Sunday
Dec282008
Mt Patterson
Sunday, December 28, 2008 at 04:31AM
We finally made it to Mt Patterson. It took a couple days of delays, but we ended up flying there on Friday.
Mt Patterson is located about 550 miles east of us in West Antarctica (and seeing as how we are closer to east Antarctica, that sounds pretty weird doesn't it? East and west mean different things down here...). It is found in the Ford Range, a coastal range just on the other side of the massive Ross Ice Shelf.
We flew there in one of two Basler aircraft serving Ken Borek Air - the Canadian fixed wing contractor for the USAP program. A Basler is an interesting aircraft. Ours was built in 1942 as a DC-3 commercial aircraft. Basler is a modifcation company that takes old DC-3's, strips them down, rebuilds them with new parts, and replaces the old gasoline rotary engines with modern turbine engines that enable this plane to get off the ground pretty darn quick - even when it is full of cargo (it can carry over 7000lbs...).
Audrey and Paul finish loading Basler MKB for our Patterson Journey.
Basler JKB sits on the "snowmac" at Willy...
Our Basler has only crashed once - that we know of. It crashed on Dec 22nd, 2007 - just over a year ago. It was taking off at Mt Patterson (yes, the exact same location we were flying to) when it took a bad bounce off of a pile of sastrugi and clipped a wing on the snow, spinning it around and shearing the landing gear off. It took a month for mechanics camped at the scene to repair it and get it back in the air again (rumor has it some of the repairs to the skin of the fuselage included riviting strips of pop and beer cans over the rips and tears).
So this was a special trip for the Basler: it got to return to the scene of its near demise a year ago almost to the day. As we borded it at Willy Field, we kept our fingers crossed that our day would be without incedent. The reason the POLENET crew needed to return to the site was because about a month after installing it last season, it stopped talking to them. Our crew of scientists included Audrey and Paul - on Seismic, and Stephanie and Eric - on GPS. The two pilots sat up front and ran the show. Louie, a robust and bearded Québécois, was our smiling flight attendant: he was flight crew member who kept us and our luggage in order in the back of the fuselage. He even brought us coffee.
Louie the flight attendant brings coffee to all of the comfortable passengers...
Steph brushes up on procedures in the unlikely event of a water landing...
It took us almost three hours in the Basler to fly across the Ross ice shelf. We had water under our left wing, and ice under the right. It was exciting to see the edge of the massive ice shelf edge - towering 30-50 meters above the water's edge. At this day in age, where Gore has made climate change a de rigueur dinner conversation, and where large tabular ice bergs breaking off from their harboring shelves make CNN news (remember the Rhode Island-sized chunk that peeled off of the Larsen-B ice shelf a few years ago? Or C-16 or B-15A?), one pays attention when they see a large crack separating a Sacramento-sized finger of ice from the remaining shelf. I saw one of those on Friday. It is sobering. The Ross ice shelf flows north between 300m and 1km per year at it's ice edge. When cracks start appearing several km behind the ice front, it makes you wonder... The GPS and seismic data from the POLENET project will help scientists figure out what the crust below the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is doing... Is it going up really fast? That would be bad. Other models predict that the WAIS will be gone in 4000 years, and sea level will be at least 20-80 feet higher because of it. When you look out of the Basler window at a stark and austere landscape stretching to darn-near infinity, it makes you almost choke on the lump in your throat. How could all of this ever go away?
From top to bottom: Sky, cloud, water, ice, crack, ice. This is a monster crack where the ice on top will eventually peel away into the sea.
And there is the end of the crack, where it meets water. The ice cliffs at water's edge are probably around 100 feet high.
More shelf ice edge...
We did a couple passes past the landing area before we landed. I think the pilots wanted to take a real good look at that Sastrugi before they put this multi-million dollar machine down on the ground. Fortunately, the bumps weren't so bad once we landed. Stephanie sat next to me. She was ecstatic, and she elbowed me in the ribs just to prove how excited she was. We disembarked into antarctic calm, cold, and quiet. I had a full bladder so i went behind the tail to relieve myself. When i looked back over my shoulder, Steph and Eric were already high-tailing it towards the station - which thankfully appeared intact from our aerial views.
Mt Patterson from the port-side window - just before we touched down.
Audrey, Paul, and the crew and I unloaded a heaping pile of gear, along with a little tundra skidoo, and a siglund sled. I piled the siglund high with solar panels, batteries, tools, and some assorted delicate electronic gizmos that Audrey threatened me with castration (or worse) if I broke them while playing Mario Andretti on the way up to the field site.
unloading...
We only had a four-hour window to work before the pilots planned to harass us to get back on (after all, the galley closes at 7:30 pm - who wants to miss one of these delicious galley meals?), so we worked fervently to replace what was broken. I barely had time to take photos. I helped Audrey and Paul change out a solar panel on their seismic station. I remarked to Audrey "I wonder how far away the closest people are to us right this moment..." She pondered for a moment then looked over at Paul, who scratched his head....
"Siple i bet... Siple dome. Its about 350 or so miles from here".
Siple dome is a deep-ice drilling site on the WAIS. A 1004m core that went to bedrock was removed there. When I got back to the office later that day I looked up the daily field camp report status for Siple: four people are there right now. Beyond Siple? WAIS has 44 personnel on board currently, and is another 200 miles further. Hmmm. We were in one helluva remote, isolates spot that day. Wrenching around on a bunch of solar panels, iridium data modems, batteries, and other expensive science stuff.
Stephanie checks for damage in the GPS electronics box.
Audrey and Paul working on the Seismic station.
Eric working on the GPS station.
Stephanie, almost finished with the remodel project.
Our Basler waits patiently for us. That blurry thing in the bottom right is another precision GPS station.
I took a 10 minute break towards the end of our work to run up to the top of Mt Patterson (I just had to summit this one!). That's when I spotted the Petrels. I was so awestruck by their grace and dynamic pattern of movement, that i just had to blog about them separately. I swung the hefty glass pipe of my 300mm around at them for a while, and I got the photos that you can see down in the next post. I picked up a bit of the frost-shattered granite (penetrated by a skinny mafic dike - how interesting), and did a double-take when i noticed a bunch of bushy lichen tucked in a little crack on the summit block. Here i was, 550 miles away from McMurdo - the closest concentrated human establishment (and closest ATM, and closest bar, and my bed), in one of the most remote places in the world - where - if I was in vegas I would bet this place would harbor the least amount of life you can find on this planet, and here in this desolate place were two species of life, observed by me, in one five minute period.
We started packing up the Basler just as the pilots were getting antsy. I have flown in ski planes a lot in Alaska, and I have seen some weird things loaded in the back of airplanes, but shoving a little skidoo into the back of this plane was a novel treat.
We strapped ourselves in as the props started turning. Louie stood in front of us to do his solemn flight attendant duty: "Ok, we are leaving. Buckle up. You know the drill...." Then he wandered back behind us and strapped in.
We took off uphill. I was a little surprised, but i guess with our headwind that way, we were never going to have to his sastrugi bumps with as much speed. The Basler's power was impressive. We bounced and skipped a bit, then we were off - headed for a late dinner at the McMurdo galley. Within 45 minutes, our flight attendant Louie walked up, and helped us to put on our nasal cannula Oxygen hoses - we were climbing to 17,000 feet to take advantage of a strong jet stream. 2.5 hours en route to MCM/willy field. My scientist crew all fell asleep within minutes. Their heads lolled back and they began mouth-breathing in a hypoxic torpor. I inhaled thru my nose and read my book. Today i started getting nose-bleeds. That damn dry O2...
Our flight back, just after take-off. Eric in the back seat, Stephanie goofing off in the middle, and Audrey and Paul up front.
The cockpit of the Basler
17,000 feet in a non-pressurized cabin or 2 packs a day for 30 years? Either way you end up looking the same...
After unloading all the gear from the Basler (in rear), we schlepped our stuff over to the road to McMurdo, where a Delta shuttle picked us up. (Steph wanted to hitch anyway...)
