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My year on the Ice
My year on the Ice
I just finished watching Anthony Powell’s “Antarctica: A Year on the Ice” and having spent over a year on the Ice now (minus 3 weeks for a round trip home) it puts many things in perspective. It’s nearly the end of October, and my brain does finally feel like it’s returned to a nearly normal … Read more
Time on Ice
Like any addiction, it comes at a cost. We may walk away being able to pay off student loans, debt, or go on a nice vacation to recuperate, but we trade this intense period of work & play in this extreme environment for those possibilities.
Winter Science at McMurdo
So we have 3.2% of station touching science. The other 96.8% of the people are keeping this place from being overrun by the environment and preparing it for the wave of people at summer. It gives you an interesting perspective on how harsh this place is when you realize that your overhead has to be so high.
Groundhog days and tshirts
Midwinter dinner is now less than two weeks away. It sort of a dual celebration of the northern solstice and the middle of our deployed winter, although they coincided perfectly. In my case it’s pretty close as I’ll be here till mainbody/summer, but for those who are out at winfly, it’s a little late. In … Read more
Good Crew
The most remarkable joy of my return to the Ice 7 years later is the amount of joy and laughing I’ve be apart of during these last two seasons. This last summer I started by everything being last minute and so was delivered into the Network Operations Center (NOC) without knowing any of my direct … Read more
The Trials of Commuting To Pegasus
A few days ago I went out to Pegasus preparing for flight ops to work on a troublesome weather computer exhibiting strange networking problems. Driving back from Pegasus I got caught in a Herbie and it went from Condition 2 to Condition 1 in all of 10 seconds. During the ensuing seven hours waiting, … Read more
Living on the Ice: A Different Life. Part 1
This is my 3rd season in McMurdo, two Summers, and now a Winter. In many ways I’m still a neophyte as compared to some of the 15+ year veterans and some things are still new to me. For most of my readers, you’ve never been to the Ice, so I want to elucidate on some … Read more
A Celestial Week
This week has been all about the sun, the moon, and the stars, well after the unexpected plane that landed here on Monday. It’s been exhausting, but amazingly fun. Some of you may have read my previous post on the mechanics of final sunset, which was an interesting research project. Following that post I went … Read more
Final Sunset… What the world’s ending?
Nope, but Antarctican’s won’t see it again for several months, so like a friend who gets lost in the wandering, we tend to forget about them. Although the sun is a big friend and it’s hard to miss our friend’s effects… so maybe that’s a fib. Unlike many who’ve been writing and showing sunset here … Read more