Concerning life

There isn't any here, save a paltry 60 humans. Period. I watched a couple things last night that drove that point in quite effectively, albeit in rather indirect ways.

The first was the movie "Cry of the Penguins" from the late 1960s. It starred John Hurt (of chest-bursting Alien fame) as a dissipated, callow, rich youth that is sent to Cape Royds in Antarctica to study Adelie penguins. He has to leave behind most of the trappings of his frivolous lifestyle and learns how to care for something other than what directly benefits him, namely: the penguins and the girl he left back in London. Said girl was played by the smashingly cute Hayley Mills, of whom I recognized the name but had no idea she was such a bombshell. Anyhow, pretty girls aside, the coast looks like it's teeming with life when contrasted with my present environs on the Antarctic Plateau.

The second thing I watched was one episode from the "Shark Week" DVD set from some past season. It centered on the ancient, fossil sharks that are present in an extremely wide variety of shapes and sizes. The show kept going to different places where people were finding shark fossils (mostly teeth, since the skeleton is cartilaginous), and they all looked lush and totally alien compared to the South Pole. In particular I enjoyed the scenery of a place called Bear Gulch (or something like that), which reminded me a lot of my beloved Flint Hills with its exposed limestone, rolling hills, green grass, and creeks running through the draws. The similarity goes further, because the Flint Hills-and much of Kansas for that matter-were under a sea at one time, and even in our pastures we can find plenty of fossils of sea life that was abundant at some time long ago. Here at Pole we don't have soil. We have no fossil record beyond the gases trapped in the ice that is nearly 2 miles thick beneath our feet. Now that winter has set in it's probably pretty much cleared any birds that might have strayed inland out for warmer climes in the north.

This leads me back to the starting point of this-perhaps annoyingly contemplative-post in that in all this vast, white space that 60 specimens of homo sapiens are probably the only living things to be found until you hit the coast, all those 100s of miles away. I find it enervating, and actually quite comforting, to have managed to get myself so utterly and thoroughly out of the mainstream of life, with living conditions that are so vastly different and sundered from the norm.

Cryo emergency (drill)

So, pretty much the high point of yesterday was our monthly drill, which entailed responding to a low oxygen alarm at the cryogenics facility. We ended up just having one person to extract, which was a very good thing. It's really difficult bringing together the different groups of people to make this volunteer fire brigade here. Some folks were here this summer on the team and know the lay of the land. Others were here over the summer and trained with us at the fire academy back in Colorado, but hadn't been on the fire brigade over the summer and need a lot of refresher training and catching up. Other folks have been on the South Pole fire brigade one or more times before, and they have lots of preconceptions about how things should work based on how they did in the past. All these different backgrounds, expectations, and disconnects between our team members (myself included) added up to not the greatest response in the drill.

It's pretty frustrating going from a rock solid team just a few weeks ago back to what feels like square one. That means I get to facilitate all sorts of retraining and team building in order to get us up to snuff. It means a lot of work, and a lot of trying to accommodate people and cajole them into spending time they probably aren't that interested in giving up to an unpaid position on station. But, I know that we essentially had to do the same during the summer. Despite being tired and hoping to have had all that behind me, I can help do it again.

Chain gang

Yesterday a good portion of the station population turned out to help move beverages into the station from the DNF facility. We worked in a chain gang/bucket brigade sort of set-up with the individual packages being handed person-to-person up the stairs at two different entrances to the elevated station. Despite having and electric hoist and elevator, they just don't compete with the speed with which this manual method can load stuff (everything from mail to booze) into the station. Plus, people keep working after -60F when the elevator stops being reliable. I'm not sure if the hoist works in temperatures colder than that.

Our small group of guys did the 300 workout last night. We split it in half to ease into it, but I felt pretty good after the first half and did it again. I got in my reps on everything except pull-ups, but did manage to get in 10 the first time. I figure as I drop weight and build muscle that will come along. Somebody asked if there was a diet you're supposed to follow while doing this program, and one guy said that you're only supposed to eat enough to recover from workout. I guess I'm going to cut down and go for that lean and hungry look from now on.

We're supposed to have our monthly drill for emergency response, and with only today and tomorrow left in February that narrows it down a bit. Hopefully my firefighters will remember at least their basic training, and it would be nice if we don't have any major equipment malfunctions in the cold. As I write it is -57.3F with 14.8 kt winds making for a wind chill of -95.7F outside. That's plenty chilly to really mess up some of our SCBA gear should we let it be exposed to that depth of cold for too long.

So, weeks back I mentioned that they'd been doing all sorts of construction (including in very close proximity to my instruments in the science lab) to install a wind deflector between the two modules of the station. Well, this is what the view out of the (generally) upwind side of the tunnel between A and B pod looks like now that that deflector is in place.



Very picturesque. I'm sure Winslow Homer would have been all over painting that landscape. It used to be a nice view, but now...oh well.

I'm f-f-f-freezin', Eddie!

By Odin's beard and Ymir's wounds was it cold today! Our temperature was -54F, but with the 18-knot winds it dropped the wind chill down to -92F. I did a double calibration of an instrument out on the roof of ARO all afternoon, and boy did my hands get cold quickly. I was wearing glove liners, but when touching metal with even thick gloves on it will suck the heat out of you a whole lot faster. It was really pretty watching all the snow stream across the plateau from the high vantage point of the roof. Seeing that reminded me of sand blowing across dunes and really reinforced my recent convictions that I need to visit some nice, big desert like the Sahara on my way home come next November.

I got lucky in a recent trip to Skua, our local second-hand goods and thrift shop, which is the repository of all things unwanted, lost, or unclaimed. I scored a Ralph Lauren dress shirt and a nifty plaid sport coat, so should be able to augment my meager "dress" wardrobe quite nicely with both. I think somebody was working on cleaning up Skua yesterday, but this is how it looked when I was rootin' around:

10,478 feet

That's our current pressure/physiological altitude right now. It's not the greatest feeling to start working out again after any lapse of significant duration. Five of us did our first attempt at the "300 workout", which is loosely based on some of the exercise regimen that the actors that were in the movie "300" did in order to get in shape for their roles as Spartans-the baddest dudes on or off the mean streets of the Peloponnese. We're doing 10 different exercises, and each exercise requires you to do 30 repetitions (reps to those in the biz). I think the exercises would be much more doable if there were more air floating around up here at Pole. My arms, legs, and core were fine, but boy did my trachea catch fire really quickly with how hard I was breathing! This workout is supposed to last 12 weeks, so hopefully we can all stick with it for the duration and be in some seriously improved shape come June or so.

The sun is now low enough in the sky that if any bit of cloud passes before it the landscape-icescape would be more apt-takes on the pall of early twilight. The sky in general has been very beautiful the last few days, and with an almost full moon in the sky it is hard not to just stand and stare.

I got my geek on this morning and calculated roughly that the time dilation between us at the Pole (essentially zero circular speed) with respect to someone on the Equator (moving at around 1,700 km/hr around the planetary axis) is 1.00000000000123885 approximately. This is a mild relativistic effect, to say the least, but over the course of 13 months we at the Pole will have "aged" 0.0004 seconds more than somebody at the Equator, since we're moving that much more slowly than they are. This is the same phenomenon that let Charlton Hesston come back from his long-duration deep space mission (traveling very quickly) and not have aged, while on the Earth (moving much more slowly) vast swaths of time had passed and apes ruled the planet.

Let's hope no simian Armageddon occurs before I get off the Ice.

old digs, new digs

We had some volunteers do a "burger bar" last night, doing to-order burgers and fries in the absence of cooks working on the 2-day weekend. Every weekend we at least fend for ourselves, as even the cooks get a day off on Sunday. At McMurdo when they have burger bar at Gallagher's Pub you actually get to pay for your food, which never made sense to me-there's free food in the galley for 4 meals a day, why pay? Anyhow, these good Samaritans didn't have any duplicitous pecuniary intentions; that's how at least some of us roll at Pole.

OK, I'm living in this big station. I have my own room, and definitely got to upgrade from this summer to this winter. I went from the room on the left to the room on the right:

As you can see, I've got a bit more space in the winter room (it's about 2 feet wider, which actually makes a huge difference), my own window (with a nice view out overlooking "Destination Zulu" and on beyond to where the flight line buildings used to be and out to the horizon now that they're gone), and enough shelf space to accomodate my own little library:



Books definitely make a place seem like "home", or at least much more personalized, in my opinion. Roughly the right half of the shelf of books are all World War II history books that one of my uncles was generous enough to donate to the cause of keeping me entertained throughout the winter. I have read loads on WWII throughout the years since pulling "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (by William Shirer) off a shelf in my parents barn back in high school. The one history class I took as an undergrad was on WWII history, and I've kept reading about it ever since.

Opening old wounds

Well, the ladies had their own little girls-only get-together tonight, so we guys busted out an idea I'd had for a movie double feature: The Sword & Sandal Soiree. This pretty much just involved watching Gladiator and 300 on the big screen in the gym, as well as walking out afterwards with a new impetus to exercise an excessive amount this winter. I've got a couple workouts based upon those the actors in 300 used to get in shape for their roles, and may try to start in on one of those in the next couple days. I haven't heard how the ladies enjoyed their party yet.

This blogging thing got away from me this week with all the activities that have been going on in addition to just working. It seems like there's always some new thing that has to be taken care of. A definite positive thing is the fact that I've got almost all my firefighters ready to go with the minimum check-outs to officially let them respond with SCBA gear to any emergency we might have on station. The number of hoops we have to jump through to get people ready to go for our particular emergency response team is ridiculous compared to the other teams. I'm not saying it's Byzantine, but it's difficult to facilitate without spending far more hours on it than I really should devote to an unpaid position. Oh well, it's been a good leadership learning experience. Tomorrow I'll actually be working 1.5 hours in the station store, for which I will actually be compensated monetarily (unlike the fire chief work), so that's pretty cool.

This weekend is the monthly 2-day weekend for most of the folks on station. They normally just get Sunday off, but once per month there is an extra day off from work. It doesn't really apply to folks like the guys in the power plant, the meteorological office, or science support. I'd venture the science grantees will also be working through the weekend.

Anyhow, for a couple hours I'm off to bed, with visions of phalanxes dancing in my head.