Antarctica 2011 Part 4 - last minute training...

This week has been all about getting our cargo into the system. Everything we take into the field must be checked, packed, sealed, labeled, and weighed, before it is "TCN'ed" into the cargo system (In Mcmurdo, TLA's - three letter acronyms - can become verbs).

Once our cargo is in the "system", we'll all know how much it weighs, and how much space it takes up, so that we'll know if it will all actually fit on the two twin otters that are being provided for our transportation out to Field Site #1: The Holyoake Range.

We've nearly wrapped it up. But with the weather being as good as it is (the storm is long gone), we've taken the last two days to do some glacier travel and crevasse rescue training while still enclosed within the "safety net" of the Mcmurdo system. Earlier today we traveled out to the Silver City icefall to stroll around with crampons on, and to practice rescuing backpacks from crevasses.

A few photos...

Lars H (in black) watches Lars S(in red/black) practicing his self-belay and self-arrest techiniques. Christian (green) and Paul (red) watch from the background. Thats Mount Erebus way back there...

Glenn Brock lives in Sydney, so it took him a while to get used to living and traveling on so much snow.

Christian Skovsted up close and personal with some of the blue ice from the Silver City icefall.

These are Paul Myrow's old Koflachs from the 1998/1999 season. I was shocked that so much wear and tear could be put onto a pair of boots in one season. Paul explained that it was all about the sharp, abrasive limestones and fissile shales and siltstones - tearing rubber off your boots piece by piece...

L to R: Lars S, Christian, and Paul working on a bit of crampon technique in the Silver City icefall.

We parked the Hagglund at Happy Camper, and walked across the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf to the top of the Silver City Icefall with a rope on.

Julian Hanna, from FSTP, leads half our team down from the Silver City Icefall. The crevasses are quite easy to see here - in the distance behind Julian. Castle Rock is at the far upper left corner. Erebus in the background.

Antarctica Part 3 - a small storm...

Today is Monday. The weather outside is awful.

In McMurdo terminology, weather conditions are divided into three categories:

Condition 3 - "Situation Normal". You may go about your business outdoors with no travel restrictions

Condition 2 - High winds, low temperatures, or poor visibility (or some combination thereof) prevails. There are restrictions to what can be done outdoors. Travel in field environments is obviously discouraged.

Condition 1 - Even higher winds (>55kts), lower temperatures (<-75°F with wind chill) and/or even worse visibility (<100m) is encountered. It doesn't reach condition 1 that often around here - though high winds on the edge of the ice shelf and out on the sea ice can easily restrict visibility.

Today is is Condition 2 in McMurdo and the road to Scott Base, but it's Condition 1 everywhere else... Not much to do outside, although I did manage to get a bit of cargo packed...

Some photos...

Every entryway into Crary is like an airlock. In bad, early season weather, one could see why...

The Galley (Building 155) is the blue one. Photo taken from the sundial bridge between Crary and the GalleyA lonely commuter braves the winds on his way to lunch. The building at left is Building 165 - housing Mac-ops, fixed wing, SFA, Mac-weather, etc... The Building at right is the "JSOC" building... "Just Slightly Off-Center"The weather may suck, but at least the work is hard... Martha Story has worked down here for the BFC for many years... Here, she's helping me locate fuel and bamboo flag-poles during the height of our lapse into Condition 2.

Antarctica 2011 part 2 - the planning, the prep, and the training...

 Today is October 28th, 2011 and we expect to be on a C-17 northbound to Christchurch on November 30th. This will be my shortest deployment to Antarctica yet.

Before we go into the deep field of the Trans Antarctic Mountains, there are heaps of things to do in town first. The team is now going through the normal entry-into-McMurdo routine - lectures, death-by-PowerPoint, training, more training, briefings, packing, eating, sleeping, and more training...

I need to fulfill my FSTP refresher obligations (except now I'm a student rather than instructor!), while the scientists I am working with need to take the two-day Happy Camper course - so that they thouroughly understand the camp equipment and deep field put-in procedures.

The Team - There are five scientists, and me - the field mountaineer. Here's a little more about the five I am working with:

Lars Holmer - the PI (principle investigator) is a professor of Paleontology at Uppsala Universtity in Uppsala, Sweden. He loves brachipods more than almost anyone alive. If humanity was forced to choose something other than gold as the world's reserve currency, Lars would prefer it to be articulate brachiopods. Lars wrote the proposal for this project "Hot Fossils in a Cold World".

Christian Skovsted - Christian is another aficionado of the lower Cambrian Small Shelly Fossils. He works at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm part of the time, and also at the University of Uppsala.

Lars Stemmerik - Lars is the department chair of the Geology department at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a man of few words, but many Carbon and Oxygen isotope samples.

Glenn Brock utters the phrase "small shelly fossils" more than any man alive. He speaks science in verse and rhyme. He is a professor of Palaeobiology and Invertebrate Paleontology from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His specialty is "stem groups from the lower Cambrian" - in other words - this Antarctic stuff...

Paul Myrow - Paul is a geology professor from Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. Paul is the comedian and musician of the group. Within one hour of meeting him he had given me two of his blues albums. Paul is the only one of us who has been to these field areas before. He's a sedimentologist, but with a keen handle of invertebrate palaeontology. Paul visited one of our sites 12 years ago with Dr John Goodge, who I traveled to Antarctica to work with last year, out of CTAM.

The Project: These five scientists who are interested in gathering "small shelly fossils" from limestone of the lower Cambrian (about 540 million years ago) during the "Cambrian Explosion" when diversity of invertebrate taxa (stem groups) accelerated rapidly (The "Cambrian Radiation Bioevent - if you like fancy scientific terminology). The title of our proposed project is "Hot Fossils in a Cold Land". We'll be examining reef and shallow marine carbonate  deposits that formed when the earth was warmer, but also when the Antarctic continent was further north - in a more temperate latitude. Other Cambrian marine fossils show that North America, Australia, parts of Greenland, and central Antarctica where all joined up along lower latitudes as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Do you read Swedish? You can read the team blog updates here.

Some photos: (of the planning, prep, etc...)

In Phase 2 of Crary Lab (the most expensive non-military U.S. building per square foot - allegedly) Lars Stemmerik and Paul Myrow get some work done. The view into our "office" in the Crary lab building.

Antarctica 2011 - part 1

Only one day of delay in Christchurch due to weather - but it wasn't weather in McMurdo - it was the cold, windy, wet, turbulent, icy air over Christchurch that kept us grounded. Apparently LC-130's don't deal well with icy conditions.

The secret benifit of this delay was that we got scheduled to fly down on the big, noisy (but faster and more comfortable) C-17 instead. The same big fat jet that I've always taken to get down to the ice.

About 80 of us boarded it for the five and a half hour journey south.

L to R: Paul, Glen, Lars, Lars, and Christian waiting in line to check in for the ice flight at the Antarctic Center.

Lars Stemmerick sporting his Swedish Polar Research jacket on the C-17 flight. crew's eye view of the southern polar sushine pouring in through the windshield.

And we have landed on the 2011 Sea Ice runway of McMurdo Station!

Delays no more...

It is not uncommon to spend four or five extra days couped up in McMurdo due to bad weather. Cumulatively, I've probably spent about two months out of three seasons engineering ways to mis-spend this gift of extra time.

Most people just try to catch up on personal life - before realizing 24 hours before their departure into the deep field that there are a million things that ought to be done, but hardly enough time to do it. I'm no different.

Now, I'm in a rush to gobble down food, turn in a dorm room key, move out of an office, get dressed in ECW gear (Extreme Cold Weather), and run off to a shuttle that will deliver us to the sea ice runway in time to catch an LC-130 hercules flight to the Central Trans Antarctic Mountain (CTAM) camp.

I'll update this blog again in January, when I return.