a new name

Since I'm no longer on the Ice, I figured I should change the name of this blog to reflect my status. I imagine as I continue to post here, I'll change the name again, in an attempt to remain "current".
In the meantime, adieu to the Adventures on Ice. Bring on the adventures in da 'bus!

traffic

Well, at least now we know:



If only we could all get on the same definition of "constant speed" and "safe distance"!

Gotta love the "real world".

Life, back atcha

Two weeks later, I look back at my "exciting" return:
moving into my new house, getting the landlord to finally Finish my new house, finding out why I never wanted to be an accountant (by doing the accounting for 5 mos travel), paying bills, cleaning my new house, buying paint, unpacking.... Going snowshoeing with Jess, and imagining the Royal Societies in the distance. Trail running at Highbanks and (pleasantly) surprising myself with my time/distance. Receiving calls on my cell phone and catching up with people about wedding plans, new job plans, and the lot.
Having Grandma tell me about Nate's birthday wish (my first cousin once removed). His sisters go to the hotel for pool parties and such for their bday parties, but Nate's always been a bit different; Randy calls him her little old man. For his 9th(?) birthday, all he wanted was to be picked up from school in a semi. Luckily, Ben her bro, drives semis, and arranged to be there Friday to scoop him up from school and take him and his cousin to the (oil) rig (Ben runs). They had a blast.
Seeing children, both at church and helping my friend Laura with her 3-mo-old twins. Seeing my advisor, and my group-mates. While the idea he had about me combining some old gamma-ray knowledge I had with my newer cosmic-ray understanding probably won't pan out, at least he was thinking and suggesting things for a final chapter or two of my thesis! . Swapping missing folks back in the states for missing folks from the Ice and traveling.
...
So it's not exactly backpacking Arthur's Pass, climbing hand-over-fist up the waterfall in the mist and then down the pass, past verdant alpine scrub clinging to rock beside a rushing creek. Or hiking up to Ball Glacier in Mt Cook, cavorting with crampons and ice axe (for the first time ever!), exploring crevasses, and then slowly route-finding down the ridge beside Mt Cook itself, listening and occasionally watching as almost hourly rumbling heralded the collapse of yet another snowfield or scree slope. Neither has it been the unknown of hitching around the South Island, knowing there's enough in my pack for the evening, no matter where I find myself (ok, barring a $100/entree restaurant with black tie dress code. :). Greatest perhaps is the contrast with the simplicity of McMurdo, where the food was ready even if it was a bit aged, the room ready, if shared, and the tasks of the day well-defined and straight-forward
...
Yet, the great unknown lurks just around the completion of this last task (finishing my degree), luring me with vistas of more mountains to climb and gardens to grow (starting with herbs this spring!). Perhaps the great adventure isn't so far off after all; perhaps I'll manage a few mini-adventures in the meantime. Just to keep in practice. :)

a Returning

I returned this morning to Columbus, with a plane change in Chicago. Temperature on landing in Chicago: +15 F. Weather on driving to my new house in Clintonville: grey and beginning to snow. A bit of me wondered, am I back on the Ice? But no, we wouldn't have gotten 4+ inches today, with more on the way. Or perhaps we would:

...A BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH 4 PM SATURDAY...

... THUNDERSNOW WILL ALSO BE POSSIBLE FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS...PRODUCING PERIODS OF HEAVY SNOW.

I thought I'd heard a boom while out shoveling....

THE SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW WILL REDUCE VISIBILITIES TO NEAR ZERO AT TIMES CAUSING WHITEOUT AND BLIZZARD CONDITIONS OVERNIGHT.

It's beginning to look a lot like Antarctica, out there in the snow

BEFORE THE STORM DIMINISHES SATURDAY AFTERNOON YOU CAN EXPECT TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 10 TO 15 INCHES.

Anyone want to make a quincy with me? Snow wall? We could sleep quite cozily, all through the storm....

DO NOT TRAVEL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. CONDITIONS CAN DETERIORATE RAPIDLY IN BLIZZARD CONDITIONS.

Condition One is Condition Fun!

This is pretty much the worst weather I've seen all winter. Humm.... Skiing anyone?!

In the meantime, we can all surf over to Google Maps 'Bike There' Feature Request Petition and tell them, if the snow ever melts, we'd love to know the best bike routes through town.

an Ending

It's 3am Sat 9 Feb, and this is may be my last actual post from the Ice. My rotator flight leaves at 8.30a, transport is at 7.30a, and I should be up there by 7a. The rotator flights are the LC130 ski airplanes. They take the New York Air National Guardspeople here and there around the Ice and off continent, and are responsible for supplying Pole. Since it's almost too cold now to fly anything into Pole and the season ending in a few weeks means they need to get people off Mactown Station fast, we have the opportunity to fly with our service folks. It's an 7-8 hr flight vs 5-6, and the toilets are fold-down curtained seats, but it'll be an adventure! And I might even be flying off with the helo I road in with. Now that would be something!
It's been a good send-off. I've gotten most everything done that I wanted to, including saying good bye to lots of folks, talking one last time, face to face, with Anne and Peggy, and finally having that heart-to-heart with Betty.... and finishing the bottle of wine! They say your flight won't leave unless you're hung over in the morning. I don't think I'll be that, but close enough to go!
I am totally excited to meet up with Rob tomorrow in Christchurch and do some tramping. Right now it looks like we'll head for the Dusky in Fiordland. After talking more with Anne and Peggy about it (they did it a little while ago), I think it'll be Hard, but a great challenge I am up to. I am looking forward to the adventure, views, beech forest, and stories I'll be able to tell afterwards.
It's been a fully satisfying trip. I'll leave you with this......
Things I'm looking forward to when I get North:

• Fresh food. Having fresh fruit whenever I want, and having it not be rotten in parts.
• Trees. Green.
  
• Humidity
• Humidity.
• Privacy and more people, though I will also miss the community down here!
• Playing pickup in my cleats, on grass.
• Indian food.
  
• Stars (although I "saw" the moon yesterday during the Very Cool solar eclipse)
  

Thanks for following my adventures, and come back for more notes on what I've been up to!
In the meantime, I should get some sleep.......

a little irreverant humor

When they still had it, Matt Davidson's cartoons were published in the Antarctic Sun. Budget cuts. The NSF berthing is where the DVs stay. GAs are General Assistants, and generally do much of the grunt work, from shoveling to hauling, hammering, sweeping, and whatever else needs doing.

---

This one's from Scott Nutter...

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on 4 Nov, 1926 in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. In June of this year, HEMA was sold to the British investment company Lion Captial.
Take a look at HEMA's product page. You can't order anything, and it's in Dutch, but just move the mouse over the cup and watch what happens.

interesting links

A few interesting links I've been perusing lately... and many thanks to those who mentioned many of them to me!

Nerds: a really interesting take on nerd behavior and how to deal with it. Think you're not one? Read on....

AA: Antarctic Adventurer. At 24, Danny is the youngest SAR (Search and Rescue) team member I think ever on station. SAR folks are the mountaineers who make our lives out in the field safe and as such, get to go on many sweet adventures. Check out his notes on Room With a View. Galen was my Snow School instructor. Live vicariously.

Diversity: It's what's for productivity.

SciFi: Closing in on cyborgs.

Charge!: Fine British history... or at least literature. Like the noble British Arctic and Antarctic explorers, this is another example of how the Heroic Age might have been less glorious but more livable. (More on that in a waiting game: part 2. Various entertainments.)

Intimate Objects: An interesting look at long distance relationship aids collaborated on by a friend from undergrad. Who knew?!

Happiness and goals.

the waiting game. part 1: Mission, Eventually.

Since Sat 19 Jan, we have been primary mission, backup, and backup for the backup for the Twin Otters. Backup for the backup? When the weather (or other events) prevents the primary mission, they go to the backup mission. Sometimes even that won't work so rather than scrap the whole day, they try for a 3rd mission.

Unfortunately for us, when the weather was beautiful (I was out at LDB in my tank top and snow pants and definitely not complaining! :), we were on secondary backup. We were told we'd be primary towards the end of this week (23-25 Jan). Thursday, so far our only day as primary mission, we were canceled due to a low which moved in Wed, bringing both cold (low teens & twenties) and cloudy conditions with fairly high winds (15-25mph, with gusts up to 30 & 40mph). With the instrument so near the Ice edge, it experiences quite coastal weather, so the low sucks in warmer air across the ocean, bringing moisture over the Ice, where it's apt to condense out as snow or fog. I actually saw fog here early Sat morning.

Word came down earlier today that we'd be on primary again for Sat/Sun, but as of Fri night, we're secondary backup for Sat, and somehow I doubt we'll get anything better for Sunday. What are they doing instead of helping us? Pulling in field camps scattered around the area, assisting in the Bassler recovery (the bigger plane all us balloonatics had hoped to use for our recoveries before it crashed just after New Year's... oops!), and taking more scientists out into the field.

People like Shelly, my roommate, who's helping maintain and upgrade U Wisconsin's automatic weather stations, which provide most of the long-term, wide-area weather information down here. She's adding snow-depth sonars to several of the stations to attempt to gauge snowfall; frequent strong winds make this trickier than it seems. She spent ~36 hours at Pole last week; they'd been schedule for 4 days but were delayed with weather and other people's flights.


The worse the weather in any given week, the further behind schedule everything gets, so that the absolute delay is probably something over a week now. Delays are common down here, but the weather has been particularly bad this year: a fairly large snow storm every few weeks, and lots of gray skies. ...almost feels like Ohio! Luckily, highly variable weather conditions mean the skies will clear eventually, and usually after a day or two wrapped in fuzz, enough sky clears to see the sunlight dramatic on the Royal Society Mountains, giving hope realized in a few more days of sun on Mactown itself.

So perhaps sometime next week we'll get started. In the meantime, ATIC and BESS wait for us to finish before they even begin, and Jan draws to a close. Luckily, I have been moderately successful at keeping myself entertained. Look for more on that in Part 2. of the waiting game saga.

touchdown!

On the fateful morning of 16 Jan 2008, Dave and Phil, our Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) compatriots flew out with Scott, our eldest Ice CREAM science member to see just how far our balloon was from the Ice edge. Some of Dave and Phil's maps in McMurdo said 45 miles, some in Palestine, Texas (CSBF commanding facility) said a mere 35mi; none agreed.

Flying the LC130 yielded a 65mi measurement of reality: just far enough to be mostly safe from landing in the drink, where the whole would be unrecoverable. I am sure joy and whooping echoed through the big plane. None of the big boys were interested in recovering it on the far side of the Transantarctic Mountains, which would have been our next opportunity, and both further from Mactown and at high(er) altitude.

So in a "textbook perfect" termination operation, CREAM III came back to Earth. First the payload and balloon were separated and the payload parachute deployed, then the Helium released from the balloon itself. Both bits landed near each other on the flat white Ross Ice Shelf some 160 nautical miles from McMurdo. Check out Scott's blog for his impressions and pictures.

You can still see it mapped here. CREAM I had 3 revolutions and made a record 42 day flight. While there was a big push from our science PI and relations to go for a 3rd round this year, non-science folks both here and above them determined the resources for recovery would very likely be unavailable by the time CREAM III returned once more to the McMurdo area. So we have a solidly above average almost 29 day flight, in a good recovery location.

And eventually they'll tell us the recovery plan! They ask for our patience as they try to juggle terminating BESS, the remaining balloon, and finalizing recovery plans for us and for ATIC, which was terminated near Pole shortly before CREAM landed. Once plans are in hand, it's waiting for good weather and for resources to become available. Resources? We need 3 Twin Otter flights to recover our ~6000 lb instrument (including ballooning paraphernalia); the Otter can carry ~2500 lbs at a time.

So in the meantime, we wait!
... I feel like I'm getting good at that!


Quote from Dave Sullivan, who's been ballooning down here for 17 years, and 30-some around the globe.

disillusionment

I just attended a reception in the NSF chalet here in Mactown for the visiting members of the congressional science committee. They had just returned from visiting the Pole, where the South Pole Telescope danced for them and they signed their names on IceCube detectors as they sank into the hole. Other people attending included a cross-section of Raytheon workers and grantees like myself. The main commonality of the minglers however was that they belonged to one of the Congresspersons' states. (There was one congresswoman from CA normally on the defense, homeland security, and budget committees.)

After a little while, we were all whistled into a semicircle where the organizer passed out blue velvet bags containing some sort of heavy metal medal and done up with an Antarctica patch and pin. Each congressperson was given their minutes' impromptu speech which fell into the theme of 'we're in awe of what you smart people do, and thank you'. Deviations included 'your research leads to innovations and technologies which keep America as the (western) world leader', 'the teamwork displayed here is a model we should carry back to all people at home', and 'it's good to see technology used for something other than killing people' (CA congresswoman).

Thanks for the recognition, certainly! We were even told we give 110% and the taxpayers certainly get their money's worth. But please, take us down from the smart-people pedestal and just try to listen and understand what we're telling you, in simplified terms for your benefit!, about what we do. You don't need to patronize, just ask questions when you don't understand something. It'll help us get off the pedestal and learn how to talk to you so you actually do understand, and then we might actually begin to get somewhere in making the world a little better place.

When I asked my specifically more benign question: how did you like the Pole, of Tennessee congressman, he told me it was cold and that the SPT moved around. I inquired what he thought of IceCube. He said they were drilling holes to detect impulses of ... neurons... Neutrinos? No, he said, neurons. Neutrinos, I said more emphatically. He mumbled and wandered off. His speech touted the importance of science and technology in keeping the US at the top. The disjunction between true understanding and stated principle was unnerving and made it hard to believe his sincerity.

Another question: If funding science research is such a good bargain, why aren't we doing more of it? In fact, why did Kathie Olsen, deputy director of NSF, relate that she got a phone call after the holding budget passed this year in the House and Senate with ~7% increases over the presidential bill, that it had suddenly been cut by $350 million? (More on that from AAAS: shortages and overall NSF structure and budget stats.)

People who come to the Ice do so for many reasons, but perhaps common to most is a desire to explore, to adventure, to go outside one's comfort zone. To do so, they accept certain responsibilities and hardships, whether the boring janitorial work of cleaning bathrooms and common areas every day or the possibility of being caught in extreme bad weather while out in the field doing research or the lack of unexpired foodstuffs. Regardless of their personal history or training, they are very often interested in learning why their fellows are here, and what sorts of science they are supporting or sharing lab space with. This is the "esprit de corps" lauded by one congressman in his speech.

Yet I wonder how well their own ~2.5 day pampered visit brings them into that spirit. They travelled over 30 hours (roughly 2 days), just to get here. In total, they will spend almost twice as long in transit as on the Ice, "inspecting" the science they allocate money for. At least one DV worried more about getting off the Ice than on it. Rather than scientists, their reception attempted to connect them to their voting constituents. Perhaps this reflects the reality of politics; perhaps the speaker attempted to suggest his own compatriots try to adopt this lauded system. Perhaps I am having trouble believing that.

The question I asked only of my first congressman was why he chose to be on the committee. I appreciated the sincerity of his answer. His state has some resources which would benefit and grow if hydrogen were promoted as a fuel source. He envisions using next-generation nuclear power plants' super-heated water to efficiently create hydrogen to be used in car's fuel cells. I wonder if anyone has actually calculated the energy throughputs in such a system and compared them to current auto-energy usage. I wonder if all committees are used as special-interest forums. The congresspeople all agreed that the House Science and Technology Committee was one of the least partisan of all committees.

In his speech, he said the natural law is for all standards of living to come to a median value, and that we, being currently at the top, certainly didn't want that median to be lower than we have now. Which means that either the bottom comes up (benefiting his work with the foreign relations committee) or even better, both the top and bottom move up in parallel, and we stay on top. Wow. Let's rule the world? Or, us versus them? He said, it's a harsh reality, but if you bump along in high school (he likes to talk to high schoolers, to encourage them to get into technology fields), you'll bump along at the poverty level for the rest of your life, unless you find a back door. (He certainly encouraged seeking back doors if you have messed up.)

May I offer a different paradigm? It's a global economy, even if the governments are slower to recognize this and act accordingly (they just have a lot of historical baggage and are understandably slow to change). Putting others down just for cheap clothes and throw-away consumables will only hurt us in the end. Slaves have more to contribute than a broken body, but they can't do it until we free them, and yes, that is half the oppressors' responsibility. Together, we may be able to be proactive stewards of our environments, both "natural" and "man-made". By using our resources efficiently, we may be able to safe-guard some for future generations. By communicating with gentle, honest words rather than fists and guns, we may discover commonalities that make us all humans and honor the differences that make us all unique, allowing us to better define and work towards our goals, both individual and societal. Rather than us and them, me and we. This, perhaps is the esprit de corps found here, when we are at our best.

I don't think my honest congressman is a bad person, but the state of politics he is part of and a party to, which I have attempted to sketch here, scares me. Partly, it is the sense of powerlessness, though I have recently tried to assuage that by participating more in the political system and by attempting to share science and my hopes for a revised system with anyone interested. The general disinterest shown by the "top dogs" seems to point towards my naivety; I hope instead that my small patch of picture is not as dismal as it seems from here, that the spirit of adventure will free us from our fears and help us tackle our big problems together.