relying on the good, "old" computer to extract the
needed information from a mess of cryptic data. This approach
brought with it, in my opinion, a sort of laziness - again
- in the contemporary scientist. No more time spent to "simplify"
your models, your instrument, or your observing strategy:
just let the PC do the job.
This removed, according to many people,
a sort of elegance in most contemporary experiments. Opening
the door that unveils natural laws, scientists are now more
like a horde using heavy rams, with respect to the delicate
and light passpartout used by the sharpest "thefts"
of the past.
On the other side, present successes
in contemporary science are just not even imaginable without
a stack of PCs on any serious office desk. Yes, indeed, just
like Bill Gates' property (Ed - I think Bill Gates uses a
I-Mac now though).
In the end, we have two parties: John
Storey, siding for an "old fashioned" observing strategy,
robust, tested and easy to be done and analyzed. Michael Ashley
and Michael Burton on the other side, pushing for a more complex,
and probably powerful, observing strategy, that will require
a lot of painful efforts from some disgracefulles at the uni
to analyze data.
And, in the middle, a poor, frozen
astronomer at Dome C, the typical "last wheel of the cart"
(actually, I don't know if this phrase is used in English
like in Italian), expected to actually do the job.
Who will win the game?
The answer, hopefully, tomorrow.
Paolo
Thursday
14th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
These days I am still working on the
instrument (the SUMMIT), waiting for adjustments in the observing
strategies (see previous diary entries), and attending to
minimal improvements in the instrument setup. A twice daily
contact by email with the team in Sydney requires some calibrations
in advance, data analysis, that keep my days quite busy. But,
since John has left to go back home, I have plenty of time
to spend alone in the lab, and so plenty of time to think
instead of just talking, which is my natural tendency...
So, today I wrote something that doesn't
look exactly like a diary, but is just a series of thoughts,
some taken from earlier notes, about my past experiences in
the cold continent, that could also interest some of you.
I hope you enjoy them.
For the others, there is still the
choice to move to more interesting sites as suggested in the
past.
What I want to write about is the curious
nature of some things, that is that as you get closer to some
actual situations, you understand there is a mess of less
relevant details, small hints, unexpected aspects, that at
the end constitute the main part of the real understanding
you have of them, but that can hardly be reported in books,
reports and documentaries.
As an example, as I wrote in a previous
diary entry, Antarctica is the realm of light, despite the
common point of view, built by hours of Discovery Channel
programs and BBC documentaries. Now take into consideration
the permanent comparison with the cold people experience here,
sometimes for the first time in their life. No one is able
to even imagine the small adjustments and solutions mind and
body are able to find during one of these contemporary journeys
to Antarctica.
From my humble point of view, with
the relative knowledge of this environment that I have, I
am not even able to imagine how, in the past century, people
not very well trained, with inadequate clothing, pulling loads
up to 500 kilos on a wooden and leader slit, with food not
even sufficient to sustain a coach potato on a rainy Saturday
watching sports on TV, was able to cover this continent on
foot. Crossing the monstrous crevasses that can now be seen,
with horror from the aircraft, as considerable stretches of
the whole planet. And then to continue throughout the Transantarctic
Mountains, and the immense plateau that drives to the Pole.
One of the passages that makes it
impossible to me to understand that natural drive to suicide
that seems be shared by an unneglectable portion of mankind,
are the celebrated last pages of Scott's diary of his journey
to the South Pole (I highly recommend this book to anybody
interested in Antarctica). I found a sense of horror and death
even more gripping than the most severe pages of the tales
of Primo Levi (an Italian author that spent years in a nazi
lager), or the Anna Frank's diary, or of any other pages I
have read by somebody writing as a "dead man walking".
I feel a bit guilty about that, as I can easily understand
the difference between a personal choice and an unfair conviction,
but this is how I feel and I can't do anything about it.
 Nevertheless,
I am thinking about the real heritage of Scott's trip to Antarctica.
It's just, it's hard to write, an endless lines of faeces,
nearly equally spaced every ten miles, probably spaced further
apart toward the end of the journey. Starting from the permanent
and tormented ices of the Ross's sea, raising up to the continent
platform to overtake the hill and the dry valley of the transantarctic
Mountains, reaching the South Pole. Getting back approximately
the same way up to 15 miles of the famous "One Ton Depot",
where the three perished after a couple of weeks of starving
agony, in a way slightly different for each member of the
team, in weather and environmental conditions absolutely incomprehensible
for almost the whole of mankind. Any time I read those few
lines, on one of the several plates posted up everywhere,
there is a link to Antarctica in the world, as a sort of self-celebration
of the Victorian edicts, I have the feeling that the tale
can't actually finish there, and that, somewhere, there must
be a solution to move the story to a different, happy end.
Unfortunately, this is not the case,
and the three frozen bodies found about one year later by
the rescue team, demonstrated it in the most incontrovertible
way.
So, if an extraterrestrial civilization,
evolved on some far, cold planet, should land on the Antarctic
Plateau looking for traces of life, bringing with them a probe
to see through the ices and the eternal snow, they would find
this long theory of shameful remains, probably changing along
the way from the effects of the ipovitaminosis and of the
various inconveniences suffered by the team. They start from
the coast, reach a place just in the middle of nothing, get
back and stop with no apparent reason, as if a hand had suddenly
withdrawn their will. What could they think about? A religious
ritual? A sort of madness?
Years ago, during one of my first trips
to this continent, I visited an Adelie's Penguin Community
of about 5,000 individuals, on the coast of the Ross sea,
quite close to the Italian Station at Terra Nova Bay. The
day was outstandingly clear as it happens, in summer, quite
often in this part of the world. It was an absolute pleasure
to walk over the "martian-like" landscape running alongside
the iced, cyan sea, reflecting the sky and some far ice tongue.
No trace of a path, no flowers, no plants. Only a few lichens
yellow and bright, ones which grow with infinite patience
only a millimetre an year, in an almost deadly laziness.
Suddenly I look over from a saddle
onto the large penguin colony, quite confident of what I was
about to see, as BBC, National Geographic and Discovery Channel
documentaries make it quite impossible today to find something
really unexpected, at least on Planet Earth.
Maybe some of you know something about
penguins. How long they live, we probably couldn't say the
same about the common annoying houseflies. We know something
about how they live, how they raise their chicks, and we imagine
them as a funny tribe of mums and dads with their kids, grazing
in the sea of this sterile earth.
What the films can't report, and that
is what immediately struck me, is that these surreal southern
communities are permanently embedded in the smell of death,
putrefaction, and dung. A colony of 5,000 penguins in the
breeding period live with a constant percentage of individuals
sick or close to death, which are viewed with indifference
and apparent cynicism by the others - "mors tua, vita mea"
- in a community unable to gather piety.
My feelings were oscillating from imagining
a mad crowd of decadent nobles, condemned for their abuses
by a crazy witch to an eternity as clumsy birds permanently
dressing in tailcoats, or what we would see if we could just
look through the walls of one of our towns. Meanwhile, a crowd
of Skua were flying over the penguins community, ready to
prey on any inattentive individuals. This is also, to tell
the truth, quite a rare event (skuas, also heavy and aggressive,
can't easily prey on a healthy, adult penguin, as penguins
are larger and quite aggressive too, when threatened).
When walking along the coast, I accidentally
got closer to the nest of a couple of these tough predators
- the skuas - and became the target of a sort of "ritual"
attack, with noisy flying overhead, and then shit thrown.
It kind of suggested to me that I should immediately change
my course.
Was really nice, anyway, to watch the
small Adelie chicks, loosing their plume tufts to acquire
the adult dressing. To observe how one or two sage adults,
protecting a small group of them while the other parents was
fishing, avoided any casual contact with me just carefully
driving the group away while I was crossing the colony. So,
I quickly recovered from that sensation of death, even forgetting
that bad feeling in my later visits.
Penguins are really interesting birds,
unable, for historical reasons, to understand the possible
danger represented by our species. A night, years ago, I was
working around a small radiometer, about hundreds meters from
the coast and the pack, at the Italian station at Terra Nova
Bay. Suddenly I saw a medium height Adelie Penguin walking
awkwardly toward me and the instrument, probably attracted
by some shiny reflections on the mounting or by the periodical
hisses emitted from a tilting mirror. When he was a few meters
away, he stopped and watched me, apparently a bit embarrassed.
To feed or perturb animal life is strictly forbidden in Antarctica,
so he was probably not expecting something from me, like animals
are used to in more civilized places. I think it was just
curiosity driving him to me. Continuing to work around the
instrument, I watched his yellow and black eyes slowly going
off, the nice, small head tilted on his bent shoulder, and
he fell asleep standing up as I busily worked with oscilloscopes
and screwdrivers to catch the deep and weak wheezes of the
Big Bang (actually, it was just atmospheric noise...).
Another time, walking on the pack,
I saw a group of five Adelies point toward me from about half
a kilometre, walking excitedly with that hesitant movement
that alternates between sliding on the belly along the short
descending slopes of the sastrugi, helped by the back paws,
to short runs standing up. On this occasion they stopped just
a few meters away. In an individual, heading the funny group,
you could guess a leader role. It was evidently in charge
of deciding which was the safest distance to avoid any threat,
satisfying, at the same time, the irresistible curiosity of
the others, a bit more timorous and embarrassed.
We stayed there, watching the others,
for several minutes. Me crouched, smiling - actually I can't
tell you why - and perfectly silent, with them undecided.
Then, the small group, after grunting a little bit more, diverted
toward Nord, to reach the sea again, apparently their curiosity
was satisfied and they began looking for activities more profitable
like fishing.
These contacts with the wild animal
life in the coastal region of Antarctica represent probably
the most peculiar aspect to people like us - Italians - realizing
that the apparently more stupid animal knows that is better
not to trust this arrogant and stinking biped, and stay away
from the pile of trash and smell they spread out everywhere
in the world.
These, just a taste, were the details
I wanted you to listen to about this singular, cold and far
world, apparently easy but complex at the same time, so complex
that it is very difficult to get a final feeling.
Moreover, we can maybe begin to imagine
what coldness was for Scott, Shackelton, Amundsen or Mawson,
or any of the other Antarctic pioneers, not only a daily comparison
with a fuzzy and not very detailed experience, but a series
of small gestures, some of them perhaps disgusting in their
roughness - like to free the nose of a continuous itchiness
created by burnt capillaries, a series of continuous adjustment
to your behaviour that everybody experiences after a few days
on the ice. You learn quite quickly that the underneck must
stay in a certain position, otherwise a layer of ice will
fog your sunglasses (common at pioneer times, as quite often
they got a disease called "snow blindness"). Remove
a glove for more than a few minutes in windy conditions can
mean you do not recover for long time, even if you get back
in a warm room. The nose's capillaries can break if you breath
the cold air for too long. Who, living at temperate latitude,
could imagine that one of the most dangerous and advised disease
in contemporary Antarctica is dehydration?
Who knows how many thousands of little
things that bunch of stainless seamen and explorers waiting
to be rescued for a long winter at Elephant Island learnt,
after Shakleton's ship Endeavour was shrunk and sunk by the
ices pressure. People not washing themselves for 18 months,
eating just seals fried in seals fat, and diluted in "pennicam"
for the long winter in one of the most frightening and inaccessible
corners of the planet. This island really looks like the entrance
to hell, with black and steep walls diving on an ocean permanently
furious and upset. They were dreaming about, as the chronicle
reports, eating "kydney's porridge", after the anticipated
trip back to England. Actually, most of them died during the
WWII which began just a day after they left their starting
harbour in South Georgia, at the beginning of their journey
to Antarctica. They were never even aware of the war during
their trip.
To be continued tomorrow....
Friday 15th December
2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
Even if just a few of you have reached
this point, I would like to continue telling you about the
astonishment I felt when I "discovered" that the white,
unshaped thing we generically call ice, and that Inuits instead
address in several ways, can really, easily develop the most
extraordinary look. If you are ever lucky enough to travel
to this place sometime, you will discover the difference between
the so called sombrero Iceberg and the tabular one, the pack
that formed during the last winter, than the pack broken into
extraordinarily regular pieces by the long wave coming from
storms thousand miles away, to that amazing cyan blocks of
geological ice that you can met sometime when navigating.
It is possible to see sometimes, as
it has been used in a number of calendars and books, a picture
of a spooky, cyan and almost transparent huge iceberg, taken
by a lucky photographer from a ship sailing close to it. On
some cavities of this incredible floating thing, stands an
equally astonished group of penguins. It is considered the
best picture ever taken in Antarctica, and it is not difficult
to understand why. I would be tempted to say it is the best
wildlife picture ever taken.
Moreover, there are the quite common
"gothic cathedral", ogival caves created by the waves
on the cliffs of the tabular icebergs, the yellow ice due
to the flowering of algae in the short Antarctic spring (the
most prominent source of basic food for the Antarctic sea
fauna), and the geological deep ice on the Antarctic Plateau,
so transparent, that it is used to detect, at the South Pole,
the most exotic particles of the universe (AMANDA experiment).
A while ago a pilot - actually my nice
room mate at UNSW, Andre Phillips - was telling me that when
executing a loop during an acrobatic manoeuvre, you get the
feeling it has been successful when you feel a little "bump",
or vibration, as you perfectly centred the trail left by yourself
when closing the circle. This is probably not very interesting
for people not sick about aircraft's, but it is an example
of something noone could foresee from outside. So, out of
the instrumentation, out of our ability, a sign is left on
the transparent air is able to produce satisfaction for the
man driving that flying thing. Again, as soon as we get closer
to any human activity, we discover it's made of small facts,
of a long series of irrelevant but fundamental experiences,
that quickly substantiate the abstract idea we automatically
shape of unlikely human activities.
p.s. I apologize for any incorrect
information in the text above. I can't easily access books
or the web to check them.
Paolo
Saturday
16th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
Today life at Dome C is smooth and
slow. So, I'll take some time to share with you another quite
common aspect of life at 75° South latitude (and 06').
When you get used to life in a scientific
station, you begin to realize that the most technical and
cool communication system - the old-fashioned walky-talky
- can easily become, if in the right hands, a way to transport
the most common and familiar life habits, unwished humour,
"topical" debates, despite the Hollywood permanent
tendency to tell us that, if you want serious and really committed
stuff, you just have to communicate something with a harsh
voice on the ether.
For an hour now, while working on data
analysis, I have been listening to the radio (that anybody
working at Dome C can switch on).....there is a closed debate
about some stuff that just arrived with the last Twin Otter
flight.
While the pilots are recovering in
the infirmary for a lack of oxygen intake (probably because
they flew at a high altitude due to a lack of kerosene), people
are arguing on the ether about the following, puzzling question:
where the hell has the "pasta maker" gone?
I learned there are several different
theories about the disappearance of the "pastamatic".
But at least it will allow the Chef to arrange some actual,
traditional, handmade tortellini for Christmas lunch, and
I am touched to see how the attention to really important
details can make life here easy and pleasant.
Just a few days ago, an argument started
against our respectful Chef, just because he "dared"
to cut the spaghetti in half before he cooked it. This is
something that could easily cause the Italian workers of the
station to strike.
Sergio Gamberini, the nurse of the
station, called "Gambero", (that is "prawn",
to confirm our endless fixation about food), said the pastamatic
should have arrived, packed in a carton box, on board the
last aircraft. Rita, from the radio room, insists that there
was only a pen and a notebook in that box . How a pastamatic
can be transmuted into a notebook and a pen, is something
really difficult to understand. A pastamatic needs quite a
large box, while a notebook and a pen can easily fit in the
pocket. I can't imagine that an almost empty box was loaded
on a Twin Otter to be sent to a really remote site like this.
And, wait, who asked Terra Nova Bay to send "one" notebook
and "one" pen to the whole station? The discussion
quickly becomes surreal, but nobody on the radio seems aware
of that, neither the head of logistics, Carlo, nor the other
people working on the mystery of the disappearing "pastamatic".
Meanwhile, Luigi, one of the most talented
electrical engineers available within a 1000 km distance,
is trying to repair some key equipment of the station: the
washing machine. To do it he unloaded a certain number of
unidentified "underpants" from a washer, just left
there by somebody. Luigi complains on the radio about that:
the rule of the station is to remove clothes as soon as possible
from the washing room, to leave it free for the next user.
Immediately after, everybody on the
station is informed by the shrill voice of Rita, the only
woman present in the station, that the slips were her own.
There is an embarrassed exchange of messages and apology from
Luigi, promising to put the "hot" load back. But somebody
immediately starts questioning Luigi's capability to distinguish
between female and male pants. Maybe its time for him to go
back home?
The two or three main threads available
this afternoon on Dome C channel 6 (the common channel of
the station) continues incessantly.
The pilots are recovering, but decided
to spend the night here for safety reasons. Somebody must
arrange two beds for them as the station is fully booked.
 Meanwhile
Terra Nova Bay station (the other Italian station, on the
Antarctic coast), is asking on HF for some strategic stuff:
2 shovels, 60 litres of gasoline, 1 litre of motor oil, for
a team left a bit far from the station to accomplish I don't
know which duty. There is a continuous exchange of messages
and suggestions on the radio, transferred to Terra Nova Bay
and back by radio waves, not every understandable, and people
are trying, grunting just a little bit against the requests,
to find all the stuff needed to leave at 5 am tomorrow morning.
It is an attitude of the Italians to
immediately start saying "no", then quickly pass to
"vediamo cosa si puo' fare" (a circumlocution to mean
"maybe", literally "let me see what can be done")
that, in Italian, actually means "si" (yes).
cheers
Paolo
Sunday
17th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
Dome C, Instruction for use....
Paragraph 1: waking up
Accomodation for guests at Dome C consists
of a large tent with 6 to 8 beds. Inside, a stove fueled by
special 'no paraffine' kerosene, looking like something out
of a Dickens' tale, provides heat or, if you prefer, as the
stove visible in the Pingu igloo [the cartoon story based
on the perature inside is deliberately kept around 4-5 C to
favourite nice dreams]. The air is dry here, and higher temperatures
could make throats dry, and that doesn't help you to get to
sleep.
The other face of the coin is that
every morning I wake up convinced I'll never find the courage
to leave the bed. Outside is cold, and you just abandon the
warm Morpheo's embrace.
Also today I am silently screaming
against myself in the bed. The "ultimate" question
arises again in my mind: what, the hell, I am doing here?
I'll forget this question as soon as I will have dressed the
last layer of clothes.
Meanwhile, I contemplate the list of
possible gifts for the coming Christmas. Thinking of my son,
I overstrike "The Little Chemist", and write instead
"The Little Accountant".
 Suddenly,
around 5 am, the pilots fired up the Twin Otters engine to
leave to Terranova Bay, the other Italian Station on the coast.
Something quite similar to a Queensland resort. But this is
an old tradition in Antarctic stations: "let the engine
start up at early morning". Nobody knows why. Why leave
at 5 am when you could do it 5 hours later.
Previously, I told all the best things
about that aircraft, handy as a Vespa scooter. No need for
airports, they could just be "chained" in front of
the door of your building, the exhaust completely removed
to increase attention around your 50 cc engine motorbike,
double carburator, oversized carburator inlet just as 14 years
old boys used to do in Rome's outskirt.
Two different aircrafts are mainly
used to move to the Antarctic Plateau: the sky equipped Hercules
C-130, a big beast with 4 propellers and room enough to digest
hundreds of people each time plus some cargo, and the Twin
Otter, handly, light and able to land everywhere without assistance
at ground.
About the Hercules, John Storey wrote
enough last year from the South Pole. Citing by heart, one
morning he wrote "An idiot parked an Hercules just in front
of my tent leaving the engines on, yeasterday night".
Hercules engines can't be safely switched off on the Antarctic
Plateau.
As soon as the Twin Otter fires up
its two propellers, I slowly wake up with the feeling that
a genetical modified mosquito, that smart pointlike animal
spending summer sunrises flying just around your ears at early
morning, is now trying to colonize Antarctica. And yourself.
As so many "little" aircraft,
Twin Otter engines feel too high in frequency, exagerated.
They can't fly, you think in the drowsiness, it's a mechanical
nonsense, the noise is just like the one generated by a thousands
radiocontrolled toy aircrafts started underneath my bed.
The wind brings you the noise in tidal
waves, playing to filter frequencies, and looking as the propeller
is used time by time to slice mortadella. Moreover, heating
an aircraft propeller is a process long enough to move probably
the aircraft to Terra Nova Bay by the ground with a lower
amount of fuel. Sometime you think that damned twin propeller
is at the beginning of the runaways, giving finally max throttle
to take off and get as far as possible by your delicate auditory
organs. But the engine slows down again, it's just kidding
you.
Suddenly, when your are already half
way through eating the pillow, it will really take off, and
any noise, suddenly, disappears somewhere toward East.
Unfortunately my ears, in the quiet
silence of the Antarctic dawn, feature the property to "learn"
any large bandwidth, loud noises, and try to find them in
any quiet noise they found around.
So, for a long time, in a desolate
drownsiness, I feel as the power engine station, very far
and quiet in comparison, is just the noise of the aircraft
that has landed about half mile away from the station due
to a sudden fault. This uncomortable feeling that something
went wrong, after you cursed the aircraft for half an hour,
makes you feel remorse, and doesn't allow you to recover sleeping.
Up to the moment the breakfast is served. Then, you fall asleep.
cheers
Paolo
Wednesday
24th January 2001
From
Andre Phillips, Crary Lab, McMurdo.....
Hi Guys,
You'll be interested to
note that the Pole-bound passengers who arrived on my flight
from Christchurch, are *still* here! In fact my ex room-mate
returned *again* last evening, after spending another frustrating
day waiting for a departure time which was continually being
moved forward. At 6:55 this morning I woke him from a deep
slumber to alert him that he was scheduled to depart for Willy
Field at 7:00. The poor sod leapt out of bed like a Polaris
Missile and flew out of the room in three minutes flat. Shortly
afterwards he returned looking dejected and saying that the
flight had been further delayed. And the same scenario repeated
itself mid-afternoon when I noticed he was sleeping towards
another scheduled departure time. He's not a happy chappy
right now. I'm still scheduled to leave for Pole on Monday,
if not before.
I on the other hand, had
a very pleasant day catching up on a few McMurdo rites-of-passage
which I've never had time for in the past... starting out
with a tour of Scott's Hut at Hut Point. Poor ol' Scott, he
made some extraordinarily bad decisions, and that hut appears
to be another telling example. You may know that it's actually
of Australian manufacture (allegedly all jarah construction,
although I'm skeptical), and was purchased sight-unseen as
a catalog kitset. Being designed for Aussie Outback applications
it had no insulation, an elevated floor for good under-floor
ventilation, and an ample loft to duct away more of that Aussie
excessive heat. Needless to say, as soon as the thing was
built here it was discovered that it was too damn cold for
human habitation, although it was used by various expeditions,
usually as an emergency shelter, usually due to some major
cock-up.
Then I walked over to
Scott Base, checked out its well stocked shop, and walked
back. This was followed by a Skuaing raid on Skua Central.
During the afternoon I read, napped, and made some amends
for my sadly neglected email correspondence of late. Last
evening I attended the outdoors education talk, mandatory
for off-base travel. Besides a quick trip up Observation Hill
(no permit required) the only other McMurdo rite-of-passage
I would like to try is the walk around the Castle Hill Loop.
Friday perhaps.
This evening I attended
the weekly Science Lecture, concerning the installation of
infrasound detecting arrays, which have been placed in Antarctica
(and around the world) as part of global Comprehensive [nuclear]
Test Ban Treaty monitoring. Essentially these instruments
are super-sensitive capacitor microphones placed at the end
of long plastic drainpipes, and which could detect a dingo's
fart across a continental distance.
The Science Lecture was
held in the all-new, and very pleasant, building 155 dining
room. Older McMurdo visitors will recall how the dining area
was segregated into 'E' and 'O'* dining rooms, the O being
somewhat better furnished with some nice paintings on the
walls (*E='Enlisted' & O='Officers'). Those days are history
and now there is just one big well furnished dining room.
Furthermore the grub just keeps on getting better and better
as the years go by. The subject of McMurdo food has supplied
generations of visitors with something to bitch about. Maybe
my taste buds were burned out by earlier memorable examples
of Navy cuisine, but these days it all strikes me as pretty
damn good.
My last couple of days
mooching about McMurdo have been very pleasant, and a good
tonic for the last few hectic months. But I'm rapidly running
out of things to do, and a suitcase load of AASTO-related
goodies is nagging to be fiddled with... Manyana...
Cheers,
Andre
Thursday
25th January 2001
From
Andre.....
Just outside my room is a cleaner's
cupboard, filled with cleaning equipment. On the back wall
of the cupboard, written in large letters is the following,
written by guys who took their cleaning seriously (and whom
also had perhaps been on the Ice just a little too long).
"This is my mop. There are many
like it but this one is mine. My mop is my best friend. It
is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My
mop without me is useless. Without my mop I am useless. I
must swab my mop true. I must mop up the dirt which clutters
the floor. I must clean it all up before it gets tracked all
over. I will. Before God I swear this creed. My mop and myself
are the cleaners of my floor. We are the masters of the dirt.
We are the cleaners of the floor. So be it until there are
no dirty floors, but clean ones.
The Custodial Creed
Summer '94 & '95
Chris and Chase
(we are not unlike God)"
Monday
29th January 2001
From
Andre.....
Hi Guys,
...from 89 59' 39.6", AASTO Country.
We departed MCM early this morning and the flight was pleasant
and uneventful. This afternoon I've been getting myself organised*
and this evening visited the AASTO (*for instance, now all
imported laptops need to be virus sanitized before use). With
the use of butane as new TEG refrigerant, I was perhaps a
little more cautious than usual opening the AASTO door. In
fact there was quite a pong inside but I think this was nothing
more than the good ol' AASTO Pong, amplified somewhat by having
the building shut up for some time. The smell vented off OK.
There is also currently a disconcerting noise coming from
the worn (disintegrating?) bearings of a small fan which Ed
Pernic has set up. Presumably this is the one for which we
brought down a spare.
Things inside the AASTO look good,
but perhaps a little more cramped than usual. The surrounding
snow level has built up to such a degree that it's a safe
bet that the building will bury during this coming winter,
unless it is raised, or the local surface level lowered. I
forecast a ski-ramp will form fore-and-aft of the AASTO, and
the underneath will fill in. Of course this may not matter
if we intend to move it next year, and we have access to heavy
equipment to assist with digging it out. As most of us are
aware, the culprit is the current upwind location of the G-Tower.
The Pole Station has undergone quite
a makeover this year and the new Pole elevated building is
an impressive structure. Likewise the Dome is a pleasantly
quiet place now that the power plant moved out. The weather
is pleasant and flight schedule nominal. There is very slow
LES-9 comms (i.e. via a 33kb modem for the whole station)
from about 7:30-00:00 (NZDST), but from about 00:00-07:00,
Marisat and TDRSS kick in with mind-boggling bit rates.
My new tiny hand-held GPS works surprisingly
well, and indeed its estimate for the position of the South
Pole exactly coincided with the Pole Marker. If one moves
away from the marker by more than a metre of so, the latitude
figure reads something less than 90 00' 00.0". Incidentally
this beaut new Andre Toy also incorporates an accurate barometer,
and right now the ambient pressure measurement reads 691hPa.
So far I haven't had any pressure-related physio concerns,
and hope that tomorrow with be 'business-as-usual'.
Today was the last day for 'Science
Retro' [cargo] so any junk now goes back as Hold Baggage.
One of the disadvantages with coming in so late in the season.
That's the brief goss' for the moment.
I'll now walk back to the Dome and return to the AASTO at
midnight. Last evening MCM's internet link went out for the
whole evening, so you may have just received a slightly dated
MCM email from me.
I can see a squillion little jobs which
need doing, but that's definitely a consideration for tomorrow.
Bob Pernic is scheduled to arrive tomorrow.
Back at midnight.
Andre
Thursday
1st February 2001
From
the AASTO Team.....
Hi Guys,
For some unexplained reason there was
an internet outage from the Pole last evening. Not that there
was much to report; Paolo wasn't here yet, Michael was acclimatizing
to the low atmospheric pressure, and Andre was in bed nursing
a virus. But in the space of 24 hours, everything has turned
around...
* Paolo has arrived with all equipment
* Mcba is dancing on tabletops
* Andre has mostly 'thrown' his bug.
Michael and Andre visited the AASTO
last evening and concluded that the leaking gas smell was
'fresh' and in urgent need of attention. This morning Michael
acquired a 'photo-ioniser' gas detector and quickly discovered
that the butane refrigerant was leaking at a number of joints,
and indeed (judging by the liquid level in the view glass)
most of the butane appears to have already been lost. Michael
was able to fix some leaking joints with a little extra tightening,
but there are a series of big joints on-and-around the thermostatic
regulator valve, which will likely need to be completely dismantled
and redone properly. We'll think further about this one tomorrow.
Today's major activity was a serious
clean up of the well-junked AASTO. Even though it is too late
in the season to Retro cargo, we have been filling a 'retro'
box, as well as eliminating some out-and-out junk. Paolo and
Michael spent most of the afternoon sorting and repackaging
equipment, and now the inside of the AASTO is considerably
more roomier.
Andre's major task today was mounting
the DataTaker DT50 data logger onto the wall, and running
12VDC to power it. Over the last couple of days Andre has
fiddled with this instrument and found it surprisingly easy
to program, and it will make a perfect interface for monitoring
zillions of TEG parameters. The DT50 'knows' of just about
every resistive/voltage-source/current-source/thermocouple/bridge
device ever invented, so we should be able to quickly splice
in all the TEG thermocouples etc.
And that's about the all the AASTO
news for the moment. Paolo is looking well, and surprisingly
neat and trim despite all that world-class Dome-C cuisine.
Also, since he is already acclimatized to the pressure, he's
bouncing off the walls, manhauling sleds etc. He plans to
get SUMMIT brought over to the AASTO tomorrow AM, and to use
the transporting fork-lift vehicle to lift the instrument
straight onto the roof. In for a penny...
Michael has made sufficient space in
the AASTO that we should be able to work on the NISM here,
rather than trying to make space in the currently *very* congested
MAPO building.
So after a slow start, things are happening
very quickly.
Andre is currently working the Graveyard
Shift, so shortly I will attend 'Midrats' (midnight dinner),
which has become my lunchtime on the current schedule.
One last bit of interesting gossip.
Last evening a Herc was unloading when a bulldozer driver
noticed that a large metallic object fell out of one of the
engines. It turned out to be the tailpipe, effectively the
exhaust pipe of the jet engine. Which is a little embarrassing.
Because it cannot take off on three engines from the Pole,
that Herc is still here and a replacement engine, and crew
to install it, have already been flown in from McMurdo. Whilst
the aircrew were here last evening, Michael and I had a very
long conversation with one of the pilots which touched on,
amongst other things, runway considerations for high altitude
antarctic air ops. Very interesting!
That's it for now.
Cheers, The AASTO Team.
 
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