On to the pole - eventually

The last time I went to pole, the travel was way easy. Everything went just the way it was written on the plan. Christchurch, McMurdo for one night, pole the next day. Reverse it on the way out. Not too bad. The second time around it's been a little more entertaining.

On the plus side, I got a four person bunk room all to myself, which is more than you have any right to expect. So I was pretty happy about that as you can imagine. Our flight to pole was scheduled to go out at 7:00pm (catch the bus at 4:15 for the ride to the air strip). It's a three hour flight, so you'll get in around 10:00pm. When we showed up for transport to the airfield, they told us the flight was cancelled. That's always a bit of a bummer, and even more so when all of your luggage is already packed up and on a pallet. So, back to the room, make the bed again and grab something to eat. Jot down some notes, try to write it up for the blog. Chat with some friends and call it a night. Around midnight or so, I got some new roommates in from a field camp. That sort of thing happens quite a bit since McMurdo is basically a big logistics and support hub for field projects all over the continent.

I woke up early (5:30am) to check the boards for any flights headed to pole. That's not as early as it sounds because we're operating on NZ time which is essentially 5 hours behind Central time in the US, so it still worked out OK with my jumbled up body clock. This turned out to backfire rather badly. It turns out that the flight was rescheduled, but was not posted on the boards. They called my room instead - twice. Once at 6:00, and again at 6:15 for a 6:15 departure to the airfield. I found that out because they woke up my new roommates. I found this out around 8:30 when I returned to my room. At least my luggage was on the way to the pole!

So then I start the ritual rebooking of the flight. This is a lot like it is with normal airlines except the people are more friendly and you don't have to worry about change fees or where you're going to eat/sleep while you wait for the next flight. With that taken care of, I ran into a new acquaintence from the flight over. She does outreach for some of the drilling projects in Antarctica and was waiting to get the survival training required to go out into the field. It's called Happy Camper and you get to sleep in a snow cave overnight. I wanted to do that on the last trip, but there were people who actually needed the training so there wasn't really room for a tourist. We went wandering out to Scott hut to see if we could find any wildlife (penguins, seals), but the only critters were too far away to be anything more than dots on the ice.

The delay wasn't fun, but it gave me a chance to catch up on some administrative details. I got my laptop checked and approved by the IT folks - no evil viruses or other nasty e-germs were present, so at least I could plug my laptop into the station network and get some work done. I had a few work issues to deal with in the north, so this was a good time to take care of that sort of thing.

For me, one of the coolest parts of coming here is that there are a lot of science projects going on. My new roommates were drilling holes through the ice shelf and placing sensors in the ocean water under the shelf. They are trying to measure temperature and salinity over time to try to understand how this affects the ice shelves in more detail. This is important in modelling how the shelves will collapse.

I also went to a science talk by the SuperTIGER guys who I hung out with in Christchurch. It's a pretty cool project. They have a detector that is trying to measure ultra-heavy cosmic rays. They put this instrument on a ballon which reaches an elevation of around 128,000 feet and then circles around the continent for weeks. Essentially, the information they are getting is related to the life cycle of stars and the abundance of various elements present in the cosmic soup. They actually did a very nice job of presenting the topic at a level that was understandable for people not specialized in the fields. Most of the time, after the third slide they break out graphs with very strange units and crazy math which is about as clear as mud unless you happen to have a PhD in the field.  After that, I turned in hoping that there would be a flight the next day.

Happily, there was a flight scheduled at 5:00 the next evening and even more happily, I was on the manifest. Departure time of 2:45 so I had time to wrap up a few odds and ends, make a couple phone calls (how cool is that?) and generally get ready to fly. Of course, nothing has been simple on this trip, and this was no exception. At about 2:15 I updated my facebook status with a joyous announcement that I was on my way. I went to my room stripped the linens off my bed grabbed my laptop bag (the only luggage I had), geared up (you are required to fly in your ECW gear) and headed for the door. Flight cancelled due to weather. So after another quick cycle through the stages of grief,
I headed back to my room, remade my bed, pulled my laptop out of my backpack and five minutes later I was sitting in the galley getting ready to type. I pulled up the flight schedule to see if there were any flights the next day and discovered that my flight had been reactivated. Same departure time which was only eight minutes away. Love the lead times here. So, make a quick call to let them know I'm on my way, back to the room to strip the linens and get geared up, run to the transport building, and we're on the way.

Of course, the road hadn't gotten any better, so it took about two hours to make the trip to the airfield. I found out that the condition of the road was due to two things. The primary cause was a large and nasty storm that blew a lot of dirt off of black island onto the ice shelf. This makes the snow less reflective (lower albedo) and so the snow melts faster. Of course, the 40 degree temps the week before only made matters worse. We got towed for the last three miles to the airstrip. Our shuttle driver was nice enough to arm twist the galley staff into feeding us while we waited for the cargo to load and the flight crew to get the plane ready, and by 7:00pm were were in the air.