Getting started

Of course, the first thing for us newbs is the inevitable briefing. This one is a video with a bit of station orientation. In this case, largely conservation. We get two two-minute showers per week, and one load of laundry per week. This is to save water. There's another bit about the layout of the area around the station and the rules of the road for traveling around. There's also a lecture from the doctor reminding us that we are at altitude, what to expect, and where to find medical.

We're given our room assignments and sent on our way. I'm in A4-204 which has to do with the way the station is laid out. I walk into something roughly the size of a large walk-in closet. I can stand near the center of the room (not quite at center because the bed is in the way) and put four finger tips on the opposite walls. For reference, my arm span finger tip to finger tip is 6'4". It's about half again that long. However, I am very lucky as I have an interior room - no windows.

That may seem a strange way to be lucky, but it will make sense shortly. If I am to believe some of the scuttlebutt I've heard floating around, the station was apparently designed by an Hawaiian architecture firm. Whether that's true or not, they apparently didn't spend much time at the pole because they put in a lot of windows. The sad part is they did not include any method to cover the windows. Keep in mind that it is perpetual daylight for half the year, and perpetual light for half the year. So if you have a room with a window, you are left to scrounge for something that can cover the window so you can sleep which can be a chore. During the winter all or most of the windows are covered because there are astronomy experiments going on that don't want light pollution from the station. So as you can see, I am indeed lucky to have a room with no windows as I can sleep in the dark easily.

After that, I stopped off in one of the rooms set aside for the science folks and ran into our winter overs (the guys who will be staying on station over the winter). We ate lunch and they gave me a walking tour of the station. It's not very big (maybe 100 yards long by 50 yards wide), but there's a lot of activity crammed into that space.

For the first few days my job is to get acclimated to the altitude. No strenuous activity, plenty of water, no alcohol, cut the caffeine (now them's fightin' words), Diamox. Early on, I'm getting a little winded just walking up the stairs. I take some time to catch up on email and get unpacked and ready to go.

For me, the routine has developed mostly around meal times. No matter what time you look out the window, it's early afternoon. The only real way to get a sense of time is to look at which windows the sun is hitting at the moment. For these first couple days a feel kind of like a third wheel. There's some stuff I can do, but the part of the project I'm most involved with is providing computing resources to the scientists. That means all of "my stuff" is now half a world away and accessible only by satellite.

On my first day, I mostly hand around the station. On the second day, I get snowmobile training, and then catch a ride to the IceCube Lab (ICL). This is a building a kilometer from the station where all of the cables from our detector are hooked to computers. During the winter it's also a storage facility. I look around a bit to get familiar with it, and walk back with one of our winter overs.

That was a humbling experience. By the time I got back to the station I was sweating and winded. The temps have been unseasonably high so far. At one point, we set a new record in the area of -13 F or so. Typically, temps are in the -30 to -40 range at this time of the year. In any case, the gear is pretty good, so even just walking can get you pretty warm.

On the third day, they finally put me to work as a mover. A bunch of stuff in the Lab needed to move to locations in the drill camp or to testing facilities. In the morning, I moved some freeze control units which are used to make clear ice, and about 120 DOMs (Digital Optical Modules) which are what the detector is all about. Luckily, we had lots of help, including heavy equipment so it was done fairly quickly. Still, this is something that back home would have been a good morning's work. Here, it was a full day and I was feeling it.

But I slept really well.