Julius' Travels in the South

Back in the Uk now - Updates to resume and fill in the missing pieces

2008-07-22T06:39:00.002-02:00

Well, that's it I'm back in the real world having travelled back up through Africa and slowly made my way back to the Uk.

My next task is to find myself a job. I also have to unpack my stuff and sort out my life. In the mean time there should be more time to do other things.

I realise that there are a lot of missing holes in the blog and will make an effort to fill them in as soon as I can.

Watch this space.

Sorry - Busy - The Past - The Shack Arrives - The Future

2007-12-21T23:09:00.000-02:00

Once again I have to say sorry for not updating the blog. I don't have any great excuses except to say that I have been very very busy. So busy that the only time that I have time to write an entry happens to be relief which is theoretically the busiest time down here at Halley. So here is a text entry of the past the present and the future. Hopefully I will get around to filling this in a bit more.

So in short what has been happening? Well since my last entry I have been on my final winter trip and got some amazing photos (soon to be added). New people arrived on base and we had our first plane. I finally got down to see the penguins at Windy bay. Apart from that its been packing packing and more packing as we shut down the science here to make space for the building of the new base. The science team has packed over 5 tonnes already and I will be packing another tonne and a half before the end of relief. All this will be sent back to Cambridge or in the case of the AIS (which I looked after) Norway. Oh yeah my leg is fine, thanks for all the support. I have even been kiting again. More people arrived on base until it felt like a summer crew even before the ship arrived.

The ship arrived yesterday and we got to have a lovely sauna and some fresh food. Relief started properly today but I am only helping in the background as I still have final packing of science equipment to do and field equipment to get ready for deployment later.

Soon I will be out on fieldwork and being smelly in a tent.

Planning to leave Halley around the end of Feb and then will travel back through Africa.
Hoping to be back in the Uk around May but you never know.

Anyway Merry Christmas and have A Happy New Year

Precious Bay - Zen Stove Testing - Leg Update 2

2007-09-09T14:32:00.000-02:00

Sorry again for not writing anything for a while, I've been a tiny bit busy with organising and sending out Tom and Neil to put up a remote instrument site about 20km away on the Precious Bay coast. This is west of Halley and is interesting because there is a polyna (weak bit of ice caused by currents) which opens up regularly. In spring there are low level ozone depletion events caused by chemicals produced when forming new sea ice reacting with sunlight and the ozone. The instrument put down there was an ozone detector and a spectrometer. The ozone levels are measured and the spectrometer works out what chemicals are in the air. Of course you need a power source for this and that is what I was supposed to be putting in. Then I broke my leg.

Since I broke my leg I have had to do a load of modifications. Make sure everything is going to work, then write a method of how everything goes together so that Tom can put it all together.

Photo courtesy of Tom.
The site at precious bay. The caboose and in front he wind turbines. The box on the right has a solar panel facing north and the tent at the far right is the loo tent. Neil's instrument will sit on the stand on the left. As you can see Tom has done a great job and everything went together as planned.

Another thing I haven't been able to do since I have broken my leg is make much. Moving heavy stuff and standing for much more that 15 mins has been difficult. I have however been experimenting with zen stoves. These are little alcohol stoves that are made as lightweight as possible. The classic one is made from coke cans. There is great website called zen stoves with instuctions how to make these. They are pretty amazing. I have also been testing them to see how fast they boil water.

Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

This is the mini-zen which is a hybrid side vent burner. It has holes in the side and I made mine out of schwepps tonic water cans. Holes drilled in the side and a double wall mean that as the alcohol (meths in this case) heats up it pressurises and comes out the side. It weights 8 grams and the pot just sits on top of it. It boils a cup of water in 3 mins from lighting which is fantastic.

Pete the WBC and me watch as the coke can top burner burns. Sune the GA is behind me. Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

Another shot of the coke can top burner (24 grams). In the foreground you can see the tonic can top burner (8 grams) and mini zen side vent burner (8 grams).

I can now hobble around and put weight on my leg. I need to do this now since it will trigger the bone to get stronger. Of course I need to be careful so that I don't rebreak the bone. I have to be very careful, even so I can now put all my weight on the broken leg.

Me showing off my cast with the rocker on the bottom. I also have had a hair cut and apparently look 6 months younger, yay! Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

The rocker.

The rocker is essentially a roll of plaster that is then plastered onto bottom of the cast. The cast is then stengthened. This was done by the Doc last weekend. I can now walk with only one crutch and have been hobbling to the Piggott on my own twice a day with no help. Thats about 2km on crutches a day which makes my wrists hurt. Oh well no pain no gain.

I should be out of plaster in a week and a half.

Leg Update

2007-08-20T17:01:00.000-02:00

So here are the latest x-rays straight from the lab. Well the first couple are actually from last week when I had the proper cast put on. This x-ray is taken immediately after the full cast is put on to make sure that the bones haven't moved too much in the process of putting the cast on. Of course now that you have a cast on made of plaster of paris the x-rays are not as clear. In fact the x-ray machine settings have to be tweaked to increase the power to get good pictures.

Anyway on the x-rays. Apparently there was a bit of concern that the bones might have moved a little and that the gap was getting bigger. The alignment was great however. We have great backup from a hospital in Plymouth and the verdict was that it looks good.

Front view from the 9th of Aug.

Lateral view from the 9th of Aug.

A week later to check on progress I had another couple of x-rays. Once again through the plaster.

Front view 16th of Aug.

Lateral view 16th of Aug

As you can see there is hardly any difference between the position of the bones from one week to next. This is good news and doesn't change the prognosis. If everything goes to plan I should be walking on the leg partially weight bearing on by the end of the month. I will then have the cast on for 3 more weeks. The cast will be modified to have lump on the bottom so that there is a rounded bottom that I can walk on.

This is what should happen if everything goes to plan. If I don't stumble on my crutches and do more damage. I did stumble today actually but luckily didn't damage myself, I just have to look after myself. I am looking forward to walking again, in the mean time I will enjoy being pulled about by the rest of the base.

Sun Up, getting plastered, Action Film Party

2007-08-17T17:59:00.000-02:00

Having said that I would have more time on my hands (this is technically true as I spend no time on my feet) and that I would update the blog, it appears that I have roughly the same amount of time free to do things. I now spend half my time at the Piggott platform (my work is there) and half the time on the laws (where I live). Every morning a couple of people get man-hauling harnesses on. I hop down the stairs and get dragged to work in a pulk sledge. There is a lot to do. I was supposed to be going out to setup an instrument about 15km away at Precious Bay but now I am not going. So I have to prepare everything and instructions how to do this for my replacement, Chris. Its all going well but its still a rush.

Before I was allowed to leave the platform I had to first get my first 'backslab' replaced by a proper cast. The backslap cast allows the limb to swell up which it does over the first few days. After this a proper cast is better as it will support the leg better.

Richard the Doc cuts off the backslap cast with the assistance of Nurse Dave.

Richard measures out a thin tubigrip sleave which is all the padding needed in a full cast. The backslab has loads of cotton wool padding.

Removing the backslab and supporting the leg. This is actually very tiring as the leg is surprisingly heavy.

The swollen ankle.

Nurse Dave points to the place where the bone is broken, whilst Richard gives my leg the last wash it is likely to have for 6 weeks.

Arrgh! The Pain. It wasn't painful at all just cold and wet.

We had this great idea to try to get the cast to be a bright orange (for those who know it we wanted the ventile orange of our windies and overalls). The plan was to mix in some yellow and red food colouring into the water used for the plaster of paris. Unfortunately the plaster didn't take to the colouring as well as Richards hands. Also when it dried it turned into a pink cast which was the one thing I was trying to avoid.

A job well done, what a lovely pink cast. Richards butcher hands tell their own tell.

Having plastered the leg fully there was a period of cleaning before the taking some more x-rays to check whether the bones were in the correct position. A load of these photos were taken by Dean the comms manager.

Setting the x-ray machine. I think Richard is becoming quite an x-pert.

Left alone while the x-ray is being taken.

Richard finishing off developing the x-rays.

The x-rays were a success and I will put them up as soon as possible. I have had another set since then and I will put them up as well to show my progress.

One of the other big things that has happened is that the sun reappeared. This was predicted to happen on or around the 11th of August. Last year it was seen 3 days early due to miraging during an early penguin trip. This year it arrived on the 10th at lunch time. In our sweepstake Tamsin guessed the correct time.

A contingent of sun worshipers went to prostrate themselves and offer thanks that the great eye in the sky has returned. I took these from the north window of the laws where I was waiting for my cast to dry.

The sun's disk pokes up above the northern horizon.

About half an hour later we all gathered for the sun-up ceremony where the youngest member of the base raises a new flag.

This year the youngest member is Jim the Chippie. In a typically Jim show he first pulled the flag up up-side-down and then the flag nearly blew away.

Jim fights the new flag.

The Flag the right way up finally and in the right position. Its not going to last long and in a few months will have been tattered by the wind.

Jim and his flag.

We had a nice cocktail night to celebrate the sun returning (we had this the day before the sun returned). We then had a BBQ on sun-up day which was nice. I only spent a few minutes outside as I hadn't worked out how to keep myself warm outside with a broken leg.

On the saturday we had Kirsty's birthday party. She decided that the theme would be action film characters. So everyone dressed up mainly as action heros.

Mark the electrician as Col. Jack O'Neill stargate command.

Alex as the Dread Pirate Roberts (not Zorro) and me as the Ugly one in The good the bad and the Ugly.

Dean an Richard decided to show me sympathy for breaking my leg and got plastered as well. Dean was 'Jules' Bond, an injured bond, and Richard was an injured stunt man.

The whole crew.

We also played some games including the cardboard box game. You have to pick up a cardboard box with your teeth and only your feet on the ground. The height of the box becomes less and less. Richard above showed an interesting by flawed method.

Pete the RAF man claps as Neil (Jack Sparrow) shows how flexible he is.

Ant the monkey man was very very flexible and used a number of methods.

Andy the generator mech was also great at this.

Tamsin (the Power Ranger) watches as Dean looks serious.

Kirsty the Birthday girl demonstrates how to be a tomb raider.

The party was great. This weekend we have a pub crawl where I will be dragged around which should be fun. I will hopefully have an x-ray update soon as well.

The returning sun (when exactly is it going to happen?). I break my leg.

2007-08-06T17:11:00.000-02:00

So the sun is coming back. Its amazing how bright it is already. The sun is supposed to reappear (according to my calculations) on the 11th of August. So its coming fast. Already it gets very light during the day if there are no clouds and I know from last year that as soon as the sun reappears you wish that it would go away because it is so bright that you have to immediately wear sunglasses.

Anyway onto the more interesting things. How did I come to break my leg? Funnily enough our last Doc School lesson was on how to deal with broken bones. We were supposed to be doing plastering in the next session on thursday. At least Richard the doc will have had some more practice.

Well it was a lovely sunday afternoon and the wind was light but for my kite perfect. It has been a while since I have been out kiting but you never forget what it is all about. I ran out after lunch and launched the kite. I have got this down to fine art and it only takes me 5 mins to launch. I then spent a lovely 30 mins kiting up and down one the eastern side of the base near the memorial (to those who have died on base). I did a few jumps. As you know I kite ski, that is ski with a big kite. I think people might have seen the "Top Gear" where they race to the "North Pole" (magnetic), the lady in it was kite skiing. I have a bigger kite than her and I use a harness and bar instead of handles. Anyway kiting is awesome.

After about 30 mins I was getting a little tired and after a tiny jump had fallen over. What you normally do in a situation like this is to use the kite to pick your body back up and you ski off. What happened this time however was that the kite picked me up and somehow the skis crossed and I fell and rotated forward over my left leg. The ski binding didn't pop out and instead I heard a sound a bit like that sound when you pull a chicken leg off a roast chicken. It was pretty aweful. I lay down and crashed the kite on purpose. I undid the ski binding and felt a lot better. I still knew it was bad and called for help. Luckily Dave and Chris were close by just about to head off kiting and they got to be quickly. The Doctor and Tom arrived quickly and brought a pulk sledge in which they dragged be back to the plaform.

An hour later and we had the x-rays. They have a vetinary x-ray here as they are the only mobile x-ray units that are made nowadays. I am apparently equivalent to a large goat.

A front on view as you can see it is the outside smaller of the lower leg bones that has a nice crack running up and the right.

Side on view of the foot. You can see the crack is in the smaller bone (the fibula) about an inch above the ankle and continues up about 2 inches in a diagonal direction up and rearwards of the leg.

So what does this mean. Well I will be in a cast for about 6 weeks. 4 weeks of which I can't put any force on the leg. I can then hobble about on it. Then I have to strengthen up. I will still be ok for my winter trip holiday and should be strong again for the summer season. It does mean taking it easy for a while and no kiting for a bit. It also means the deployment of a remote instrument that was supposed to be carried out by me is going to be covered by someone else and I don't get to go on penguin trips for a bit.

Its not the greatest of things but it happens. I should hopefully have more time on my hands to keep you updated. I should have some more pictures soon.

Midwinter - Sorry I am so rubbish/lazy

2007-07-23T20:31:00.000-02:00

So I haven't been the best blogger recently. And this is even after I had promised to be better. Well here is a little update. I have been busy. Before midwinter there was a massive effort to make the midwinter presents. In the middle of this the instruments have been playing up. But that is the challenge of living here. You get an amazing environment and at the same time opportunities to make loads of things with the guidance of the various tradesmen here.

One of the things that we made was a 50th birthday present for the base commander. This was a brass coin etched to commemorate the occasion.

As you can see it fits nicely in a miniture sledge box.

We even managed to etch a likeness of his face into the face of the coin.

As usual we had our midwinter photo competition. These are the photos that I entered:

This was the environment one and shows the whole base. The nearest building is the Piggott.

This was my people photo. It is of Rich, one of the steelies during the summer. As you can see he was a little mad.

This one is of Mat the vehicle mech who was operating the Nodwell crane whilst Chris and I were in the basket fixing the Share Antennae.

This was my wildlife photo and is I think my favorite penguin. He kind of looks like he is just about to kick a small football of snow to me.

Midwinter hit suddenly and the mad rush to finish the presents was just as horrible as last year. You might have thought that I should ahve known better being a 2nd year winterer but I didn't. Others on base were just as bad. We had a lovely week off as well but it wasn't that much of a week off. When we have time off here someone immediately organises something. This year we had a biathlon (x-country skiing and throwing snowballs), photo competition as mentioned earlier, a murder mystery night, a film day, a pool competion and a crazy golf day. The crazy golf was amazing with everyone building holes and clubs and then spending a few hours putting.

Of course the high light of the week was the midwinter day itself. The usual naked run around the base and massive meal topped with an enormous meal and the giving of presents. The presents this year were if anything more amazing than last year.

Andy receives his cheese board and knife made by Dave.

Mark was not happy with his bucket.

Dean was amazed with his present from Ant.

Mark finally gets his proper present. A miniture primus stove from Andy.

My present was a tesla turbine made from broken hard disks and powered by steam. I gave it to Mat and he decided never to fire it up because it looked so good. I think he was just scared that it would blow up.

The pool table showing all the amazing presents.

Other presents of note were: Kirsty's brass model of the laws for Tamsin, Mats sculpture of a man skiing for Richard and Alex's poem for Brian.

Since midwinter we have been back working hard.

The light is coming back and its lovely.

The girls spent a night at Wonky and did some light writing.

I will be better.

Aurora Australis-last night

2007-05-24T18:05:00.000-02:00

Just a quicky. This is a video I just made. Last night we had an awesome auroral display. It was the bestest ever. I really mean it, I wanted to get naked and dance around. It was trippy. Anyway the video is not finished but it sort of is. I have some fiddling to do and sound to add.

I made it using my digital SLR taking 5s exposures. I then added up the photos and made them into a movie today. Enjoy. I will post the final version soon.

Sundown - More Fixing Radars - Starting Mid Winter Presents - Tamsin's Birthday

2007-05-13T14:27:00.000-02:00

As usual my blogging plans are never as good as they should be and as usual my blog is way out of date. Everyone else here seems to have the time to blog. I like to think that I am just busier than everyone else. Of course this can't be 100% true. My new plan is to try to at least keep up with what has been happening and then retrospectively catch up on stuff that I missed since the last entry (January). This of course is still likely to fail but I will try my best. So keep looking back because new entries may appear after this one at a later date.

So what has been happening recently? I guess the most significant thing for us is that the sun has gone again. At Halley we have approximately 105 days without the sun. This isn't to say that there is no light, there is alway light. But what does happen is that we don't get to see the actual sun for that time, we just get a glow that appears on the horizon. As is traditional at Halley we have a sundown ceremony where the oldest member of the base lowers the flag. Then in the evening we have a sun related party. Somehow every year there are arguements about when sundown actually is. This is because there are a number of optical instruments here and they all use different definitions of when the sun is actually down. Then of course there is miraging which will can cause the sun to appear above the horizon when it actually isn't. Anyway it is a good excuse for a party.

The laws platform taken whilst walking to lunch just before the sundown ceremony.

A view of the sun at 2pm about 10mins before the flag was lowered.

Chris stands to attention as we wait for everyone to gather on the laws open platform.

Mark and Brian wait at the back. What was really nice on that day was the lovely moon over the Piggott platform.

Jim the Chippy (and the youngest on base, who will be raising the new flag at sun-up) finally makes it. He had a good excuse in that he was on nights but got up specially for the ceremony.

This year it turned out that our Winter Base Commander, Pete, was the oldest on base and had the honour of lowering the flag. He gave us a lovely short speach before the lowering in which he revealed that he would be celebrating his 50th birthday. He did a fine job.

Everyone looked on.

I then wondered back to work this time taking a few photos.

It just amazing the sort of colours you get because of the low sun. The moon as well was awesome.

That day I had to carry on working hard trying to get the new MF radar working again. This radar is located in the optical caboose about 1.5km from the rest of base. Now that winter has really started properly we walk most places because it is more hassle to get a skidoo started and these are all at the garage getting serviced for the next summer. Luckily its a very nice walk (unless you have a load of equipment to drag) especially on a beautiful days.

The view of the base about half way to the optical caboose. The small building in the foreground is the piggot and the larger one in the background is the Laws.

The radar that I have spent a lot of time fixing is the newest radar on base. It has buried antennae. It seems that a lot of my maintenance on this radar is to compensate for the changes in snow properties as it builds up and compacts above the antennae. The properties change and therefore the tuning of the antennae changes. This change is really bad for the radar and we get a lot of energy reflected back into the transmitters. This results in blown up components and overheating.

One of the chips on one of the Power Amplifier cards that has blown up.

These components are all new which means they are all surface mounted. So lately have learnt to desolder surface mounted chips by using gas soldering irons. Its a tiny bit scary, basically using a blow torch to remove components but it actually is less damaging than trying to use a conventional soldering iron.

Hopefully I will have got the MF radar running alot better as I understand it more and more.

I have also been spending a lot of my time making my mid winter present. This is taking up all my spare time but I am starting to believe that it might just work. Not long now either. Mid-winter is less than 6 weeks away so I have to get working. My idea this year is very different from last year and I think one of my problems is that my idea last year was so good. I couldn't do the same thing (it would not be that exciting for me) and so I have gone a little crazy. I hope it will work.

I also realise I haven't been very good at keeping in touch with people this year. So from now on I will be making more of an effort to write my blog and also get back in contact with other people. Give me a call if you know my number.

January - At last

2007-04-10T18:44:00.000-02:00

Sorry once again for being so rubbish at keeping my blog updated. It seems that I have either been too busy and maybe a bit too lazy.

One other mishap that happened was that the hard drive on my laptop decided to kill itself. One second it was fine and the next it was making those "knock knock you know what has happened" noises. So I have spent the last week rebuilding my computer. Luckily I had a small external hard drive. I took everything off this and then sacrificed it to the laptop gods and now it is living as the laptop hard drive. I still don't know quite what I have lost but I will slowly discover it I am sure.

What is certain is that I now have no excuses for not updating the blog. Of course now I can't remember what the dickens happened in January but I will give it a try. I also had the honour of writing the base Web Diary which was not really up to the normal standard. So if I am repeating what I talked about in the web diary you must forgive me.

Unlike last year, when relief finished by New Years Eve, this year the madness started on New Year’s Day. After a week of the ship being stuck 50 miles from N9 in heavy sea-ice and everyone on base on standby for relief, it was a relief when the wind changed direction and the ship eased its way to N9. N9 is the site that we used last year which is 59km to the north-east of Halley and is used because there always seems to be either good sea ice or if that has disappeared then there is low shelf ice. There is low shelf ice there because there is a massive crack there that runs for about 100km all the way to the hinge zone. N9 was chosen, as there was too much sea-ice at the creeks this year, once again very different from last year when it was chosen because there was too little ice at the creeks. This meant that we had to prepare ourselves for the long drive there (max speed of a snocat pulling a sledge is about 15kph). For some strange reason I was the only winterer to be assigned to work shipside for relief. It was very exciting not to be on base but at the same time I was so used to being around a small bunch of winterers that not being with them was very odd. There was a good carnival atmosphere as we drove to the ship just because we were going to see loads of other people.

Our first view of the ship as we approached N9. The twin otter plane is on the left.

As usual everyone was split into day or night shifts so that relief continued 24 hours a day. I happened to be on night shift which I can now say is not as good as day shift. It is summer so we have 24 hour daylight but its still colder on night shift. Having woken up early in the morning to drive the snocats to the ship, I found out that the next night shift was when relief started. We ate some lovely salad on the ship and I tried to get some sleep. Of I couldn't really. We then started our shift and drove a number of people and some sledges to the halfway point. It then turned out that the snocat from the Halley end, that we were supposed to meet halfway, hadn't even left. So we stayed in the halfway caboose and played scrabble. It was a pretty tiring day and after that relief just sort of blended into a blur of driving in poor contrast and then helping loading beside the ship on the ice.

This year saw the arrival of some new vehicles: 2 Challengers and 2 John Dere tractors. However to begin with the snocats took the brunt of the work load.

Jim the new wintering Chippie who was my driving buddy filling the transit tanks with avtur from the ship. The big green tractor is a John Dere with a track kit.

The new Challenger showing that it can do the job of three snocats.

As the new vehicles came on line the snocats were slowly retired until only the new vehicles were running. The weather was not nice either for a few days and this slowed down many of the shifts. There wasn’t that much wildlife this time at the ship except for a trio of Adelies that kept on turning up.

During relief the first few 2007 winterers arrived at their new home for the next year. Hopefully they weren’t too shocked. Even with the bad weather and only four vehicles performing the relief, the fact that they could all pull a lot more than the snocats meant the relief was over in a week.

Finally everyone arrived on station and we could all get back on days and get on with the summer season.

This year the major changes to the base seem to be the moving of the Garage and the Drewry buildings closer to the Laws. As well as that there is more Halley 6 sledge testing and a garage refurbishment. This is on top of the usual caboose, tunnel entrance raises and usual summer maintenance. On the science side we are installing a number of new instruments, lots at the CasLab, a new MF radar, and the flying of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs).

One of the experiments used scale models of the Laws platforms and models of the new Halley 6 buildings to investigate the wind tail profiles that may form at the new
Base.

Simon measures the snow accumulation around the model of the Laws platform.

Looking at the snow levels around the new Halley 6 modules.

All this adds up to a very busy summer especially when you consider that the summer season is less than 6 weeks long.

The aircraft was very busy, firstly carrying out the servicing of remote science equipment on the continent towards the pole. Later it was being used to remove empty drums from some of the field sites close by.

Alex services the instruments at A84.

Drum loading at Site 5.

Somehow the new faces seem to have boundless energy (maybe we did last year) and are out every night skijouring, kiting or x-country skiing depending on the wind.

Judgie showing his skills just before he took a bad fall and hurt himself.

So many kites and so many good kiters. I thought my skills and a year down here would allow me to show off but all the newbies are naturals. Its just so unfair.

As usual there was the summer football match, with no injuries for a change.

What you see there is me on the floor having just been pushed over by John (ex Winter BC and fouler) who has the ball.

Catchup 2: A brief journey through January

2007-02-25T18:05:00.000-02:00

Will add pictures etc... from January, but here is a little video from one of my summer jobs which was to move the search coil magnetometer from one of the cabooses to the Simpson platform. The sensors (coils) were buried in the snow in a 1150mm x 1150mm x 1150mm box that I built. I made the movie using my digital camera set to take photos every 6 seconds and then compiled the photos into this.

The other person helping me is Simon Coggins ex Halley Winterer and current Science coordinator.

One of the other things that I have done is cut off my beard. As some of you know I have been growing a pretty disgusting beard since Sci-fi night and have tried to take a photo of myself every night. Here is the result.

Catchup 1: A brief journey through December

2007-02-23T02:03:00.000-02:00

Looking back at my blog I can see that I have a lot of work to do to catch up with what has happened in the last few months. This is the first attempt that I have made since the beginning of december and as usual the reason for not being able to write the blog has been that I have been amazingly busy. As usual my nights haven't been enough to catch up on everything. But hopefully this is a start. At the end of the last entry I mentioned that a second Basler aircraft flew in and with spares etc... in order to fix the broken plane. That plane disappeared and we resumed our time digging up things burind in the snow and raising them in preparation for the summer.

For me, as mast officer, this involved a lot of raising turnbuckles as the snow just keeps on falling here.

Dave the Comms manager struggles to get a chicago grip attached to the stay. You essentially use two chicago grips and a chain hoist to take the strain off of the turnbuckle so that you can shorten the turnbuckle and add in a 1.5m strop. This then raises the turnbuckle about 1m off the ground. Nearly all the turnbuckles on the comms masts had to be raised this year.

Once they were all raised we then used a theodolite to carry out a mast survey. This allows the RAF summer masties to come in and decide what work needs to be done.

One of the new things that we have done is to start ice carving. We had some blocks of ice and a few old chisels from Liz the chippie and just started to chip away. As expected we immediately started to carve penguins. Then Fran came out and started to carve a snocat. (These carvings were never completely finished and just before relief, Kirsty and I took them to the Maggy shaft where the temperature hovers around -10 degrees C for safe keeping. Hopefully we will finish them off and I will get some good photos to show you)

Kirsty and Fran show off their carving on the Laws south platform. The most surprising thing is how soft the ice is when you have a sharp chisel to use. It just cuts like some sort of plastic. I thought it would be really hard and tough. You can do very detailed work.

One of the other things we have to raise is the catenaries. The catenaries are what we call the cable runs to the antennae. These cables hang on large fence posts.

Here John shows how low a catenary can get. When these are raised they are about 8 foot above the snow surface.

With the expected coming of summer we also had our final winter party. Its all a bit sad that we are saying goodbye to so many people. And after a year we really got used to each other and made some amazing friends. Of course six of us were staying which was good. We have also had a year of samba playing with our drum guru Dave (Band Name: Drum line) and the Halley band had also been practicing for at least 6 months. This was our last opportunity to show off to each other. Another interesting contruction was the making of Vodka luge. This massive block of ice was made by taking a bucket of water and leaving in outside.

Fran samples the vodka.

The Halley band run through their greatest hits.

Me playing the surdu with Drum line.

One of the more interesting raising jobs was the raising of the Halley 6 Automatic Weather Station (AWS). This AWS is sitting at the site of the new base and is about 15km away from Halley 5. One of the interesting things here is the accumulation at the site. There seems to be more accumulation here that nearly anywhere else I have seen.

On arrival at the site we realise that the accumlation has been so large that the solar panels are no longer available and that there is going to be a lot of digging to do. Chris shows how low the sensors are. Luckily it is a wonderful day weatherwise and its a lot of fun. I feel sorry for the Halley 6 winterers if this is the accumulation they are going to get every year.

Liz shows that you can read Cosmo anywhere during one of her breaks.

Digging seems to be all we do here before summer. As you can see the weather was really great which meant that we were digging and sweating in our t-shirts. We excavated a massive hole in order to get the wires and batteries up to the surface again.

The raising team after we had got everything out. Reading from left to right we have Andy, Chris, Liz, Kirsty (team leader) and me. We actually moved the Halley 6 site 5m closer to Halley 5 as the AWS is the only thing that marks the new site.

During this time we had the damaged Basler repaired and then flown out via us. So once again we saw the canadian pilots. We finally also had the Germans fly through with their Dornier 228. They returned a few days later with Pat the Summer BC, Martin and Ben (Vehicle Division) in order to prepare for the arrival of the ship. We also had the BAS twin otter arrive from Rothera. On board was the head of my division Mike Pinnock and Mark Maltby one of the Rothera Electronic Engineers who came over to help install a new medium frequency (MF) radar. This was to be one of my summer projects, that is to install the MF radar.

The ship then got stuck in heavy sea ice and couldn't make its way through. Luckily for us this meant that we could have one more penguin trip. I like to think I had something to do with persuading Simon to organise the trip as I was the main person bugging him to do it.

This also allowed the some of the summer people to get to see the penguins, which is something they rarely get to do. One of the crazy things on this trip to windy cove was that when we got there, there were juvenile penguins actually on the ice-shelf. These curious little fellows had climbed up the slope right to the top. It was true that the slope had become shallower, but even so it was impressive.

Anto and Ian the pilot snap away at the penguins at the top of the slope.

From the top we could see that the whole colony had dispersed. There were still loads of them but they were completely spread out. Very different from the two other times I had come.

I also caught this adult going to the loo.

It was a pretty amazing evening, to be down on the sea-ice in only -5 degrees with sun dogs and penguins. It just reminded me how luckly I am to be here.

As usual the adults looked well groomed.

The adults are now the less flighty birds. And the chicks that used to be so curious and who used to wander right up to you are very very flighty. Here a returning mother wanders over to me.

The chicks are also nearly as large as the parents. I much prefer them when they were tiny little things what were cute instead of the big ugly scardy cats that they are now. They are also starting to loose their feathers and so they look even worse.

Fran walks underneath the chicks that made it to the top.

Some chicks hanging out under a cornice that is starting to thaw.

The trip to the penguins was amazing as usual. The ship was stuck in ice until new years eve when the wind finally changed and blew some of the ice out of the way. On base we had a subdued new year's celebration. As we knew that relief would happen the next day. At least we had a good christmas dinner and party where we played the samba drums again. The ship ended up being 8 days late which meant that the summer season was shorter and therefor busier. But that is another story for another entry. Hopefully will get an entry for January in very soon.

Still Alive

2007-02-15T22:57:00.000-02:00

Just thought I would make a quick post as I am just about to go on nights and in the next week should have enough time to catch up on the blogging side of things. The ship has come for second call. Which means that summer is nearly over and all the summerers will have left us in the next two days. Over half of them have left already and are staying on the ship. All us winterers got to go to the ship and have our teeth checked by the dentist. After that there is only one last plane (the Basler) on its way out of Antarctica to go and then we shall have our 10 months alone again.

Watch this space because I will be blogging to try to catch up all that has happened.

Alive.

2007-02-02T20:06:00.001-02:00

Hi. Long time no post. Have been busy working which is good and playing which is also very good. I will finish off and update this blog very soon as I am now getting myself more organised. There is a bit of news I guess and that is I am going to be the deputy winter base commander. I am not quite sure what this involves but it should be interesting.

I am also writing the january webdiary for the base.

Whats been happening for the last Month? - Planes - Cranes and Getting ready for the Summer

2006-12-03T15:05:00.000-02:00

So its been ages since I last posted and the main reason for that is that there has been too much happening. Now that its getting a lot warmer it means that we can go out and do a lot more outdoor work. Another thing that has happened is that the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) in the Uk delayed the BAS planes for some reason (something to do with cargo weights and the stength of the wheel skis that they use) that I'm not really sure about. They are coming but later than expected. This means that new people (Pat the base commander and Ben and Martin (vehicle guys)) won't be coming in so early. The RRS Ernest Shackleton is also required somewhere else in the North earlier than usual which means that this summer season is going to be shorter than normal. So we are being urged to get as much work done as possible.

One of the people put under a lot more pressure because of the delayed planes is Anto the vehicle mech who has to prepare all the vehicles for relief on his own. So some of us have been giving him a hand and learning to drive some of the vehicles around a bit more. I seem to have become an expert at dozer driving.

Picture of the D4 dozer that I drove for a day helping Anto the vehicle mech move stuff around. In the background you can see the Nodwell crane parked by the Laws platform. We were transfering propane gas stillages up the the platform and getting rid of the empty ones. That day I think I worked until 11pm.

The other thing that has happened is that the skiway has been laid down. On a bearing from the 4km marker that we raised the other day. And the first planes have been through. The first was a Basler which is essentially a DC 3 that has had turbo props added instead of the usual piston engines and its also slightly stretched at the front. This plane came through nearly a month ago bringing with it fresh veg and new people.

The Basler being refueled. This is actually the 2nd Basler, I didn't make it down to the skiway either time but Vicki the Doc took my camera when the 2nd plane came in.

The plane dropped off its food, refueled and headed off the the Shackletons (mountain range) and then Novolazarevskaya or Novo as most people call it. A few days later we heard that the plane had crashed. We were not allowed to tell anyone for a bit as they hadn't informed next of kin etc... No one was injured and a search and rescue (SAR) was launched. The SAR plane came from Patriot Hills and flew through Halley. The SAR plane turned out to be a twin otter just like the BAS planes.

The Twin Otter from Patriot Hills as it approached Halley.

I did make it down to the skiway this time and even though we knew that the plane was here for a SAR there was a bit of a buzz as we were going to see new people. It was a lovely day and we spotted the plane a long way away. When it came close we started to hear the UHF radio talk between Dave the comms manager and the pilot. So you can picture the reaction from some of the men at the skiway when we heard the female voice of one of the pilots. Some of them (not me of course) suddenly became all shy and started grooming their beards. Of course this was understandable since they hadn't seen a different lady for a long while. Not that you would call any of the ones on base ladies anyway (only joking).

The Twin Otter, taxiing in. This plane is pretty much exactly the same as the BAS ones except that they have full skis instead of the wheel skis that BAS favours.

The plane being refuelled at about 10pm, although it is 24 hour daylight the shadows can still get very long late at night.

Me (don't I look dashing) standing next to the nose ski of the plane. You can see how robust the ski landing gear looks. They are alot stronger that the wheel skis that BAS use but then again you can't land on gravel runways with skis.

The crew of the plane, had a leisurely dinner and didn't seem in too much of a rush for a SAR but that might have been due to slow communications with some of the other bases. They seemed to enjoy the base and I don't think we scared them too much. At one point, whilst Brad the mechanic was eating dinner, however, about half the base was sat at the other end of the table asking questions. We were probably staring because we haven't seen new people for a long time. We then helped them refuel.

Amy the copilot (who caused quite a stir with some of the men on base) checking the fuel levels in the two massive ferry tanks that they had fitted in the back of the plane.

The plane heading off finally heading off to resue the people on the other plane.

The next day after the twin otter left, despite it being a saturday we spent the whole afternoon drum raising. These drums were 44 gallon (205 litre) drums of Avtur (aviation fuel) which nearly everything down here runs on. They are piled in to heaps of 200ish drums and you have to use the Nodwell crane to hoik them out of the snow. Once they are out of the snow they are dropped onto sledges and flipped upright by hand. Thankfully I didn't have to do too much digging or flipping as I was the designated dozer driver for my shifts.

Raising drums of avtur out of the ground and loading them onto sledges.

Me and Kirsty just before we did our double shift (I think because Anto thinks I am such a good dozer driver).

More raising, this time its the AIS receiver antennae. Because of the snow accumulation we had to raise them 2m. As you can see

Once they are lowered to the ground, we checked that they were ok. We attached a new bit of scaffold of then craned them back up and slotted them on.

Me tidying up the cables whilst Liz sets up the theodolite in the background so that the poles are vertical.

Nod 4 with the basket attached. This allows us to lift 250kgs to a height much more than a cherry picker, but relies on the man on the ground to safely move us around.

The view of the SHARE array from way above tower number 4. This is from the basket at full extension and being on a flat ice shelf its really odd to look down on anything, especially these antennae.

Precious Bay is the bay to the south west of Halley and it is this sea ice that is thought to break up and reform causing ODEs (Ozone Depletion Events). The ODEs trigger sensors and Halley and then the Simpson team launch their Blimp to get a profile of the ozone.

Simon putting on his crampons before our walk down to the ice cliff edge of Precious bay.

Me near the edge at the bay. Photo courtesy of Simon the GA.

Simon the GA checking out the magnificant view. It was amazingly beautiful with this massive bay and the sea ice stretched out unbroken for miles ahead of us.

Right out on the iceshelf we saw this black dot probably 2km from us and all we could tell was that it was an animal. I put on my big lens (70-300mm) and zoomed in as much as I could. The above picture is cropped and you can make out that it is definetly a seal. So given the state of the ice its probably a Weddell seal (they are the only ones to keep open holes in the ice) but it could have been a leopard seal that had travelled a bit on the ice. From the distance we were away it was just life.

Me next to a marked flag planted at the Precious Bay experiment site that should tell us about snow accumulation.

More raising, this time it was the catenary posts that hold up the wires the antennae. You take of the wires then get a dozer and use the a chain attached to the blade to pull the posts out of the ground.

Chris posing after we had put all the posts back in the ground in their raised positions.

And finally the catenaries are back up.

The Basler again. Its a fantastic plane. You can see the person on the wing (Francis I think) who is holding the fuel pipe that is pumping fuel into the wing tanks.

The plane heading off to Novo to move people around and to resue its sister plane nearby.

Penguin Video

2006-11-27T19:35:00.000-02:00

Sorry about not posting for so long. I have been trying to get around to posting a video for ages and hopefully this will work.

Raising the 4K marker - 2nd Penguin Trip - Digging out Vehicles - Nights again

2006-10-23T19:08:00.000-02:00

As I mentioned in the last entry, I went on my post winter trip. It was great to get off base and we had a few amazing days. The one thing that we didn't get to do was get to go and see the penguins at Windy cove (see map), this was because the weather was bad. There was also a thought that we had already all seen the penguins at least once so it wasn't a priority. Having got back from the trip we realised that we really hadn't seen the penguins since the chicks have been hatched. So for a couple of weeks I had been wanting to go on another penguin trip. Most of the time when we go off base we go with the Field GA, Simon. Now that the post winter trips are in full flow he spends most of his time off base. Because of this he nominated people to stand in his place. Its actually more complicated than that, he decided that there were some people who were good at the rope work and climbing up and down and that others were better at being responsible and deciding if it was ok to go down onto the sea ice. As long as a penguin trip has at least one of the rope experts and one responsible person you can go. I happened to be one of the rope experts.

Once again the weather proved to be a decisive factor and for nearly two weeks we waited. Then the next weekend looked good for a penguin trip. Bob, the genny mech, Liz, Kirsty and me got organised and started to get everything together for the sunday. The weather then took a turn for the worse and John the Winter BC decided that if we worked on the sunday raising the 4K marker we could go to the penguins on the monday.

The 4K marker before we pulled it out and repositioned it. The marker is 6 avtur drums welded together and is used by the planes to help them find the skiway. They can use their radar to find the drums and then take a magnetic bearing from there. The sledge behind is a glomaxs sledge with a Fasi crane on the back. We didn't actually need the sledge but took it just in case. Photo courtesy of Bob

From the base you can normally see the 4K marker unless the weather is bad, as we had to move the marker closer we decided to test our GPS skills and navigate to the marker using last years GPS reading. What was quite interesting was that using the GPS was fairly easy but that last years GPS reading was 450m out. We then remembered that of course we are on a floating ice shelf that is flowing so of course the old reading will be out. So it seems that since the last GPS reading of the marker, it and the whole base has moved about 450m. As you can see from the above photo the years accumulation is pretty large. You can also see the amount of snow that we shifted. It wasn't too bad and at one point we thought there were another set of drums lower down which would have made it very difficult. In the end we could push the drums ove, we then attached a sling to the top and dragged them out of the hole. We repositioned the marker so that it was exactly 4km from the Laws building. We then pushed it upright, dug holes and burried some dead men (lumps of wood to attach guys to) and attached some new guy ropes.

The 4K marker in its new position. Liz and I tighten up the stays while Bob took this picture with the sun halo behind. Photo courtesy of Bob

Me after finishing tidying up. As you can see the warmth advantages of having a moustach and beard are somewhat offset by having moustachticles and having your balaclava frozen to you hairs. It looks cool though. Photo courtesy of Bob.

The next day the weather had settled down and we set off for Windy cove for our penguin trip. The trip was pretty uneventful, but somehow more relaxed than previous trips, maybe because we had got everything ready the day before or maybe because we were on our own and could set our own pace.

The trip there was uneventful except for the fact it felt more like a holiday down to the coast instead of a fieldtrip to the zoo. Once again I think this was due to the fact that we were on our own. Once we got to windy we relaxed a while got our selves kitted out in the warmth of the snocat. We then roped up as usual and made our way down to the abseil point. Since we had last been down there the abseil point had changed quite a bit. The whole thing had sort of slumped. Of course as the rope expert I was leading the group and the most likely person to fall into a crevass is the person at the front.

We got to the abseil point and as we couldn't see over the edge we decided that I would abseil out on a short bit of rope (we were still roped up) and down a little bit to see if it was good. Of course there might be no nice ramp down to the ice and by abseiling out onto a cornice I was putting myself in danger. I abseiled out and realised that I didn't have enough rope and I still couldn't see if there was a drop into nothing or a nice bank of snow that would be easy to climb up. So in the end I climbed back up and we looked at the abseil point from the a promontary to the west. This is truely walking in an unmarked unexplored area and its very scary when you are not with a trained GA. We survived and got a good view of the abseil point which turned out to be perfect. We then made our way back and all of us quickly made it down to the sea ice.

On arriving at the sea ice some penguins immediately came and greeted us. It was amazing. We wandered past these and headed for the first big group. When we first came here all the penguins were all huddled in one group about 1 1/2 km away from the abseil point. The colony had now split apart into about three groups and had got bigger, probably because the mothers were back. Once we were fairly close the birds just came to us.

One of the first chicks that waddled over to us.

They really seemed to like Liz, and these two wandered right up to her until a couple of adults decided that the kids were getting too curious.

You get so carried away by how cute the chicks are that you forget how lovely the adults are as well.

Another cute chick sporting the cowboy saddle walking stance.

Another good looking adult.

This one wandered right up to me and was probably only 30cm from my boot when it decided to stop. I got a few photos off and then my battery died on the camera, which is typical. Instead I was just at one with the chick and I like to think we shared a moment.

Anyway we had a fantastic day down with the penguins and after a few hours down there we made our way back up. Once again it was a bit scary doing all this without an expert about. We got back after what seemed a perfect day.

A few days after the penguin trip I helped Anto the vehicle mechanic start the long defrosting and servicing that he has to perform on all the vehicles that have been laid up for the winter.

The winter vehicle line. All the vehicles were originally placed on mounds about 1.5m above the snow surface. After the winter there are no more mounds and most of the tracks of the vehicles are covered.

The first thing we did was replace the batteries. Once these were replaced we removed as much snow as we could from the engine and turned on the webasto engine preheaters. These run on avtur like the vehicles and heat up the coolant which in turn heats up the engine. Once this is done and the engine is heating we dug out the rest of the vehicle.

K21, as you can see the job of digging it out and getting it going is a bit more involved than getting the car out of the garage.

Once the engine has been heating for about an hour and there is no snow in delicate places like the radiator fan, we started them up and surprisingly they fired very easily. Not bad for a vehicle that has been frozen for 10 months. We then rocked them backwards and forward to free the tracks. It took us the whole afternoon to get two vehicles out. But it was very satisfying at the end of the day. With the vehicles returning the preparations for summer are starting.

The end result K16, the Fassi crane sledge and K21 in the normal summer sledge line.

The summer is returning and we have loads of work to do to get the place ready for the summer season. Its also scary that there are going to be all these new people arriving. We now know who is coming down and we have been sent photos of them from their conference in Cambridge.

One of the fantastic sunsets that we have enjoyed. It seems to happen when we have this particular type of cloud.

Next entry I hope to get some video of the penguins up.

Post Winter Trip - Sledge Flash - The Rumples and the Gin Bottle Creeks

2006-10-18T17:36:00.000-02:00

Its been just about a month since I left on my post winter trip and as usual its taken me a bit of time to get this out. Since then another trip (sledge gladiolia/golf/gnome) has been out and returned and currently the third set of trippers is out on the ice shelf. Its a bit strange, on our first winter trip we all went to the Hinge zone which is the crevassed area about 40km to the south of Halley, where the Brunt Ice Shelf joins onto the antarctic continent proper. We went there because there it was a good training ground for everyone to learn how to travel on foot in crevassed areas, it was also really interesting. Our pre-winter trips were for 4 nights, these post winter trips are for 9 nights out and we were allowed to choose where we would go. So the strange thing is, is that with all this time available and no restrictions on where we can go every sledge wants to go and visit the Macdonald Ice Rumples (camping), the Gin Bottle Creeks (Creek 2 Caboose) and the penguins at Windy Cove (Windy Caboose) all of which are within 20km of Halley. So where has our spirit of adventure gone? Maybe it disappeared over the long winter. No I think the real reason is that people don't enjoy driving skidoos for days on end. The 3 hours to the Hinge zone was bad enough and the reason for this is the throttle design of the Alpine 3. I know I am putting a lot of blame on a bad bit of design. The throttle on skidoos is a paddle thing that you push with your right hand thumb. Essentially at the safe speeds that we travel at (20 km/h) you have only open the throttle partially, and this makes your thumb ache after a while. I have found out on the internet that you can fit a special cruising finger throttle but ours don't have them. Anyway this is the reason I think we all chose not to go somewhere more than 20km away.

For us (Kirsty, Liz, Simon and Me) our trip really started the day before we were due to get set and off. As the first post winter trip we had to dig out and make up our nansen sledges which had been stored down the container line. We then made up our half units and full units and got our all our equipment together. The next day (the 18th of September) we got our final belongings together, went and collected our skidoos. We had a leisurely lunch and then set off to the Macdonald Ice Rumples.

The Brunt Ice Shelf around Halley. This shows the location of the Creek 2 caboose and the Macdonald Ice Rumples. The ice flow is also shown and can be seen by the striations which are perpendicular to the ice flow. The ice shelf flows off the continent, sweeping around at the top it hits a sea mount and the ice is thrust up forming the MacDonald Ice Rumples. This sea mount slows the ice up, pinning it back at the rumples. Because of this the ice along the coast is constantly being stretched which causes the Gin Bottle creeks to form.

The MacDonald Ice Rumples from the air. As you can see the ice flows and is rucked up, by hitting the sea mount, into a number of concentric rumples in the ice. Under the wing you can see the Gin Bottle creeks. I've been told that Halley is only where it is because the Gin Bottle creeks provide good access for the ship to relieve the base, the creeks are formed because of the rumples. So we have to thank the Rumples for Halley. As you can imagine when the ice gets rucked up like this it forms lots of crevasses. This is what makes them interesting. I found this photo on 75 degrees south

On our way to the Rumples, or as we have been learning in Spanish Los Rumples. We stopped to rope the skidoos together as we were entering the crevassed area.

Me on my alpine 3 skidoo at the back of the group as usual. The whole winter trip I seemed to be at the back. You can see that the front of my skidoo is attached by a thick rope to the nansen sledge infront.

Just outside our camp site we stopped while Simon checked for crevasses.

This photo shows Liz and Kirsty on their skidoos in front of the second wave of the Rumples. If you look closely at the bumpy areas you can see massive bridged crevasses.

Setting up camp. It takes about 2-3 hours to set camp, pitching tents (pyramids and loo tent), tarp the skidoos and organise everything. It all seems like a lot of effort but at least the doos will start and the tents won't blow away.

Having set up tent we settled down to some quality tent time. For some reason being in a tent out in antarctica is really fun. It can be a bit cold at times but maybe because we have been cooped up with 15 other people for ages its nice to only be cooped up with one other person. Its just nice and relaxing and an opportunity to relax. Maybe the carbon monoxide poisoning also helps you relax. The next day the weather was bad with rising winds and no contrast which meant that we could go out and wander about in the rumples. The day after that the weather got even worse. Instead of just sitting and reading in our tents we got out and practiced a few crevass rescues and then as the wind really got up. The next day there was a major blow with a peak wind speed at Halley reaching 63 knots (the instrument may have been broken). Being tent bound was quite nice I read a complete book and relaxed. Its also nice to get out and the day after the blow it was a fantastic day.

We roped up and started to explore the rumples. It was a bit strange getting all roped up and I had forgotten how heavy everything felt especially your feet once you have your crampons attached. The rumples is so crevassed that all four people roped up to a single rope can be standing at four different crevasses. Its therefore pretty dangerous and a bit frustrating because you get to dead ends with too many crevasses quite a bit. To begin with we just tried to get to a high point in order to get a view of the whole place. After a few wrong turns we got to a place where we could look down on nearly the whole ice shelf.

The view of our campsite and Halley in the background from the first high point in the rumples. Its amazing how far you can see on a flat ice shelf when you are slightly elevated (50 ft). We are not used to it.

We also happened to reach this high point at about 12:30 GMT which luckily coincided with the annular solar eclipse on that day. I knew about it and had brought some welding goggles. We all say the eclipse (partial for us) and its pretty amazing, it a sure thing that not many people have seen a solar eclipse from some ice rumples in antarctica. After looking around a bit we then explored the rumples a bit more and abseiled into and jumarred out of a smallish crevass. All in all it was a fantastic day out. We returned knacked to the camp.

Kirsty trying to keep warm in the tent. As you can see we have our primus stove on low. Our other heat source is the tilley lamp which is hanging down on the left of the photo.

The tilley and all our stuff hanging up at the top of the tent. This is the warmest place and so you put all your gear up there to dry out and get warm. You can also hang up your frozen food so that it defrosts.

We spent one more night in the tents and then upped sticks and headed to the Creek 2 caboose. Moving to a caboose after getting used to a tent was difficult. For a start a caboose takes ages to warm up. I guess this is because it is larger that a tent but also because there is a lot of material in a caboose that needs to warm up as well. Cabooses have fantastic refleks stoves which do a good job of heating so good that once you have heated a caboose you have to have them set very low. The problem is it still takes about 4 hours to warm a caboose to bearable temperatures. You also seem to have less room in a caboose. After arriving we had a quick check down at the creek to see if there was easy access to the ice. We couldn't find any and the weather started to turn bad.

We had another bad weather day stuck in the caboose, the wind howling outside and covering all our boxes and belongings in snow. The day after that was fantastic, probably the clearest and sunniest day since winter. We had a little dig to find all our stuff in the snow but we got roped up and headed out onto the ice shelf.

Another fantastic day walking along the Gin bottle creeks of the Brunt Ice Shelf. This heading from creek two to creek 6.

Kirsty and Liz with Simon behind them. Antarctic explorers.

We walked along the ice shelf until creek 6 and then found that there was a very gentle ramp down onto the sea-ice.

Kirsty abseils down onto the sea-ice at creek 6. Simon looks on from the bottom. It was a very gentle slope down to the sea-ice and you can see why these creeks are used for the relief of Halley, if they have formed and there is sea-ice when the ship arrives.

Liz attached herself to her abseil device on her way down, while Kirsty and Simon wait down below.

We got down to the sea ice and then went exploring, heading further and further toward the rumples. Walking on the sea ice is one of those things that doesn't seem that exciting but when you realise that you were last pretty much in that position off the same coast in the RRS Ernest Shackleton on the way down in December last year its very odd. The other thing we saw is penguin tracks. These must be Emperor penguin tracks from birds heading to or returning from the Windy cove colony, Simon the GA thinks that there must be a polynya or a lead in the ice where the penguins are coming from as they need access to the sea to feed. The have been known to walk hundreds of miles to get to the sea. We didn't actually see any of the birds (oh except an antarctic petrel) but we did follow the freshest tracks and they just lead to one of the creeks and then turned back. The penguin must have been confused.

The view of creek 7 from the sea-ice.

Looking back along the Brunt Ice Shelf.

Kirsty poses beside a nice bit of the ice shelf.

We turned back at about 4pm in order to get back to the caboose in good time. We had walked all the way to the entrance of creek 9 I think.

Having made our way back up we take a last look at creek 6 before walking back to creek 2.

Kirsty stops while I take a photo of the creek 2 caboose and our tarped up skidoos.

Me posing with the Coleman's mustard while Liz watches the syphoning of the parafin. Having just started to read about Scott in Ranolph Fiennes book, we were trying to recreate photos that Scott's expedition had to take to satisfy their sponsors. As you can see the inside of a caboose is pretty nice.

We had another night and were trying to head over to Windy for the two final days of our holiday but bad weather prevented us. Instead we headed back along the drumline (which you can travel along even in poor weather) to Halley, refreshed and ready to get back to work. The pre and post winter trips are great and are our holidays giving us a taste of what the antarctic was like and is like for the real explorers. I am already looking forward to next years holidays.

The Sun Returns - Blimp flights - Work - Preparations for Post Winter Trips

2006-09-16T14:40:00.000-02:00

Here's the sun. Finally after more than 107 days (for me because I was on nights immediately after sun up) I got to see the sun. I had just come off nights and looked out of the rear window on the Laws platform just after lunch and got blinded. You forget how bright it is. Throughout winter it was dark, but even at midwinter there was a glimmer of red on the northern horizon. It then gradually got lighter and lighter but when the sun actually rises it is so incredibly bright, we have also probably forgotten not to look directly at the sun. I ran and got my camera.

My first view of the sun after on the friday after my nights finished. This was the view out of the back door of the Laws just after 2pm. I know it doesn't look like it but the sun was incredibly bright.

I then went outside and wandered around looking at shadows. If look closely at the next photo (click on it) then you can see my shadow on the right hand side of the Laws building, its probably the length of the building on the snow because of the low sun angle.

A view of the Laws platform on friday after nights. You can see the Dozer under laws with a sledge attached. This is because there is a gash run every other friday to remove rubbish from the platform.

I think I then started to get a little giddy with excitement at seeing the sun that I tried to get some artistic shots. I didn't expect to miss it that much and maybe in reality I didn't miss it but it is really nice to see the sun again.

The Halley signpost with the Laws and the sun in the background.

Of course now the sun is really annoying. Annoying because it is too bright and we now have to go back to wearing our tinted goggles and sunglasses and if you look in the wrong direction you get blinded by the sun reflecting off the snow. We have even had to pull down the blinds to look at the computer screens. Overall the sun is better than no sun. And the sun returns extremely
fast. From sun up (10th of August) until 24 hour daylight (29th of October) is not very long.

With the return of the sun the weather has got worse, something to so with more heating of the air. So we have had a lot of cold windy days. We seem to have very few days when we can do outdoor work. So things such as mast maintenance, or fixing or raising equipment outside has sort of piled up. On the rare good day we just try to get as much done as possible because we don't know when it will be good again.

One of the interesting things that has happened is the erection of a weather haven (big tent) to serve as a blimp hanger. A load of us helped build the weather haven and then the Simpson team filled up their blimp.

The first attempt at flying the blimp. The Simpson team launch the blimp to try to measure tropospheric ozone levels when there is an Ozone Depletion Event (ODE) caused by newly forming sea ice. You can see that the tail of the blimp was a bit flaccid for this attempt.

Another photo of the Blimp being launched for the first time. Its pretty cold work as they have to let it rise to 500m at about 5m/minute and then they have to bring it slowly back down. All this time they are standing out is the freezing temperatures checking the winches. I helped them once and it was nithering

So every now and again an alarm goes off and the Simpson team have to fill the blimp and get it raised. As I mentioned earlier the tropospheric ozone (low level bad ozone) is depleted when sea ice forms, so when the wind has swung around from its usual easterly direction to a westerly, it brings a packet of air that has been sitting over Precious Bay (in the Weddell Sea) where there is a polyna (russian word describing area of open water surrounded by ice) for some reason and sea ice forming. The alarm is triggered by ozone monitors near the ground at the CASlab (Clean Air Sector laboratory). The blimp flights give the scientists back in Cambridge a profile of the ozone levels at different heights.

For me its mainly been routine maintenance work, this consists of fixing antennas that have snapped in the wind. Just checking that the instruments are doing what they are meant to be doing. Refocusing the optical experiments. One of the things that the light and occasional good weather day has meant that outdoor jobs are carried out. As mast officer I have to check all the masts we have on base. These masts (varying from 5m cable gateway masts to the 45m AIS masts) are built on the unstable ice. One of the things that happens is that the snow accumulation builds up and this compresses the snow which in turn tightens the stays. So we go around every few weeks and loosen the stays, this is done by undoing the turnbuckles. Sometimes there is so much accumulation that we have to raise the turnbuckles. Now that there is enough light and I can see the top of the 45m masts and I can also check them for straightness. The straightness doesn't affect the AIS much but potentially the mast can lean too much that its not safe enough to climb and therefore you can repair things on the mast or the mast might even fall down.

The AIS masts are still standing which is good. I got around to surveying them with a theodolite. I found that they were both pretty straight.

When there has been bad weather I have tried a bit of electronic engineering. This isn't as easy as it sounds because I am not really an electronic engineer but rather a mechanical engineer with some electronics knowledge.

One of my winter projects. To make a cloud monitor, simply an infra-red detector that can measure the temperature of the sky. The idea being that clouds are warmer than no clouds.

So this is pretty much my the first circuit board that I have etched. Its all very interesting.

There has also been the birth of the Halley running club. This came about because I had heard that many of my friends back in England were running a half marathon. And after a few discussions it was decided that we might try to have a Halley Half Marathon. A lot of us then got down to training in the gym and for a few weeks it was in constant use. Then the light arrived and we started to think about running outside on the snow.

Setting off for our first freezing training run. All of us got cold bits. We nearly ran around the whole perimeter, about 5km. The temperature was about -35, but we felt warm most of the time until the last section where we were running into the wind. Dave (leading in photo) and I (second in photo) got frozen bellies and Liz and Vicki (following) got cold thighs. Apparently you get cold where you have the most fat.

Having run around on the snow and taken into account how cold it is, we have revised our plans and have decided to on run a 10km. Running the snow is like running in sand and the 10km will take us about 2 hours by which time we will start to freeze. The 10km is quite good because its about the distance from creek 2 (gin bottle creeks) where there is a caboose. So the idea now is to run back from creek 2.

We have also started our preparations for my post winter trip. I am going out on the first and therefore coldest trip with the same people that I went on my first trip, that is Liz, Simon and Kirsty and this time we shall be called something like sledge foxtrot or something beginning with f. I should be off base from the 18th until the 28th of September.

Another Blimp flight. This time tail of the blimp is more turgid. In the background you can see the miraging of the ice-shelf and the icebergs near the Rumples. This is where I should be heading out for my post winter trip.

Hopefully I will have some photos of the trip soon.

Penguin Trip - Sun Up - Back on Nights

2006-08-14T01:25:00.000-02:00

So as promised here are some pictures taken on my first penguin trip. This is one of the unique things that you get to see when you overwinter at Halley. The penguins in question are Emperor Penguins and there is a colony of them on the sea-ice at Windy cove. Windy Cove is approximately 20 km North West of Halley apparently the penguins like it because they come here every year when the sea-ice forms in March. Kirsty and I visited them at the end of April just before sun down (click here for blog entry) and we walked along the ice-shelf and saw the colony forming. There were all these penguins arriving on their belies and it was an awesome, if somewhat cold weekend.

So every year as it gets close to sun up you start to get a lot more light and the temperatures increase. At this point the Simon the GA gets all excited and starts to think about penguin trips. For these penguin trips you have to basically abseil down the ice cliff and onto the sea-ice. Once you have chilled out with these crazy animals you have to then jumar back up. You also have to be careful when walking on the sea-ice because if the wind changes it can break up easily. So Simon has been got us practicing our abseiling, jumaring and gave us a talk about how to survive on the sea-ice. He then had us practicing hauling ourselves out of an imaginary crack with an ice pick or warthogs and finally had us throwing hand lines to each other if the worst did happen and someone went through.

A week before sun up Simon and Andy (Metbabe) went out on skidoos to check out the cabooses at Creek 2 and Windy, and the access down to the sea-ice at Windy. It was a really cold clear day. So there was excellent visibility but it was freezing. At the time I was raising more turnbuckles on the Comms masts with Dave, the Comms Manager. At the time Simon had radioed base at 2pm to say that he and Andy were going down on to the sea-ice and that he would call back at 4pm when they got off the ice. We heard nothing. At 5pm John, the Base Commander, got concerned and started to get ready to a Search And Rescue (SAR). The plan was for Anto, the Vehicle Mech, and I were going to get our equipment and head out in a snocat to find out what had happened. It was sort of exciting to be on a SAR but at the same time a bit scary that something had happened. In the end, just before we were about to leave (6pm) we saw lights on the horizon. It took them an hour for them to arrive but we knew they were ok so we stood down the SAR. It turns out it was so cold that all the radio batteries failed. The GPS units got so cold that they didn't work. They tried to light the stoves in the caboose but couldn't get the paraffin to light. They decided to get back to base. Apart from that they had a successful trip and had found out that there was easy access to the sea-ice.

A few days later the first group of sightseers went down onto the sea ice and came back with fantastic tales about how difficult it was to get down and up and how amazing the birds were. A couple of days later the next group went down to see the penguins, this group came back with even taller tales of giant cracks in the ice and immense ice climbs. The last group was mine. Like on the winter trips you can all just leave base when you want. People with similar jobs have to cover each other and so can't leave the base at the same time.

So we got our equipment together (P-bags etc... for camping out) and loaded everything onto a sledge and jumped into the snocat. In my group were, Kirsty, Bob, Simon, Andy and Me. It took just over an hour to get there along the familiar drum line and windy caboose, with Bob driving (it was his birthday). We woke up, jumped out and immediately got into our harnesses and roped up as an alpine five and made our way along the ice shelf to the abseil point.

Our view of the Penguin Colony from the abseil point. This was at about 12 GMT two days before the official sun up (local noon is at 13:45 GMT) and you can already see that we have quite a bit of light.

It was pretty cold just getting here and once we got here we stood around and set up the equipment to get down to the ice.

Setting up our abseil anchors. You just get two stakes and push them into the snow. Its amazing how strong the anchors are and then at the end of the day you just bend down and pull them out.

You then have to stand around and freeze even more while each person clips onto the rope and abseils down. Really cold.

Kirsty starts her decent onto the sea ice. We are abseiling on a dynamic (stretchy) rope with no safety line. In order to make it safe we abseil with a french prussic below the abseil device so if you let go of the rope the prussic will catch you.

As Bob sets up for the abseil, Simon swings his arms around to keep warm. It was a cold day. Apart from the cold there are a lot of dangers going onto the sea ice. In the background you can see the ice-shelf, and the sea ice. Just at the bottom of the ice-shelf where it joins the sea ice there is a tide crack, this is caused by the differential movement of the two sheets of ice. The sea ice also can be blown around and breaks up easily. Its exciting going on it.

Finally its your turn and you realise why everyone seemed to take so long getting going. Because your hands are frozen its really difficult to get the figure of eight on the rope properly and you fingers have no feeling. Once you get going its wonderful and once you are leaning back on the rope you know everythings going to be ok. The abseil point was chosen as there was a nice bank of snow that had formed against the ice shelf. The only difficult bit was the lip at the top. Once you get on to the sea-ice proper you have to still go quite a distance to make sure that you have passed any dangerous tide cracks. You then unclip from the rope so that the next person can get down. Its amazing how much warmer it is once you are down on the sea ice.

Simon makes his way down the ice-shelf as you can see Simon our guide chose the easiest slope to get up and down to the sea ice.

Once everyone was down we made our way to the colony itself. This is about 500m from the abseil point. On the sea ice you don't rope up but rather stick close together and have easy access to throw lines. If you actually went through it would be absolutely freezing so we also carried a whole rucksack full of spare clothes.

As we got closer to the colony we passed a few cracks in the ice that had refrozen but weren't that dangerous, Simon was checking them with his bog chisel. We got the colony itself and after a briefing from Simon just wandered about taking photos. My camera decided to take a few photos and then packed up. This must have been from the cold. Later it suddenly started working again, really odd. Anyway this is one of the reasons I came to Halley and I was finally here among the craziest creatures on the planet.

The penguins doing their stuff on the sea ice. The snow underfoot is browny-yellowy and is stained with Penguin guano.

The penguins are very curious and will come to within arms length and then stop. At the beginning it seemed that they really liked Bob.

Most of these emperors are males and haven't eaten for 3 months. They weigh about 20kg now and have lost about 10kg since the beginning of winter. To me they look extremely healthy. Most of the chicks have hatched but are hiding on their fathers legs. The females are starting to arrive and they swap roles so that the fathers can go and get some food.

A few more curious chaps. The more curious ones are usually the males that didn't find mates or who discarded eggs (we saw a few of these).

After about an hour we started to get cold and the temperature started to drop, so we decided to head back. Essentially we just followed the reverse procedure.

Me just before I climbed back up to the ice-shelf. The moustache keeps you warm but it gets frozen and then sticks to your balaclava. Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

Instead of abseiling, we had to Jumar back up. In fact the slope wasn't that steep so you could just kick your boots hard into the snow and walk up. The jumar was just to prevent you falling back down if you did fall. Simon went up first and then Bob and I went up. We then roped up and headed straight to the snocat in order to get it heated up. We loaded up and collapsed back in the vehicle. We then tried to eat frozen sandwiches washed down with warm ribena. All in all a pretty amazing trip. Hopefully I will get to go on a some more and hopefully will see some chicks.
The last thing we did see before we left windy caboose was a faintly miraged sun. This was two days before the official sun up date.

Two days later we had our official sun up ceremony, this was to greet the returning sun. Having not seen the sun for 100 days, its something we have been looking forward to.

Everyone standing around watching the Sun-up flag raising ceremony.

Kirsty being the youngest on base raised the flag. She did a very good job.

Kirsty ties off the flag and there it shall remain until next sundown.

Having done the job so well the local media (John the WBC) flock to get Kirsty's story.

The Piggott platform just after the sun up ceremony.

The Laws building looks better with the flag flying.

As you can see from the picture it was a fairly overcast day with a lot of cloud in the north so we didn't actually get to see the sun on that day. I also went on nights immediately after the sun up day so I didn't get to see the sun for another week.

Nights is fine. There seems to be more and more interesting cooking going on during nights. So far I seem to be cooking new cakes every night. Donuts, croissants and bread which are all easier than I originally thought. I've also been more efficient in my night cleaning so I've had more time to watch the films in the Halley video library.

Hopefully I will get some photos of the sun in my next entry.

Cabaret, Super Hero night, Still alive after Midwinter -its also getting lighter - AIS explanation

2006-08-02T21:55:00.000-02:00

The rest of midwinter was just as tiring as the first half but instead of making presents there was frantic preparations for cabaret night and the photo competition.

The photo competition run by Anto over midwinter. Really amazing photos, which took ages to vote for.

The photo competition was hotly contested there were five categories: People, Environment, Wildlife, Abstract and Bob (pictures people had taken of themselves). Everyone entered at least one photo and most people entered one for every category. Since we have all done pretty much the same things we all had very similar photos so judging was harder than expected. I got second prize in the people competition with a picture of Jacko the RAF mast officer taken at the top of the 45 m masts. All the photos were great and all of them are going to be made into a collage.

The next big event was the cabaret. As usual with these sorts of things there are the people who can play instruments and sing and do everything and then there are the rest of us who just have to make fools of ourselves. Most acts were put together on the last day but the seemed to work.
It was a great night and inspired the formation of the Halley band which now meets on friday evenings (because all other evenings are taken up with other things).

One of the highlights of the cabaret was Liz cutting Andy in half. Liz couldn't help laughing hysterically the whole time which just so funny.

Bob, Liz and Chris start the meaning of life song just before Brian walks in. Really really good.

The Samba band runs through its paces, so much fun.

The cabaret was just about the last thing that happened at midwinter and I think most people were fairly glad to get back to the normal routine of work after a week of lazing about and getting fat, you have to draw parallels with christmas again. Apparently the danger after midwinter is that you get depressed because its still dark and you don't have anything to look forward to for a month or two. I didn't find this at all mainly because I was incredibly busy. I know that I have kept on saying that I would have more time after midwinter to keep the blog up-to-date and that I would have more time to do my stuff but that doesn't seem to have happened.

One thing I mentioned last time was the fact that we have had unusually high snow accumulation this year (maybe a consequence of global warming). This has mean that we have had to raise equipment out of the snow. I have more to do than most people because I am the winter mast officer which means I am in charge of making sure all the masts are nice and straight and not over tensioned etc... One of the jobs that I have spent a lot of time doing is raising turnbuckles. Turnbuckles are the attachments that have a right handed thread at one end and a left handed thread a the other and are used to tension stays. I have done quite a lot of this with Dave the Comm's manager since the Comms masts seem to be buried more and he has catalogued the process in his blog here. I like to think that he was taking photos while I was doing all the work but thats not true. I have probably raised about 30 stays so far and have about 10 more to do. My main responsibility, the AIS radar, has been behaving itself so I have started some winter projects. These are some programming to extend the AIS radar's range and some hardware design to make a cloudmonitor. It keeps me busy when the weather isn't very nice outside.

After two weeks of recovering from midwinter and digging in the snow we had a Super Hero's night. We preceeded this by watching the Incredibles in the afternoon.

Halley super heros. from left to right: Dave as Super Calf, Brian as Super Mario, Vicky as Electra, Nicola as Popeye, Kirsty as Haribo Girl, Fran as Caslab Girl, Liz as Super Gash, Mark as the Incredible Hulk, Alex as Batman, Andy as Bicycle Repair Man, John as Zorro, Simon as Thor. In the front we have Chris as Spider Man, Bob as Fat Man and me tucked in behind Chris as Kite Boy (special power making lots of wind).

Mark was a bit too scary, and I think the showers are still a bit green.

The night was really good fun. After dinner the main corridor was cleared of dangerous items and a few people had a go at bar-room-bungie. Here you put a harness on and attach a bungie to you back. You then run down the corridor as far as you can until you are suddenly pulled back by the bungie. At this moment you slam you hand down and stick a postit to the ground marking how far you got. This happened a few times until unfortunately the attachment between the bungie and the harness snapped and the bungie flew down the corridor and hit Bob on the leg. Luckily he wasn't too badly hurt but he was in pain. That put a bit of a dampener on the evening but it was still a good night.

The sun is slowly returning as expected after midwinter, so the base is getting ready for the post-winter trips that start at the beginning of September and last 10 days. On this trip we get to choose where we go. We seem to be sticking to the same teams which makes sense. The ones who went first (us) will go first so we had it the warmest last time and this time will have it the coldest. I think we are planning on exploring the rumples a bit. Before those trips we are going to have some penguin trips to the local emporer penguin colony at Windy Cove. Kirsty and I saw them from the top of the cliffs before midwinter here. This time we will be going in larger groups with Simon the GA and will abseil down to the sea-ice and I am told that the penguins come up to within a metre or so of you. It should be awesome. Once we are on the sea ice we have to get off it by jumarring back up. In anticipation of this we have been abseiling and jumarring back up off the Simpson platform.

The light is slowly returning. Sun-up is due on the 10th of August. We have already started kiting again, which was awesome as usual, but I haven't got any photos because I have been too busy kiting. I did get this photo of the memorial (to those who have died at Halley) when I went searching for it after reports that it had disappeared in the snow. The little blip on the left on the horizon is Wonky Caboose.

It getting light enough to kite as well, so now half the people on base are watching the wind speed for that perfect wind. Even though it is getting light its still pretty cold. Although it hasn't got below -50 degrees C (it hit about -48 degrees before midwinter) its sometimes below -40. When it started to approach -40 again about a week ago, Kirsty and Vicky ran outside with damp hair and let it freeze with their heads hanging down. That didn't work so well so they go a tub of warmish water and dunked their hair in it and then let it freeze (about 40 seconds) and then stood up.

Kirsty shows off her frozen hair. How cool is that. Photo courtesy of Dave

Vicky's wild woman impression. Photo courtesy of Dave

Another job we have been doing is helping build a Nansen sledge these are usually made by Snowsled, but we made ours out of spare bits.

Liz, me and Nicola working on the Nansen sledge, in the garage, that the whole base helped build out of spares. Its pretty amazing that we use these sledges made of ash, lashed together with leather and twine. So we had to learn to square lash and fettle all these wooden bits to make a fully working sledge. Photo courtesy of Anto

We've also had the return of the aurorae. Now for the science bit well and a bit to explain what I do. You might have gathered that I am the AIS (Advanced Ionospheric Sounder) engineer. The AIS is a radar that bounces low-medium (0.1-30MHz) radio waves of the ionosphere. The ionosphere is a charged region of the atmosphere (between about 100km and 800km up). These ions, charged particles, are created mainly by intense ultra-violet light and at low altitudes would just recombine with an oppositely charged particle. At high altitudes there aren't enought atoms or ions to do this so there is this charged region just sitting there. Radio waves bounce (actually they refract since the charge density changes with altitude) off the ions but the altitude that they do this depends on the frequency of the radio waves. So the AIS in it most basic sounding mode just sends pulse trains up at different frequencies and from this you get a picture of the ionosphere.

What is the point of all this?

Its all to do with space weather and how the Sun interacts with the Earth. The Sun is constantly sending out streams of particles which fly off and hit the Earth, or they would but the Earth's electromagnetic field protects us by deflecting these particles. The magnetic field is itself deflected out behind the earth into a long tail. Occasionally you get a coronal mass ejection where you get a flare on the sun and loads a particles are flung out of the sun. The Earth's electromagnetic field gets hit pretty hard and wobbles. Consequences of this are that satelites get knocked out and I think the North American electricity grid was knocked out by a big flare. Another consequence is that the charged particles get tunnelled by the magnetic field lines and dumped into the polar regions and you get aurora. The ionosphere gets affected by all this. You can see that if the magnetic field is fluctuating then the charged ionosphere is going to move about. The AIS is build here because Halley is near the auroral zone and it is one way of working out how the Sun affects us.

Anyway we had some aurorae. Now auroral activity is linked to the activity of the sun. The activity of the sun can be measured by looking at the number of sun spots on the sun's surface. The sun spots go through an 11 year cycle and from solar maximum to solar minimum and back to maximum. The last solar maximum was in the year 2000 so this year should be a solar minimum year. So we don't expect that many aurora. We have only seen about 3 good ones. The main problem being that you have to have good weather at the same time. There have been quite a few times when we can see on the magnetometers that there is something spectacular going on with the magnetic field but haven't been able to see anything because there is a blow on at the same time. And then there is the moon, incredibly bright to our sun deprived eyes. I could go on ...

It amazing when it is clear.

The Halley sign post, with a faint aurora in the background.

A slightly more impressive aurora taken from the Laws looking towards the Piggott.

My most recent "hair" picture. I'm trying to take a picture of myself in the same place everyday and will hopefully make a movie of my hair growing. I do look a bit disgusting.

Hopefully next entry will be soon and include photos from our first penguin trips down onto the sea-ice.

Fids night, Midwinter and Naked runs

2006-07-04T20:08:00.000-02:00

We are all finally getting back into the swing of things after an excellent semi-relaxing week off for midwinter. Of course the lead up to midwinter was very very hectic as everyone got down to finishing off or starting and then finishing off their midwinter presents. At the beginning of winter, at our first sit down meal (actually here) we all picked out a name from a hat to decide who you would make you midwinter present. So for about 4 weeks before midwinter I spent nearly every evening making mine. We did have one party to releave our stress. This was Fids night. Fids are members of the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey and this was the old name for BAS . Anyway we all tried to grow beards (I dont' think the girls did) and then dressed up in our finest old fashioned clothes.

Fids night. We tried to recreate a famous antarctic photo (by Frank Hurley) and also try to show off our beards.

As midwinter approached more and more we expect the darkness to completely descend. I mean the sun disappeared over the horizon over a month ago and it still hasn't got completely dark. That whole thing about 105 days without the sun is true but you still have light. Well just a little on the horizon. I don't actually use a torch except when I am going into a container or working on something outside and I actually have to see well. Most of the time you can stumble about and head in towards the lights on the buildings.

The Piggott platform taken close to local noon on the 12th of June, thats nine days before mid-winter and we still have a lot of light.

Because it is dark I haven't been able to get out and safely kite, I did try about a month before midwinter but I could hardly see anything and the sastrugi was huge which made me fall over to easily. Maybe I have lost my touch. Because we can't get out so much we have to occupy ourselves indoors a lot more. This is good because we had to do our midwinter presents. The countdown to midwinter sped up and the present making became frantic. You have to remember that midwinter is like christmas (we actually missed proper christmas because of relief) and you get the same christmas rush. I have also done a few other things apart from present making. I gave blood, having passed out last time after 5 mins of digging in my arm Kirsty and I went to the surgery to take each others blood. Kirsty couldn't find my vein so in the end Vicki the Doc just used a syringe and got some blood. I then took Kirsty's blood. There wasn't any fainting which was good. I've finished watching all episodes of star trek enterprise, thats 4 seasons of trekkie stuff. The world cup has hit us and we are constantly talking about it and although we can't watch the games we listen to them through the internet.

Then all of a sudden midwinter was upon us. We had a week off which was good and things were organised everyday. The first of which was film day. We all wrote down some films to generate a list of films that we wanted to watch. We then voted on for 5 films. In the end we watched: Its a wonderful life, To kill a mocking bird, The life of Brian, A very long engagement and The muppet's christmas carol.

Alex, Kirsty, Dave (cleaning a bowl of chocolate sauce) and Chris get ready to watch another film. Note the large video collection and the digital projector behind the leopard skin sofa.

We also played darts against King Edward Point at South Georgia and lost. I think they were cheating because we played with the whole base (16 of us) taking it in turns to throw out arrows, but they played with two people only in each game which means they got more board time and hence won. Anyway they are not really in the Antarctic being north of the arctic circle.

We had a quiz night, which somehow Kirsty and I won. Kirsty was very excited because it is the one time in her life that she has won a quiz. Well she thinks it is.

On midwinters day itself John the winter base commander delivered drinks in the morning to our rooms. And then cooked us brunch. The next thing that happened was the traditional midwinter's run. This is a naked run around the Laws building. The girls put us to shame by organising themselves and then running around before any of the boys had any idea what was going on. They actually did it before brunch. The boys (only four of us) then got ourselves together and performed our duty nearer 2pm. I did the run twice.

Me just before my first midwinter run.

The midwinter run around the Laws platform.

The light around the Laws on midwinter's day during the naked run at 13.44 GMT (local noon is at approx 13.45 GMT, the temperature was -38 degrees.

All I can say is that it was freezing and all your extremeties feel it (all of them). The second thing you feel a lot is that your breathing is really difficult and so you get about half way around and you just want to stop and sit down except that you know that would be a bad idea. So you have to keep going but your chest feels like it is about to implode. When you get back it the warm air sort of burns and you get the burning feeling on your skin similar to when you fall into an ice cold pond and then get into a hot shower.

The rest of day was spent getting warm again, finishing off the presents and wrapping them to be placed under the christmas tree.

The presents starting to accumlate underneath the christmas tree.

An amazing dinner was served at 7pm:

We happy few, just before our midwinter meal.

I especially liked the spicy prawns, the deep fried camembert, the duck, the beouf en croute. We had so much food that I was the only person to clear his plate at the end of the meal. We were so stuffed that we retired to lounge to open our midwinter presents. Each person got opened their present, then guessed who had made it. It was surprisingly easy to work out who had made what. They then picked someone else's present and delivered it to them. The two opennings of note I think were Simon H's which he broke as he openned it. And I think to think that Anto openning mine was funny since he didn't have a clue what they were and I had to talk him through what to do.

Immediately after the present openning we got to listen to the midwinter broadcast. This is a broadcast that the BBC do for us. Each of the bases gets to choose a song to be played and also our friends and family can ring in and leave messages. For me it was fantastic to hear my dad send me midwinter greetings from deepest africa.

After the broadcast we all put our presents on the pool table and inspected them. We also started to have our pudding.

Everyone inspecting the midwinter presents. The present I got from Nicola is the draughts set in the foreground.

All the presents were pretty amazing and you could tell that some of them took a massive amount of effort. Here are some that I liked, of course I have included mine in there.

Chris' amazing colouring pencil drawing that he gave to Bob the Genny Mech. Entitled "The wheel of life of a Genny".

Bob's penguin carving that he made for Fran, and Simons penguin bottle openner that he made for Mark.

Another picture of all the presents on the pool.

The present I made for Anto, a box sledge (made out of Ash from an old Nansen sledge) with two Avtur drums (made of brass) that are actually salt and pepper grinders. The orange sacs in the background are travel pouches for the grinders and look like P-bags.

It was a good night and it was nice to finally get rid of the presents. Hopefully the next entry will include pictures of the rest of midwinter including the cabaret night.

Club Nido II, I faint at Doc School, Darts, Rime and Darkness

2006-06-06T14:55:00.000-02:00

As you can see I've finally got around to posting some more photos. As promised in the last entry I have a picture of an actogram, this is the output from the actiwatches that we wear for Vicki the Doc's research project. Her research is to do with circadian rythms, and how light affects the resetting of the biological clock. Every month the light bulbs in our light boxes get changed between white light and a bluer light. The light boxes and bulbs are provied by Philips. It is thought that the blue bulbs will reset our clocks better and make us feel better. We also have to have two days of pee sampling (they are testing our Melatonin levels to check where in our circadian rythm we are) and questionaires about our physical and mental states. You can find out more about this by clicking here and reading the first article.

Actogram showing my activity and light exposure for a week. The graph is a bit confusing because the data is repeated each day. This is done because the most important times are the nights and by adding the next days data on the end allows the nights to be more easily studied. The yellow trace is the light exposure and the black trace is my acceleration.

As you can see on the above graph I get exposed to quite a bit of light and occasionally I do a bit of exercise. There is actually quite a bit of competion to see who was the most active each week, but this is really complicated to work out as some people are very active but only for a very short time. Also people wear their watching in different places so it is difficult to get a true measure of activity.

We have also had a proper Club Nido (the worlds most exculsive club apparently). This happens in the garage. We did have one in the summer (see here) but officially Club Nido only happens in the winter. It was very good, with Frances, Alex, Anto and Kirsty putting a lot of effort in to decorate the place. There was also a massive blow predicted so we all arrived as the storm started. The garage is about 600m from the Laws platform which in a big blow can be quite a distance. It was nice being inside a relatively warm garage while there was a storm outside but we also had that feeling that it would be best to get back to our beds at the end of the night and that we had to brave the winds.

Halley Base Babes (from left to right: Kirsty, Nicola, Vicky, Liz and Frances) initially segragrated themselves in the middle of the dance floor at Club Nido. There were shades of a school disco.

Things warmed up though.

Frances and Mark strutt their stuff while Alex poses.

Vehicle Mech (Anto) and Vehicle Mech Apprentice (Andy) read a tool magazine in the chill out corner with the Halley babes.

There were a few intense twister sessions before the dancing got really going.

There was also a lot of sitting around and chatting and eating.

A few people struggled back early but most people stumbed out into 50 knot winds at about 2am. I was in this big group and stumbled out near the front. We started to head back along the hand-lines with visability down to about 15m. I was looking back watching everyone else and as we got out I noticed that Mark stumbled worse than most and actually fell over. I went back for him and got him back to the garage. He was in a bit of pain and seems to have sprained something on the stairs out of the garage. After we had warmed up we tried again to head back but quickly turned back to get another set of goggles for Mark. We finally headed out about an hour after everyone else had left with me helping Mark along and him dragging himself along the hand-line. I don't know how long it took us but it felt like it took us about 30 mins to walk the 600 m back to the Laws. The last bit of the journey was around the Laws building itself and for this bit we just sort of held onto each other and slid along till we got to the stairs. It was great to get back. Mark every said that it was the first time he had held another man's hand for any lenght of time but he was willing to do it again. It turned out that he had actually broken his foot. He also had a bit of frost-nip. Anyway it made me feel abit of an antarctic hero.

Mark shows off his broken leg.

With mid-winter approaching everyone is starting to build their mid-winter presents or at least crystalise their ideas. So this is one of the things that people are doing in their free time. We are also learning a great deal from each other. One of the things we have every thursday is Doc school. This is where we practice and learn advanced first aid and other things Vicki (the doc) wants us to learn if we have to treat someone if she is not available (if the patient is her or we or she is on a winter trip). So we have been going through our ABCDE etc... first aid until it has been drummed into us. So now we know how to put in a chest drain, take and type blood, perform a tracheoctomy. We have been going through the whole lot and also do scenarios which is all very good. One of the more interesting ones was on C the circulation system were we learnt about pelvic fractures and blood loss. We aslo practiced putting venflons (canulae) into each other. We took it in turns to stab each other and then the idea was to get a blood sample and type it (ABO rhesus etc...). So I got to stab Mark, and this was pretty good, straight in no mistakes, a bit of blood on the floor and didn't quite slide the tube in deep enough but still good. Then it was my turn and I got John the BC administering. I not normally bad with needles and I rarely faint but for some reason I did feel a tiny bit queasy on that day. Anyway the up shot was that John missed my vein on his initial stab by about 5mm and his sticking the needle in and out for 5 mins didn't get the vein either.

Me having a canula (venflon) fitted by John the WBC. After 5 mins of searching for a vein he withdrew the venflon. He was just about to stick it back in me when I fainted.

It was very embarrassing waking up on the floor of the dinning room having just had the most amazingly vivid dreams. I think I was mumbling something about having been in the other place maybe the afterlife. Apparently I was also making heaving breathing sounds. Very very embarrassing. Enough said about that.

We have also had GA school where we learnt to use GPSs better and recently learnt to splice. So now we can make eye splices, end splices and short splices. There has also been welding school run by Anto. Hopefully all these lessons will continue after mid-winter.

We have had some contact with the other BAS bases in the form of webcam darts matches. Our first was against Bird Island and their wintering team of four. They just beat us. We then played the mighty Rotherans and soundly beat them. I think there is a trend of smaller bases doing better because of the increased board time for the players (We play 501 ending on a double with everyone taking it in turns).

Simon the GA just about to throw a dart in the famous victory over the Rothera. Note the fancy webcam on the darts board to make sure we aren't cheating.

There have been a few questions that have continued to crop up in the comments and I have not been very good at answering them so here goes.

One of them was what camera do I have?
I have got a Canon 20D with a 17-85mm zoom lens and a 70-300mm zoom lens. I hardly ever use the 70-300mm but will hopefully do so when we visit the penguins again.

What is rime?
Rime is formed when we have fog here. Basically it is water vapour condensing out of the fog onto all cold surfaces (everything). It is similar to hoar frost but hoar frost forms directly from water vapour whereas rime condenses first. Needles of ice form on all the surfaces. Here are a few photos that may help.

Rime on the Share Towers and the AIS mast in the distance. This photo was taken in April when we still had light. The shadows were pretty amazing. If you didn't have the rime then the Share towers in the background would be silver. Photo courtesy of Andy METman.

Rime on the handline at the bottom of the Laws. As you can see the ice has deposited on the rope in needles. You get weird vibrations along the hand-lines when there is rime. I think it is something to do karmen vortex excitation and the rime provides weight (to lower the frequency) and friction (to help cause the excitation). This photo was also taken when we still had light. Photo courtesy of Simon H the GA.

There are a few more questions which I will dig up and hopefully answer in the next entry.

We have also had a few aurora, I am determined that I will get a really good photo and movie of the aurora while I am down here.

More Aurora (named after the Roman goddess of dawn), over the Piggott platform. Hopefully we will see some more soon.

I mentioned that we had a storm on the night of Club Nido, but it only reached its peak at about 10 am the next day. It hit about 65 knots (we don't now exactly because the anemometers broke), this was 2 min average wind. One of the consequences was that a lot of stuff got blown about. On the Share towers, about 5 out of the 16 towers had pieces of angle missing weakening them a lot. Chris and I climbed them and found missing bolts and most towers fairly wobbly, we fixed them in the freezing temperatures. We also found the stairs blown off on one of the cabooses where the optical experiments take place.

Chris at the bottom of the optical caboose, you can see the steps have been blown off and are deeply buried in the snow.

The steps once we had dug them out and reattached them.

While Chris and I fixed the Share most of the rest of base when about picking up bits and bobs that had got blown of containers. We have also had some wonderful weather with beautiful clear skys. The problem with this is that when the sky is clear it gets really cold (-40 degrees C cold for me) but it gets warmer when it is overcast. I think I prefer it to be freezing and clear.

We still have light. This was taken at about 2:30pm GMT yesterday, thats about an hour after local noon. Its pretty dark but you still have enought light to wander without bumping into things.

All the buildings have safety lights so you can navigate easily to and fro. The lights from left to right are: The Laws building, the melt tank and on the right the Simpson platform. The only time you can't see the lights is when there is a blow and then you can use the handlines.

Sundown, The Tunnels and Pee Funnels

2006-05-10T22:40:00.000-02:00

As usual the blogging process for me is long. I think I posted these photos three weeks ago and I have only just got around to writing about it. In the last entry I described my trip to Windy caboose and I mentioned that the sun was leaving us, well the weekend after the trip to windy the base officially celebrated sundown. Sundown is the day that the sun officially sets and does not rise again until sun-up (sometime in August). You can't predict exactly when sundown or sun-up will be although you can calculate it pretty well. The problem is that atmospheric conditions lead to mirages and then you can sometimes see the sun when it has already set. The mirages are pretty cool and once or twice I have been skiing and the sun is setting and then it seems to rise again (because of the miraging) and then it sets again. There was a small debate as to when sundown actually was, its more complicated when you realise that we are on a moving ice-shelf (moving farther north all the time). In the end we found a definition here and we used a programme that used to generate sunset and sunrise times for one of the optical experiments to calculate the exact day (we actually used decided to say the sun was set when it was 1 degree below the horizon and got an accurate GPS reading of our current position). Having calculated the exact day when the sun was likely to have set for the last time it was decided that we would have the flag lowering on the closest sunday.

Liz the chippy lowers the flag at the sundown ceremony. Liz is oldest person on base and traditionally is the person who lowers the flag. The youngest person (Kirsty) gets to put the new flag back up in August. Our names were put into a hat to see who gets to keep the flag and it turned out to be Simon the GA who got it.

The rest of the base stand around while Liz gets the knots on the flag undone.

Later in the evening we have the BBQ. This is officially the coldest barbie I have ever been to. It was freezing.

It was a pretty chilly day that day. I remember because I went kite-skiing just before the flag lowering ceremony and had to wear bear paw mittens. I've also just had a quick look at the temperature data for that day and we were enjoying the BBQ in about -36 degrees C. Its a bit mad to have a BBQ in those temperatures but surprisingly the food was well cooked and tasted lovely.

Its a bit odd now that we never see the sun, its not that we have total darkness and everyday around midday it gets light in the north. On really cloudy days you can hardly see anything but on clear days you get a lovely red glow that grows slightly stronger, peaking around 1:30pm before it slowly gets darker again. The moonlight is pretty impressive as well when it is full and is more than enough to go skiing with.

On the work front, everything seems to be calming down and I have started to get to grips with all the bits and bobs of my job. One of the great things about this job is the varied jobs that you have to do. One of which was to help the genny mech Bob down in the tunnels again. We have two sets of tunnels here at Halley. One set, the Laws tunnels, joins the main Laws platform to the Simpson platform, the other, the Piggott tunnels just feed cables out from underneath the Piggott. In the Laws tunnels there is the Melt tank (this is just a big tank of warm water that we shovel snow into in order to make more water). The melt tank is actually heated using a heat exchanger and the exhaust gasses from the generators on the Laws platform. The tunnels aslo contain the flubbers (big rubber bags) which hold all the avtur (the same as Jet A1 which doesn't freeze at low temperature) that the generators run on. Around and under the flubbers are bunds, big tarpaulin pools which are meant to catch any spills that might happen. We were just securing the bunds a bit better. Whenever I go down there its just amazing how crazy it can be, you get amazing ice crystals. The best one I think is on a side tunnel between the melt tank and the main tunnels just under one of the lights, and must form because of the warmth of the melt tank and the light.

My face distorted through the best icicle in the laws tunnels.

Bob strokes the icicle. How on earth did such a clear phallic ice crystal form?

For information about the Halley building see hereThe force of the ice is also pretty amazing and in some of the older sections of tunnel the armco tunnels are getting crushed. In some places the steel is being ripped apart. Of course we monitor the deformations and temperatures all the time to make sure they don't get dangerous. You might also notice that we are wearing safety harnesses. On some of the access shafts you could potentially fall over 25m down so we clip onto runners that run a steel cable. There is also an emergency winch on the surface that can be used to winch people up, but it is manual and it wouldn't be nice to do if it was particularly cold.

The force of the ice is impressive. Here it has crushed a massive wooden beam as though it was a match stick.

The tunnel between the laws and the simpson is really long (about 290m) long. The heating pipes for the simpson run to and from the laws and apparently are really efficient only losing about 8 degrees on the journey.

So thats what has been happening. In fact since I posted these photos we've had a few more parties and we are really leading up to mid-winter which is on the 21st of June. Its not long now and then the days will get lighter and lighter and before we know it it will be summer again. At mid-winter there is a big celebration on par with christmas back at home. One of the main things to do before then is build our mid winter presents. I can tell you now that I haven't made much progress so I better get down to building.

One of the things I was going to mention was the antarctic treaty this was a treaty signed by all the countries that had interests in the antarctic, it basically sets the antarctic aside as a place for scientific studys that can't be exploited by mining etc... It also says stuff like, no persons in a military capacity allowed, no foreign (to antarctica) animals allowed (this is why there are no Dogs anymore) and finally it tell you what you are allowed to leave behind. Basically you are not allowed to leave anything behind, so if you build something down here you have to remove it that is unless it is buried. All waste has to be removed except human waste. On the main platform our waste gets flushed and dumped into the ice and forms a big onion under the building. On the other platforms they found that the loos blocked up too much because they weren't used enough. So they found a solution.

The Piggott toilet. Note the chimney, this is a rocket bog, tradename "Incinolet", and it turns all your waste into ash and gas. We also have the urinal which is just discharged into an "onion" under the ice.

Anyway I just thought you might be interested. Another thing I have been doing slowly when I have time is to build my sno-blizzard. Hopefully I will have it running around outside soon and will have some photos of it.

Running in the Sno Blizzard. How cool is this radio controlled vehicle with its 11cc engine. It needs 10 tanks of fuel to run in and I'm on tank number 8 now.
Someone requested a picture of a pee funnel, these are used by the ladies on base on winter trips or trips to cabooses since its too cold outside to expose yourself for too long. Anyway here it is.

Errgh!! As requested a picture of a pee funnel. This seriously grossed me out when I took it. I think the Doc also thinks I am a bit wierd for asking to take a photo of one.

Our health is pretty good. I mean we were all given thorough medicals before we came down and then inoculated against every known disease because we might pick up on the way down. We also have a doctor, Vicki, to look after 16 of us I think that is a pretty good ratio. Most of the time she has little to do since we don't injure ourselves much. She also looks after the waste management with help from the winter BC. She is also carrying out a study into the use of light boxes. We have these light boxes (see picture half way down this entry) which are supposed to help us synchronise our circadian rythms and combat SAD.

The actiwatch. This measures our activity and the light that we are exposed to.

She uses these actiwatches, pee samples every month, sleep diaries and questionnaires she is trying to work out whether white or blue light bulbs are better for us. In the next entry I will hopefully have some more details about this.

I have also noticed that my blog has become a blog of note on the blogger front page which is cool. There seem to be a lot of questions about stuff and hopefully I will answer them in the next entry. Hoepfully that will be soon.

Windy Weekend and Final Sun-pillars

2006-05-10T20:37:00.000-02:00

I don't really want to appologise again for taking so long writing this entry, but once again I find myself doing so. Its been about two weeks since I posted the photos from this little trip and it took me two weeks to post the photos. It takes me ages to post and I think it is taking longer and longer maybe its the lack of light. We also have just come out of a comms black out so we haven't had the internet for three days. There was nothing wrong with the system here, but they were upgrading some equipment in Cambridge back in the UK. Our comms is routed through a satelite and then connected to the world in Cambridge. If anything happens there then we are affected too although we still have the iridium phones and HF radio. Anyway time to tell you what it was like at Windy.

Windy caboose is a very small caravan on skis about 30 km to the north-west (I think) close to the sea at Windy Creek. Its a place where you can go for the weekend and get off base. It does involve a load of organising though as you have to travel with enough equipment to keep you alive for 20 days if you get stuck on the way (thats a half unit see halfway down here for what a half unit is). Kirsty and I decided to try and go ages and ages ago but only got the opportunity that weekend. So on the thursday we started to get everything together. First of all we had to dig out a skidoo that was completely buried and then start it, and drive it into the garage where it defrosted over night. The second skidoo was already snow free and being stored in a container on the container line. All we had to do with that one was get it out on the next morning. Thursday night was also the night to get all the food together and pack our personal stuff. Friday arrived and the first bit of the morning was spent getting everything together and getting the sledges and skidoos to the laws building. The last few items included our P-bags (massive bags of bedding including a sheep skin, thermo rest, insulating mat, a really warm sleeping bag, a fluffy sleeping bag liner a canvass sleeping bag outer and an emergency two man bivvy bag) and rescue sacks (these have the ropes and climbing equipment for rescues, wandering about in crevassed areas, and abseiling down to the sea ice etc...). At about 11 am we were just about ready and we went to back to check on the scientific equipment on our platforms. We had lunch and then packed the sledges. Packing takes ages and we only got going at about 3pm this was only one hour late. It was important to leave early because sundown was officially at 4.30 in the afternoon.

Bob shot of Kirsty and I before we set off for Windy caboose.

So we set off at a good pace with me leading, the temperature was about -30 degrees centigrade and dropping and driving in these temperatures is pretty bad. We were driving Alpine 2 skidoos made by Bombardier and the most comfortable way to ride them was to kneel on the seat or just stand up, unfortunately this means you are more exposed to the wind and get tired. Luckily the grips and thumb throttle are heated so your hands don't completely fall off. The snow was lovely and fluffy so it wasn't too bumpy but it slowed down the sledges.

We stopped when we were nearly at the caboose to take a few pictures. The dots on the left of the skidoo are drums, as the whole route to Windy is along a drum line. The big dot straight ahead of the skidoo is the caboose itself. My skidoo is pulling the half-unit Nansen sledge.

As you can see we were driving Alpine 2 skidoos which have a bad reputation. Kirsty was pulling a box sledge with all our stuff in with her skidoo. These skidoos were not as comfortable or as fast as the Alpine 3 skidoos we used on the winter trips but they did the job and started easily below -30 degree C.

We got to the caboose and immediately lit the "Refleks" stove (this is an amazing stove that runs on paraffin) which heats the caboose very efficiently. We then unpacked the sledges and tarped up the doos, this took another hour and by this time is was very cold and dark. We lit the tilley and primus and proceeded to cook dinner. Getting the stoves going at these temperatures is difficult as the meths which you use to heat preheat doesn't really want to light. Once the caboose started warming up it was easy. I think the first night we ate soup followed by instant "man food", I had bean cassarole and kirsty had her usual chill con carne. The man food rehydrated food is pretty good. We went to sleep early and slept for hours, amazing. Once the stove had heated up the caboose we had to turn it right down to pilot otherwise we would have been roasted, even then you had to occasionally open the door to let in the cold and cool the place down. The loo at the caboose is a red flag to the west of the caboose (the prevailing wind here is from the east). That night it was fantastic you could just see a faint aurora to the south and you could also hear this amazing cackling sound. Like geese or some alien birds. It very unnerving whilst you are trying to have a pee without getting too much too cold.

The next day we woke up at about 11 in the morning, there was the usual arguement as to who should get up and light the stoves and get some hot water going. We had a leisurely lunch and then noticed it was getting late. We went out and got the rescue sacks out and got the ropes and harnesses so that we could rope up and get a look at the penguins.

So we roped up as an alpine pair for the first time on our own. Normally we have someone who knows what they are doing telling us what to do. Kirsty stands beside the caboose all ready to head out.

Having roped up, Kirsty was still pretty scared of forgetting what to do if I fell in a crevass (to be honest I was a little bit worried about her as well) so we practiced the z-pulley rescue. This involves stopping the person falling, putting in some snow stakes and constucting a pulley system from four pulleys and your jumars so that you can easily haul them out of a crevass. Once we had done this we set off towards the coast.

With the sun setting we set out off drum line following a flagged line towards the wierd cackling sound towards the coast.

After a while we reach the cliff edge. The sea-ice has formed properly and we can see the source of the sound. A massive brown mass of penguins.

Zooming in a bit you can start to see the different huddles that have formed. Some loners still stand about on their own.

Zooming right in. Its pretty amazing to see this and something you only get to experience by wintering at somewhere like Halley.

It is normally possible to abseil down to the sea ice and get right up the penguins. Apparently you don't have to try to get close to them, all you do is stay still and they waddle up to you because they are very curious. We couldn't do this because the our field guide Simon hadn't yet checked the old abseil point or the sea-ice. Hopefully after sun-up we will get another trip to windy and will see the baby emperor penguins close up. Of course once you have abseiled down to the sea-ice you have to climb back up, which might be tricky.

As you can see it wasn't the clearest day with poor visability, the sun was also disappearing fast so we reluctantly returned. It was also really cold and when we got back to Halley we found out that it had reached about -37 degrees that afternoon.

Who needs mascara. After the trip to penguins my eyelashes were like this.

That evening after deroping and enjoying another rehydrated meal. We watched "The day after tomorrow" on my laptop.

We also experimented with baking in the caboose. We took croissant mixture with us and made croissants. We then made an oven out of two pots and some bits of metal and a lid. It took about 20 mins to bake two croissants on the primus. Absolutely fantastic straight away with butter and golden syrup. Yum.

The next morning it was really cold inside the caboose. The refleks had run out of fuel during the night and it was horrible. I am sorry to say but I was too much of a girl to get out of bed. Kirsty actually got out, lit the stoves and refueled the refleks while I cowered in bed. We had a good breakfast/lunch of left over croissants and sausages. It was a fantastically clear day and we had hoped to get back to the penguins but we quickly realised that we wouldn't have time. Everything in Antarctica takes ages. I then unwrapped the doos, started them up which was a lot easier than expected (we had heard some horror stories about the year before when they couldn't start some of the doos miles from home and had to be rescued). I then went on a little trip to retreive some jerry cans of paraffin a few miles back towards Halley. Kirsty was packing up the caboose. I then refuelled the doos (I had to mix in 2 stroke oil into jerrys of neat petrol except at below -30 the oil was like toothpaste) and we packed up the sledges. By 3pm (only two hours late) we were ready to leave, sun down that day was predicted to be at 3:45pm so it was important to be getting back with sunlight. We drove back faster than we had travelled out. The beautiful weather also produced some crazy mirages as we travelled back. Once we were back on base we had to put everything back and so we didn't really stop unloading, refueling etc... until 6:30 and we joined the rest of the base for dinner.

The next weekend was "sundown", this is when the sun officially sets and doesn't rise the next day or the day after or the day after, in fact it next rises around August the 10th. It still gets light its just that you don't see the sun. You get a sort of dawn that turns immediately into a dusk around lunchtime. The sun was disappearing faster for the next week so every opportunity was taken to get out and about x-country skiing or kiting. You also appreciate the sun and the lovely sunset colours you get.

The sun is disappearing, this was taken at about 3pm. Kirsty demonstrates how to x country ski. Rime deposited on the masts and stays makes them stand out.

Sun pillar taken from the Piggott platform. Liz the chippy drags a polk sledge and bumps into Dave the Comms manager, as he comes from the tunnels, in the foreground. The buildings from left to right are: the Laws building, Bart the balloon launching hut and on the right the Simpson platform.

Post beginning of winter parties, Aurora, More parties

2006-04-19T19:01:00.000-02:00

Its been about 4 weeks since I got back from my prewinter trip (see last entry), which tells you something about how disorganised I am. Since the trip a lot has happened but I would have to say that less newsworthy stuff has happened. Sledge alpha as the name suggests was the first prewinter trip to take place and as there are 16 of us there were 4 more trips out. This has meant that during the week there have only been 12 of us about. The rules about winter trips are that people with similar jobs can't go on the same trips. This is because then there would be no one to cover all the jobs that have to be done on base. For example not all the electronic engineers can go on the same trip. This means that only one person from my science platform can go on a winter trip at a time. So we have been a man down on the platfrom for 3 weeks, then you have to factor in nights (we have one person on base on nights to be awake for alarms and to do the metrological observations throughout the night) and for us this mean that for 5 weeks we were missing people. Its mean a lot of covering other jobs which has been interesting but has prevented other work being done.

With all these missing people the place has felt slightly empty, and quite so when they come back on the weekend its usually a good opportunity to have a bit of a party. Immediately that we (sledge alpha) returned we had Frances' birthday party. For this she chose to theme it as a kids party. Everyone dressed up for it, and it seems that everyone enjoys dressing up, maybe some more than others.

The kids feast at Frances' birthday kids party.

We played loads of games, including: musical chairs, pass the parcel, hit the pinata, pick up cardboard of the floor. A magician and this lovely clown also turned up for entertainment.

Its not all play and I got to go down into the Piggott tunnels for the first time. This was helping Bob the genny mech refuel the flubbers. These flubbers are big rubber tanks for the generators and they live in the tunnels. For some reason the Piggott tunnels have this amazing ice crystal formation at the warm platform end. The other colder end has no crystals at all. It must be something to do with warmer moist air getting into the tunnels.

Bob poses for a photo at the scenic end of the piggott tunnels.

The actual job of refueling is not the most interesting if you are in the tunnels. If you're doing that job you just open and close valves and watch to make sure that everthing is ok. You then might dip the flubber to see how much is in there.

The flubbers deep under the ice hold gallons of avtur. Everyday fuel is pumped up to day tanks in the generator rooms for burning in the diesels.

The other job is on the surface about 25 meters above the flubbers where you have to crack open 44 gallon drums, and move a spout from a pump about. This is pretty good fun and good physical work. The other thing you get to do is drive dozers around. You need a dozer to drag the sledges with the drums about. So I have had the opportunity to drive two dozers about, the first was a D5 made by Caterpillar, an awesome machine with fingertip controls. So you have a foot brake, a decelerator (thats right not an accelerator) also foot operated. On your right you have a joystick that controls the blade (shovel thing on the front) and on the left you have a couple of small sticks that you operate with you first and second fingers, these brake the left and right tracks. Oh yeah you also have a hand throttle and a hand brake and gear selector. Anyway its great fun and easy to drive, the difficult bit is digging or using the blade. I can do it but it takes ages and I am rubbish, oh well. Hopefully I will get more opportunities to become a better dozer driver.

There was also a slumber party about three weeks ago. This was exclusively for girls, unless you made the effort to girly things, so I decided to do girly things. This was me just after finding the wig.

Me starting my transformation from Jules the dude.

Until I was turned into Miss Julie, super babe.

As you can see we did a lot of makeup and all that sort of stuff, I don't understand it, but I can now say thank god I don't have to have to put on makeup everyday, its so difficult. I also think I might have scared the base a tiny bit. None of the other men dressed up and some of them were giving me dodgy looks, one was even eyeing me up. The girls seemed to enjoy it a lot.

Not only is there a lot of dressing up, but there is a lot of experimentation with hair. Since we don't have a hair dresser down here, we cut each others hair and since we are not going to see normal people for a year and in some cases two years you can shave your head and see how long it takes to grow back. Frances has started this process but only in her second year, so to start with she got a mowhawk.

Fances practices her mime technique having applied her face mask.

She has since then shaved it back to grade zero. In order to do this another themed party was organised.

Frances cuts off all her hair so that she can be Ripley for Sci-Fi night.

I too have decided to shave my hair off, the idea being that a number of us will take pictures of ourselved everyday and make movies of our hair growing. Shaving my head gave me the opportunity to try to be Jean-Luc Piccard for Sci-fi night.

Frances, Dave, Nicola, Vicky, Kirsty and me getting ready for Sci-Fi dinner.

Dave was some sort of wierd alien with upside down clothes and two heads, Vicky was on the Men in Black people and Kirsty was Lilu from The Fifth Element.

Me as Jean-Luc Piccard operating a old fashioned 21st century computer.

The day before Sci-fi night I went on nights. We need to have someone on base awake at all times in order to respond to emergencies. The main emergency being fire. The buildings contain a lot wood and everything is freeze dried to such and extent that normal fire proofing doesn't work so most things but burn very well once you get it lit. This is the main reason we have someone on nights. The person on nights also performs the metrological observations at night. Kirsty would like me to point out that she trained me, so if I made any mistakes you know who to blame. One of the bonuses of being on nights is that you might get to see some aurora. For me this happened on Sci-fi night. Everyone else had gone to bed and I was still wondering about in my Star trek uniform. I went outside to do the 3am met observation and suddenly there was wispy glowing cloud about. I woke up a few people and by the time they came out it was a bit rubbish. I don't think people appreciated being woken up. Later the aurora came back even stronger, once again I woke people up and once again when they came out it was a bit rubbish. Then 5 mins after they all left again and the few people who remained were presented with a massive display of the aurora australis.

My first successful aurora shots, when I worked out you need a tripod. This photo is taken from (i am a girl, i like to wear dresses) the laws platform with an exposure of about 20 seconds. I needed a lot of help from kirsty taking this picture as I am a rubbish photographer.

Another photo from the Laws, this time in the direction of the Piggott.

The tattered Union Jack above the base and the stars with a bit of aurora.

Stars and the Laws, my room is the furthest lit window.

The stars and aurora in the direction of the piggott. You can see the Halley signpost in the foreground on the right.

These photos were taken over the next few days when the displays were not as vivid as the first night but they are still fairly awesome for me. Hopefully my next entry will include a photo of a pee funnel and news of my trip to Windy caboose.

Winter Trip - Sledge Alpha

2006-04-08T05:30:00.000-02:00

So the day after the amazing melt tank party. I went on holiday - well that is how I viewed it. Officially I think it is supposed to be field training but as we don't have to do our normal jobs I think it's more of a holiday. We all get two winter trips every year. The pre-winter trip is for 5 days and the post winter trip is for 10 days. There are 15 normal winterers and the G.A.. Our Field G.A. (General Assistant) is Simon and he's really the guide for all the field trips off base. The rest of us winterers were then split into 5 groups. There are certain rules in who can go on holiday together so that the base can cope without missing too many Met people or be left without anyone who can fix the generators. It turned out that I got picked to go in the first group. Traditionally the groups are called sledges and our sledge being the first was called Sledge Alpha. The members of Sledge Alpha were Liz the carpenter, Kirsty (Metbabe), Simon the field GA and me. All the pre-winter trips tried to head to 2nd Chasm (see map below), an area in the Hinge zone which is interesting because its very churned up ice and contains loads of interesting crevasses. As I mentioned before Halley is not on the Antarctic mainland but is actually on the Brunt Ice shelf, a floating chunk of ice that is stuck to the Caird coast. The Hinge zone is the area where the ice shelf joins the continent proper and as the ice flows off the mainland its churned up forming crevassed areas. Occasionally there are massive calving events where huge chunks of ice shelf break off. This is predicted to happen in the next few years and this is why Halley base is going to be moved to a new site and have a new set of buildings.

Map of the brunt ice shelf. Halley V is marked by the left hand cross. The proposed position of the Halley VI is shown by the right hand cross. Our winter trip was at 2nd Chasm. The map was modified from a map used in the Halley VI proposals.

When the last major calving event happened it moved nearly the whole ice shelf and opened up a few massive cracks in the hinge zone, in these cracks there was the sea and this then froze over and left the chasms that we go playing about in.

So we prepared to go off on our holiday. We actually didn't get off on the first day. When you leave base here you have to carry a massive amount of gear. You need to carry a "full unit" between two of you. A full unit consist of two nansen sledges (wooden sledges designed by the great norwegian explorer ), 16 jerry cans of fuel for the skidoos, 2 jerries of parafin, two man-food boxes (each containing 20 days rations for one person), medical box, HF radio, Pans box, inside tent box, inside food box, two pyramid tents, P bags (bags full of fantastic bedding including the warmest sleeping bags ever, sheepskin rugs, thermorests, bag liners of various sorts) and then your personal stuff. It took us all day to get all the stuff together. We did get off the next day early in the morning, the first thing you notice when you travel any distance on a skidoo is how uncomfortable the throttle position is. You also freeze pretty quickly. When we got about 20 km from Halley we then linked up. This involved roping the skidoos together into pairs using a 30m rope, this means that if the first skidoo falls into a crevass the second one should be able to stop and stop the first one hitting the ground. We are also roped to the skidoos to prevent us hitting the ground in those circumstances. ~40 more kms (~60 km from Halley) we reached the campsite for 2nd Chasm.

360 degree of the campsite at 2nd Chasm.

The view of 2nd Chasm from the campsite.

We pitched up the tents and then went for a quick exploration of the wind scoup near the camp. It was during this little exploration that I fell into my first crevass. It was only a tiny one (an ankle biter) so I only went in up to my knee before I caught myself. In order to stop this happening we also walk around roped up, with aout 20 m of rope between us, once again this is so that the person who falls into a crevasse can be saved by the other person that they are roped to.

The campsite was pretty bleak but we brought enough things to make it comfortable. The tents are very good, are made of ventile (tightly woven canvas) which stops the wind. Inside you unroll your P-bags which are warm enough for you to sleep outside in but made extra warm in the tent. You then set about lighting your Tilley lamp and the Primus stove and pretty soon the tent is roasting. Of course you can also get carbon monoxide poisoning from burning stuff so we had a sensor that was going off all the time, and was probably the most annoying thing on the whole trip. Water is made by melting snow (dug from the clean snow area) and the food is pretty good and based on army rations. You things like biscuits brown and biscuits fruit. The loo is a red flag and the area around it designated as dirty. In fact we also brought a modifed pup tent as a loo tent. Pup tents are small emergency tents, and we brought one that was modified with a hold cut in the ground sheet. A loo seat made from a wooden box and some insulating foam finished off the luxury facilities. Having the loo in a tent made the whole experience a lot more pleasant and lessens the risks of exposure. The ladies also get issued with pee funnels so that they can go the loo without disrobing, maybe I will get one of them to explain it all.

Simon our guide and field expert demonstrates how to use the pee flag. There was also a dedicated loo tent with a loo made out of an old man-food box and pink insulating foam shaped appropriately. Luxury camping.

You get two people in each tent and I shared one with Kirsty which was great as she is pretty mad which makes things interesting. You spend a lot of you time in the tents sorting our bedding, melting water and refueling the lamp and stove, cooking and just chatting. We also spent a lot of time in the tents, one day we only spent a couple of hours outside because the weather was so bad. Spending time outside is cold if you stay still and knackering if you keep moving. You'd think that it might be boring being stuck in a tent but I really enjoyed it and am pretty sure I will enjoy more time in tents.

Kirsty sits outside our pyramid tent. This was the childrens tent. Liz and Simon shared the other grown-ups tent next door.

When we did get out we trained, learning how to: rope up, save people from crevasses using pulleys, use crampons, use ice axes, abseil down and jumar back up. And the best bit about the training is that it's for free in an amazing setting. Thats why this job is the best thing ever. It quite easy to forget that you are in an amazing place.

Kirsty and Liz at the back of an Alpine-four (all of us attached to the same rope) in Likijusi a mini chasm that we discovered.

Once we had learnt enough skills, Simon would then find something interesting like a crevasse (one of which seemed pretty big to me) and we would then go and explore it. So here are some photos of what it was like.

Liz waits at the bottom of a crevasse.

Kirsty abseils in to join us in the crevasse as Simon watches from above.

Me showing off my ice climbing skills. Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

Me lowering myself into a crevasse. I haven't fallen in! Photo courtesy of Kirsty.

Liz, Simon and me on then wind scoop ridge. In the background you can see the campsite. Photo courtesy of Kirsty

Simon, Liz and Kirsty moving along an ice ridge.

Sledge alpha enjoying a break and a snack.

Kirsty demonstrates her crampon and ice climbing skills.

Liz and Simon delve deeping into the crevasse.

All good things come to an end and so did our holiday. Having arrived at 2nd Chasm on sunday we left on thursday morning. Leaving took a few hours as you have to disassemble the camp. We then drove back the 60 odd km back to Halley.

The view from the back of the convoy. At this point we are travelling individually as we are getting close to Halley. In unknown areas we always travel as linked skidoos. This means that if a skidoo falls into a crevasse the other one can stop it reaching the bottom.

For some reason the journey back was a trickier than the journey out, mainly because the snow conditions had changed which meant that we kept on getting sledges tipping over. This always happened when going downhill as the sledge would catch up with the skidoo and then hit some sastrugi and flip over. I think we had to pick up sledges 5 times.

The first sledge that flipped over.

We made it back safely and I think all of us are looking forward to the next winter trip. They are so cool. So until the next trip we are essentially stuck on base. We might be able to get away to a caboose for a weekend but darkness is approaching fast and with it the cold.

Sledge alpha returns to Halley.

The Beginning of Winter

2006-03-28T19:44:00.000-02:00

So I'm still alive and fairly sane. I thought that as soon as winter started I would have loads more time to do things such as update the blog but there just seems to be loads of other things to do. Its nearly a month since everyone left and I am trying to catch up. I don't really know how good my memory is but here goes.

So everyone left and we returned to an empty base. Or virtually empty base. It was about 1am by the time we had got all the vehicles refueled and parked up. Suddenly it seemed as if there was no one incharge. Of course there was John the winter BC and the first thing that he told us was that the next day was going to be an easy day. He would check with the ship in the morning to see if they were going to come around and say goodbye to us. We would have to leave fairly early in the morning and meet the ship on the cliff to let off flares. We woke up but unfortunately the weather was rubbish with visability down to about 100 feet, so even if the ship had come around we would not have been able to see it. It was a bit disappointing and so it turned out that our last view of our way off this floating lump of ice was when we were driving up away the night before. So we had an easy day just making sure everything was ticking over and getting used to the extra space that we now have. In the evening we had a massive meal together to celebrate the start of winter. It was very nice. We also chose our rooms, which was done by putting all the good rooms into a hat and each of us then got to go up get a room. I got a pretty good room with a window facing the East, so at least I get the sun in the morning and get to watch the kiting in the evening if I happen to be in my room (unlikely as I will be out there).

Dinner on the night after the ship left with everyone else. Only us left. Dave still has all his hair at the moment. Photo courtesy of Bob

We also got to pick someones else's name out of a hat, this is going to be the person we will make mid-winter presents for. Since we are normally working over Christmas we tend to celebrate mid-winter (22nd of June?) as it is the darkest day of the year. For this you have to make a mid-winter present for someone else secretly. These tend to be pretty good and people put in a lot of time an effort. Last year there was a robot penguin and even a working steam engine (until it blew up). So I will have to make something good for... oh that was close... I will tell you who at mid winter. It turned out to be an excellent night and about 2am when we were really sloshed we decided to cut peoples hair.

Kirsty and I cut Dave's hair. What a good way to celebrate the beginning of winter. Photo courtesy of Kirsty

We also cut Liz's hair, but this time only a grade 8 all over. I must say its quite satisfying to cut someones hair and it turn our ok. I know the styles are not difficult but its still quite tricky.

We had a few days off, well most of us did. Of course science never stops, so some of the metbabes had to work. About two days later we woke up to a beautiful day and decided to try for a group photo. This also gives me the opportunity to explain who are the 15 other people that I am now stuck with for the next 10 months?

Group photo in front of our home. People from left to right: Simon H (GA (field mountaineering guide)), Alex G (Data Manager), Nicola (Chef), Andy W (Metbabe), Frances W. (Metbabe), Dave A (Comms Manager), Brian H. (Plumber), Mark W. (Electrician), Anto B. (Vehicle Mech.), John W. (Winter Base Commander), Liz K. (Chippie), Vicky M. (Doctor), Bob P. (Genny Mech.), Kirsty S. (Metbabe), Chris O. (Share Engineer), Me (General Dude and AIS Engineer). Photo courtesy of Bob

The other significant thing that happened in the first week was the melt tank party. This is something that happens every year pretty much as soon as the ship leaves with the summerers. The summer accomodation (the Drewry) building gets shut down as it is not used anymore. The Drewry has a melt tank to generate water so when it gets shut down we pump a lot more heat into in and have our yearly communal bath. Access is from the snow surface or through up a ladder and through a hole high in the side. It's ace...

Me just about to dive in. It got down to about -20 degrees that night and it felt pretty cold especially on your feet.

As you can see its really good fun.

The view of the melt-tank before I dive in.

Later in the evening the first nakedness of the winter occurred as people jumped out of the melt-tank into the freezing antarctic and ran around the Drewry building before getting back in. I tell you the snow was freezing and even though it only took about 30 seconds to run around the building it started to hurt by the time you got back. I think there were about 6 naked runners nearly all male. It was really good fun and I'm already looking forward to next years one.

The last three people in the tank.

The next day after the party sledge alpha started to prepare for their winter trip. Sledge alpha (Liz, Kirsty and I plus of course the GA) was the first winter trip out this year. So hopefully I will tell you about that very soon.

Second Call, the ship returns and takes everyone else away. Arrrgh!

2006-03-17T10:35:00.000-02:00

I'm getting really behind on the blog but I shall catch up. The last entry ended with the plane leaving us and that was about ages ago. Oh well the day after the plane left we had about one more day and then the ship turned up and everyone left. In fact there was one last party in the laws for the old winterers and summerers, it was also the night that the leaving winterers set booby-traps for the new winterers to discover when they have left. These include leaving smelly fish in the heating vents, putting potato powder in the milk, tabasco in the ketchup (we actually really liked this). There are probably other jokes that we haven't discovered yet.
The next day everyone woke up early and nearly everyone assembled at the garage. Only about 20 people were left on base. Dropping from 60 people to 20 is a massive change and those that were left behind found it really quiet. Everyone else then got into the sno-cats and the convoy to the ship set off.

Matt (old winter Genny mech), Gemma (summer Civil Engineer) and Dan (old winter Chippie)(my summer room mate) leaving in K21. Thats it for them no more antarctica for them.
I was co-driver with Ads in K21 the same sno-cat that I was driving for the first call relief which was really cool. It was a bit weird as there was a sort of party feel and at the same time we were all saying goodbye to all the great people that we had met during the summer. The weather was fantastic and the journey uneventful, the route was so smooth compared to first call and I even fell asleep in the passenger seat. We arrived at N9 and there was no sea-ice but the ship was moored up against the low shelf-ice. Very strange to meet all the crew who we spent about a month with and yet who we haven't seen for 2 months. So much has happened and they were not there. They were slightly shocked with the haircut but were all pretty cool. I then somehow got volunteered to work on the ice unloading the sledges that we had dragged from Halley, most of this was rubbish for recycling in the Falklands or the UK.

Unloading waste on the sea-ice. It was freezing and there was a crack in the ice just where the sledge was. Its risky but sometimes you have to take them and we had a GA on hand to save us if things got bad.
So a long day on the ice but the reward was great food and an unlimited bar. The ship doesn't limit beer to two bottles a night so it was a pretty heavy night later on. The evening was great though as the sunset was perfect.

The shadow the the ships superstructure on the ice shelf at N9.
The sea was also cold enough to produce sea smoke... ah just looked it up on the interweb, sea smoke is produced when frigid polar air meets the warm moist air that lies on the surface of the sea which is warmer. The warmer air rises and condenses on the frigid air producing a smoke, it looks like the sea is burning with invisible flames. There was also grease ice, this is when a skin of ice crystals begin to form on the sea surface making it look matt and greasy. In some places there was pancake ice, as you image the ice forms clumps together to form pancakes. This is just the start of the sea ice forming and it'll be two or three months until there is sea-ice thick enough to walk on.

Snocats on the ice-shelf waiting at the top of the ramp for us to collect the next morning and drive back to Halley.
The next day we woke up early with a slight hangover and left after a fantastic full english breakfast (I'd forgotten how good the food was on the ship) and then drove back to Halley.

Relief driving, better than motorway driving and I loved it. I don't know why you'd think that you'd get bored but its great, I guess its because its so alien to be sitting and driving on an ice-shelf. Cool.

Bob shot (technical term for taking a picture of yourself in such a way so that it looks as if someone else took it) of me driving.
As soon as I got back to Halley, I refuelled the Cat, had a quick lunch and then installed an optical instrument, which took the rest of the day. Looking around the Laws platform that evening it started to sink in the fact that everyone was leaving and that that was the summer over. There had been so much happening that it still really didn't sink in. The next day we had to wake up early and take the final summer stragglers to the ship. Once again it was a fantastic drive except that the contrast was a bit worse. I drove half of it with Lance one of the mobile plant operators in K21 and then swapped with Kirsty so that I got to drive K14 again. K14 is the oldest Cat and is a bit crazy with dials and switches above your head like a plane.

2nd Wave. View of the ice-shelf from just outside the bridge. The captain is looking out and down below the relief is ongoing. Once again the sno-cats await us at the top of the ramp.
We arrived very early and then had a wait around because the crane on the ship was broken. The engineers on the ship fixed it but it took ages. It wasn't so bad because there was a lot to look at. There were the penguins.

Penguin friends. Yay.
And the whales.

Killer whales. Wildlife! Its amazing after a few months you forget that there are other living things. We only get birds (skuas, petrels of various sorts and the occasional penguin).
So it was getting late by the time they had unloaded all the sledges. Still we had to get back and it was decided that we would drive back in the dark if needs be. There was a chance that the ship would sail further down the coast the next day to a creek closer to Halley in order that we could say farewell properly but it as we walked off the ship onto the sea-ice we knew that we would only seeing the 16 of us for the next 10 months. It was slightly emotional saying goodbye again to everyone.

Kirsty just before getting on the back of the sledge. In the background the shack is covered in ice. We will see the ship again at the end of November.
Then the word came from the winter BC to get on the final sledge and move out up to the waiting snocats and the beginning of winter.

John Withers the winter BC (base commander) rallies the troops before leaving. It was fairly emotional. 10 months man. 10 months. 10 months and only 16 of us. God I hope its good.
I acually got to drive the final snocat away from the ship, so I didn't get the view of the ship slowly receding in to the distance but instead had to concentrate on driving. We then split into our respective snocats and started driving.

Driving back in the night was interesting and odd as we never seem to use vehicles in the dark. I guess its going to get darker a lot more and we shall have to get used to it.

The dream team is reunited for the return journey. It was excellent to be in a snocat with the crazy one (Kirsty) again, it makes the journeys so much more interesting. Kirsty drives the final bit into Halley, narrowly avoiding crashing into flags even if there were a few scary moments.

Driving back was also a bit strange because I was constantly thinking about the whole 10 month thing but not in a bad way but just in a sort of "its finally happening" sort of way. I was enjoying the feeling of starting something that I've never done before and something that might be quite tough. Anyway winter began and we returned to an empty base, which is good as now we all have separate rooms. Whats more important is that it is our base for the next 10 months.

Blimp - Club Nido - Sunsets - Kiting - No more Plane

2006-03-01T22:57:00.000-02:00

Its been sometime since I last wrote stuff on here. But it feels like it was about a month ago as so much has happened. We are actually on our own now. So much has happened that I will have to write another entry, maybe in the next few days, how we came to be left on our own. That is there are 16 left on base and we are in winter mode. So in the lead up to everyone else leaving I have been immensely busy. Most of it has been finishing off the last few summer jobs, these are outside jobs that will be too difficult in the winter. I have also been trying to absorb as much information about my job as possible. This has probably involved me asking far to many questions to people. I've also had some time for recreation of course, but its all been very similar to previous weeks. Its funny how the weather dictates so much of your life here. If the weather is bad the plane doesn't fly. If the weather is bad then all your work is indoors. If the wind speed is between about 9 knots and 20 knots and the weather is good then I, and normally Kirsty, will go kiting. If the weather is good and there is no wind then we will go skijouring. If there is no wind and the contrast is bad then we will go x-country skiing. Contrast is a difficult thing to explain unless you have seen it yourself. When the sky is covered in cloud the white snow surface loses all its definition and you can't see any texture or sastrugi. So we x-country ski when this happens so we won't injure ourselves doing a more high speed sport. So its been normal. One interesting thing that has happened recently has been the launching of the blimp.

MET people testing their blimp. The Laws building is behind them. Liz the chippie is on the right looking at the camera. The blimp is a bit flaccid but they were only testing it. They are going to attach instruments underneath it and then they let it rise and measure things. I think its something to do with sea ice break up.

Actually just been told that the experiment is all about ozone depletion events that occur when ice forms. So in the spring (October) when the ice is breaking and re-forming you get the whole ice cycle going on and they are trying to see whether the formation of frost flowers has anything to do with ozone events. Its too complicated for me to understand.

We also had a final party of the summer.

Club Nido begins to warm up as Craig, Vanessa and Dave the canadian start shaking their limbs. Club Nido is usually the garage. Its called Club Nido after the powdered milk we drink (Nido) which is actually really nice if you mix enough of it in. For the first few days here I didn't really notice that it was powdered.

Club Nido, is supposed to be the most exclusive night club in the world as it usually only operates in the winter. There was also a BBQ outside which was surprisingly good considering that it was about -15 outside.

Frances (centre) struts her stuff.

One of the things that is happening more and more is that we are having a few hours of relative darkness. It never quite gets completely dark at the moment but we get long sunsets as the sun skirts the horizon in the southerly direction. This has meant that in the last week we have been having some great sunsets. I guess this is another sign that winter is on its way. I am told that the sun departs very quickly and that in a couple of months we will be wishing for the sun. At the moment its really nice to be able to go outside occasionally and not have to wear sunglasses, of course your eyeballs just start to freeze if there is any wind. We will all be wearing clear goggles soon.

One of the amazing sunsets taken from the Laws building. On the left is the skidoo line where we park up the skidoos and night.

Craig kiting as the sun dips below the horizon. The building on the far left is BART where the weather balloon is launched every day, the next building along is the Piggott (my work place).

Sunset in front of the melt tank tunnel entrance. The mound is a mound of snow and ice piled up by the dozer which makes fill the melt tank easier. The melt tank is about 25m down so you actually shovel snow into a hole in the ground where there is a shaft to feed the tank.

If the weather is good then it doesn't matter how dark it is. Kirsty was kiting when I saw my first star/planet (you can't really see in this photo but its just above the cloud on the right hand side) since arriving at Halley.

We have also lost the planes. The planes are the only way to get around quickly and the only way to get out of Halley in a hurry as they can fly all the way to Rothera on the antarctic peninsular and from there you can get a bigger plane back to the falklands. This is what Dave the comms manager did when he broke a tooth see his blog. The plane foxtrot bravo bravo has been the Halley plane for most of the time and it was the one that I was in twice. It was also the one that was damaged when we went to M83. It was due to leave Halley a few days earlier than it actually did because when it got back from its last trip (I think to Neumayer, the german base) it was found to have a broken front ski/wheel steering link. This had probably cracked when we made our landing at M83 and fatigued until it had properly broken. Another plane was sent from Rothera with the spares and the air mechs changed the whole front wheel/ski assembly.

The plane takes off for the final time with the air mech Dave the canadian as co-pilot. We are left with no air cover.

So that was that for the planes. The skiway will remain open until the planes leave Rothera but that won't be long and then next year we will have to put the skiway back in its place and prepare the surface for the next planes which should be arount October/November.

Victor-papa-foxtrot-bravo-bravo leaves performs her final flypast before heading off to Rothera. Hopefully we will see Ian the pilot next year.

Ice Cricket - Man Hauling to the N9 4 km marker - Sunset - AIS

2006-02-16T18:35:00.000-02:00

It seems that some fans of this blog find it slightly annoying that I start each entry with an appology, well I am sorry for annoying you but that is the way I feel. Its nearly been another week and summer here is running out. So too are the large jobs that have to be done outside. This means that we are doing more and more tidying up and packing up boxes of equipment that is to be sent out when the ship returns for second call. We still have to go out quite a bit as there are jobs (raises) that are left late in the season in order that they (the things you are raising) don't get buried as quickly as if you had done it earlier.

The saturday after my last entry was a fantastic day and we had the afternoon off. Because of the fine weather a cricket game was organised. I turned up after a good skijouring session. Earlier in the week I had somehow done a few 360s on the snowboard whilst being towed by the skidoo but haven't been able to do it more recently. When everyone who wanted to play cricket had turned up we only had 14 players. So we split into two teams, with Ads (Adam the comms dude) and Ian (Pompey the steelie) as captains.
The rules were as follows:
Each team took it in turn to bat with two of their players, each pair faced 4 overs. If they were out then they lost 5 runs. All the rest of the players were fielders. The final player on each team faced the bowlers alone for two overs. Scores were added up for each team. We played with a tennis ball.
The final scores were Ians team 1 run, Ads' team 9 runs. I was on Ads' team. Woohoo! The scores don't really reflect the quality of the game nor the quality of the banter in the outfield. I guess the champagne moment was when Craig (the plant operator) made a running diving catch before smashing into the snow.

Post cricket photo.

You'll be glad to know that cricket has been the one sport that produced no serious injuries. You have seen that Alex's ankle was broken in the footie, but I haven't told you that Jay Blow's (John Blower - Sparkie) shoulder was torn when playing softball.

On the sunday I got off base again. This is the second time but this trip was less glamorous than the trip to windy caboose. This trip was organised by Liz (the Chippie- see photo below) and was intended to be a training session for manhauling. As the name suggests Manhauling is Scott's (of the Antarctic)way of travelling. You attach a sledge to you and walk or ski to where you want to go hauling your sledge. As I mentioned in the last entry, whenever you go anywhere off base you carry loads and loads of stuff incase it gets really bad. This means that you have to haul a lot of stuff. In order to do this over reasonable distances you need training, and this trip was intended as a training trip. We only took a primus, some fuel, sausage sandwiches and chocolate, extra clothing. As with every training exercise it was a learning process. We had a rubbish sledge to pull, we used an only climbing harness to attach the sledge to the hauler and we didn't tie down the stuff in the sledge. Not tieing down the stuff meant that for the first km bits kept on falling off the sledge. Luckily like a well trained boy scout I had two bits of string in my pocket and we fixed the problem.

Liz, dragging the pulk sledge back.

When we set out the weather was gorgeous and we just thought it was going to be another fine day on the Brunt Ice Shelf. As it turned out, because the clear skys it was also one of the coldest days. I hauled the sledge all the way to the destination, the 4km marker. Just further on from the 4km marker there is a small mast which holds a solar panel and a UHF transmiting antenna. This is a radio micro barograph (or rubaro) and this experiment is run by the MET babes on the other platform (Smelly Simpson Platform). We were only wearing normal clothes (thats the sort of gear you would wear outside in England) with some windies (thin cotton outer clothes which stop the wind) over the top. By the time we got there one of my sunglasses lenses had iced over, sweat on my forehead had frozen and my eye lashes had beads of ice on them. We quickly got all our extra clothes on and started the primus and began to melt some snow for a brew up. After about half an hour the water finally boiled, by which time we were starting to get really chilly. We posed for this picture, where we sat down on the snow sofa that KIRSTY and CRAIG made (what excellent craftspersons they are).

4 km man-hauling family portrait. Uncle Anto stands behind and Auntie Liz sits on the snow sofa with me.

Liz hauled the sledge back and we got warm again. There is a good reason to go manhauling, and that is it is lovely and quiet, except for the squeak and swish of the snow. And you get to feel like you are doing the proper antarctic hero thing a bit more, instead of getting you hands vibrated off by a noisy skidoo. I mean I love skidoos a lot, they are amazing, but it is the difference between steaming in a boat and sailing a yacht. The yacht is so much cooler and although it might not be quite as comfortable it feels right and you appreciate things a bit more. One of the amazing things as we came back was the miraging. Miraging happens alot here because of the ice causing air close to the surface to become colder than the air above. This causes diffraction which bends the light much like in a fibre optic cable. Sometimes we see massive icebergs on the horizon. On the way back from the 4km marker we were seeing different amounts of miraging across the base. So the Simpson platform was massive and the laws was big at one end. The garage and the Drewry were tiny. Its really odd. It would have been cool if people looking in our direction had seen three massive people sliding towards them but no one saw that.

Not much else has happened since then. Except for the poster incident.

Someone put up these posters of me doing a head stand in the snow. It didn't take long to find out who is was (Kirsty). I still haven't found them all. All I can say is that some day I will have my revenge.

We've done more packing and cleaning. Oh yeah my radar broke for a bit when a power supply blew up. This caused me and Bryn to work until 10.30 pm getting an old replacement to work. A lot of people have also been asking me what my job is. I think I have already told you that I am the AIS engineer. I think I will try to explain my job more fully in the next entry. As you can see below time is running out and apparently the light will fade quickly.

Sunset over the AIS transmitter masts. (Photo courtesy of Miriam the old SHARE engineer)

Busy - Sorry - Climbing the tallest erections in Antarctica - Trip to Windy Caboose - Ze Germans - Kiting.

2006-02-10T18:45:00.000-02:00

More appologies for my tardiness on the blog front, two weeks is really slack. My only excuse is that I have been too busy working and having fun, so sorry again but tough. I should have more time in the winter. I've been so busy because all the work here has to be done in the summer and the summer season here is drawing to a close. I think the ship is due back on the 23rd of this month and apparently it won't hang around. Basically all the summering staff will leave along with last year's winters and we (16 of us) will be left to fend for ourselves. The other thing that is happening is that I am being given more and more responsibilities which is good but gives me less time to do other stuff. I have been made Winter Mast Officer, this means that I am nominally in charge of all the masts here and have to write a report for HQ about their state. Its not really much as most of the masts will be maintained by others but I should know what I am doing. Because of this I am always being called on to help the Mast Erectors (Fish and Jacko) with Mast erection. Its good fun unless its really really cold. The other bit of responsibility is that I am going to be Winter Piggott Coordinator, which means that I am supposed to coordinate the Piggott Science platform, once again there is not much to do except help my platform communicate with the rest of the base and HQ but I need to know what is happening, which I don't at the moment. So what has been happening in the last two weeks?

A lot has been happening in the last two weeks. I guess the first thing that happened was that the Laws building was raised. This required everyone on base except for those involved with the plane or the chefs and one person running each of the science platforms. They need so many people because each leg of the building (20 of them labled east 1-10 and west 1-10) needed two people to run the jacks and raise the jacking plates. I was on the west side with Jeff Cohen the passive engineer (passive engineers are not passive but deal will all the passive instruments, I will taking over half of his jobs). There are about 50 people on base so the other 5 or six people were coordinating stuff on the ground. It was a pretty long day and very cold as we stood around for ages waiting for things to happen. Apparently it might be the last time they ever jack the building as Halley 5 is due to be removed and replaced by Halley 6. We have actually had the Halley 6 architect and some engineers here testing things and changing their design. So the laws got raised 1.7 m.

The next day the AIS transmitter masts were raised. These are the tallest erections in Antarctica and are 46.3m above the snow surface after they were raised this year. There are two masts that hold a Log-Periodic antenna curtain between thenm. Because they are so high, raising them took two days. The mast erectors Fish and Jacko took it turns to climb the masts and Bryn and were the other climbers. I think I have mentioned before that Bryn is the old AIS engineer and that I am taking over from him. On the first day Fish and Bryn climbed the west mast.

The AIS masts with Bryn and Fish at the top. The snocat on the left is K21, the dream teams relief snocat (see previous entries).
In order to raise the masts you have to fit a new 10 foot section of mast to the top. So you drop the antenna curtain onto the ground. Get a pulley onto the top of the mast. You then haul a gin pole (long pole that fits to the top of the mast) with another pulley on it and fit it to the top of the mast, you can then pull things higher than the current top of the mast. You then haul the new section up and fit it to the top. The next day it was mine and Jacko's turn to climb. It was a beautiful day we raised the mast by lunch time.

The view looking down from the top. The smallest blobs are people, the next size up blobs are skidoos and the largest blogs are sledges.

Jacko the mast erector at the top. The spanner thing on the right is called a podger and has a tapered handle. Podgers are really useful for locating holes and tightening the nuts afterwards. Dropping stuff at 45 m is not good.
Once you have raised both masts you can raise the antenna curtain again. Raising the curtain was a bit of pain as the antenna had to be checked as it was raised and there was a bit of damage between insulators and the dipole wires but wwe fixed everything and it all worked well later. While we were doing all this work other people were invited to climb the masts as it is not often that you get an opportunity to climb them (they are transmitting a lot of the time with 10kW pulses 250 times a minute at wavelengths about the same size as a large human). Only one person apart from Bryn, Fish, Jacko and Me got to climb and that was Kirsty. She was just lucky and was there when we weren't too busy. So she is only spectator to have been up the largest constructions in antarctic this summer.

The rest of the week was spent helping the masties with raising turnbuckles. Snow accumulation causes most of the work here. I also started to prepare for the weekend away. This was an idea I had about a week before when I heard that some of the current winterers were going to a holiday caboose for the weekend. They did it and said that it was a lot of fun. Others were going and I thought instead that it would be good to get off base for a day trip. So I organised with the GA (Simon H.) to make it possible. In order to leave base, you need to have done co-pilot training and you need to take a half unit. A half unit is a small unit and a full unit is all the safety equipment that you need to take with you if you are planning on sleeping out it a tent. A half unit consists of Pots box (pots, pans, primus, tilley), spares box (plates etc...), inside tent box (loo roll and more stuff), radio box (has an HF radio), man food box (contains enough food for 2 for 20 days), P-bags these are massive bags with sleeping bags, thermorests, sheepskins and other bedding that normally makes it too hot to sleep and an iridium phone, rescue sack (we didn't take one as we were travelling along a drum line but this normally contains ropes, ice axes etc... for crevass rescues)... um oh yeah you need a jerry of parafin and some meths. A half unit is massive and a full unit is even more. So I did a small amount of stressing trying to locate all the bits and bobs and orgainise the rest of the crew. The crew turned out to be Liz, Kirsty, Anto and Me of course. It got to sunday and we as usual there were some late risers. We located the equipment and loaded up snocat with all the stuff. When you shove that much stuff in a snocat you feel like you are going on a massive journey, so the day trip did feel a bit weird.

Anto, me, Liz and Kirsty get ready to leave for Windy Caboose in the Star Ship Enterprise.

The trip only took about one hour at 20 km/h but for me it was great to be back in a cat, this being the first time I had been in one since the relief. It was great and when we got there Liz brewed up, which was fantastic. We got there at about lunch time and ate our picnic.

The team inside Windy Caboose.

We then had a bit of fun kiting next to the drum line and having a snowball fight.

Snow ball fight at windy caboose, Kirsty of course cheats by using a frisbee to hurl snow at me. Action shot from Liz the chippie taken from the top of the snocat.

We had dinner at the caboose as well. This time it was a slightly different meal, with tinned hotdogs, and tinned spagetti which turned into a bit of a mush. We drove back and arrived back on base at about 10 pm. What a perfect day!

Another week started and we got some great weather again. One of the highlights apart from the great weather and hence skijouring etc..., was the arrival and departure of the Germans. The Germans base to the east of us on the Ekstrøm Ice Shelf is called Neumayer and they have only one plane. They used to have two but they crashed one at Rothera a couple of years ago. The plane is a Dornier Do 228 and looks pretty aggressive when compared to the twin otter.

The Germans in the Dornier preparing to leave.

The Germans just leaving the ice

Neumayer base has a shorter summer season so while we are still doing things their one plane is leaving, refueling here and carrying on to Rothera. So at Neumayer they are going into winter mode. Which reminds me we are going to have to go to winter mode soon, I've mentioned that before haven't I. Anyway the weather has since got fresher and we are regularly having days when it is 20 below in the evening. The fresher wind makes it good for kiting.

Anto and Me kiting. My kite is the blue one and its 9.5 square metres large.

Me with my first kiting injury. How disgusting is that? The control bar for the kite smacked into my lip which then got cut up by my teeth. Vicky the doc said I it was fine and that I was a wuss.

2006-01-27T20:13:00.000-02:00

Many apologies for the lateness of this entry, it seems that every entry begins with an apology for not updating the blog. One of the reasons is that I am working 11 hr days and trying to fit in loads of recreation at the same time. You can fit loads of recreation in since we are still enjoying 24 daylight. Of course this leaves you pretty tired, so you don't feel like writing your blog at 12 pm when you return from kite skiing or skijouring or whatever. However this time I do have a legitimate reason for not writing this. The reason is the snow accumulation on the base that I have mentioned many times before forces you to raise everything. This raising includes the communications dish through which we get our internet and telephone service. This dish was raised just after the last entry (on the 16th) and when they turned the dish back on it couldn't find the satelite again. This was partly because the dish was set up slightly wrong and was looking in the wrong sector and partly because a few days later we had a massive blow. A blow is basically when the wind gets above about 25 knots, which makes working outside tricky.

Anyway we have been back on line for a few days and I am trying to make amends.

As promised in the last entry a piccy of me at Pirate Night.

See I have finally got around choosing some photos of Pirate Night. As you can see because we are stuck in a small community with not that much to do for recreation (apart from kiting, skijouring, abseiling etc...) we have to entertain ourselves by dressing up. We do have fun and do have alcohol. The alcohol is controlled however (2 small beers a night max and 4 on saturday (or a bottle of wine)). This is a good thing because of the dangers of falling asleep in the snow or other alcohol related injuries. However as you can see it doesn't take much to send me over the edge. Don't worry I haven't done anything embarrassing yet apart from dancing.

Scouse Pirate, Geoff Pirate and Ian Pirate.

The two on the outside are steelies (this means they are steel erectors/welders) and Geoff is the base general assistant. He's normally the Health and Safety person in Cambridge but every year they send one of the admin people from HQ to see what it is like on base.

Kirsty Pirate, Dave Pirate and Vicky Pirate

It seems like I haven't seen Dave for ages. He's actually back in Stanley seeing the dentist, so they can get you out of here in the summer. He cracked his tooth doing a fuel raise (as you guessed drums of fuel have to be dug out of the ground because of the snow accumulation). The tooth apparently has to be removed but he should be flying back to use within the next few weeks. Hopefully he will be bringing us goodies from the Falklands.

Pretty much immediately after the last entry I got to be co-pilot again. This was pretty cool because hardly anyone else has been flying and I had just come back from a flight. I think this is because I was qualified to help with the LPM/LPR (Low Powered Magnetometer and Low Power Riometer) stuff. So it must have been last saturday the weather got good for a trip to M83. As suggested by the name, M83 is a LPM site 83 degrees south. Only A84 is farther south of all the likely trips that I could go on so its quite cool to have got to do the most southerly. The flight there was a bit tricky because there was a lot of cloud which meant that we flew at 14 thousand feet. Normally you are required to have oxygen in a unpressurised plane above 10 thousand feet, but here the rules are laxer and BAS doesn't send people with weak hearts south. The flight was pretty good and we got some good views of the mountains. Miriam was in the back and because of the height she had a serious headache, which isn't good for 3 and a half hours. When we got close we couldn't actually see the LPM (see the last entry for what an LPM looks like). So in the end Ian decided to put the plane down as close to the GPS mark as possible and we would taxi to the site. It was a pretty heavy landing but to me it felt ok. Anyway we got to the sight and all we found was a couple of poles sticking out of the ground. We realised that the site must have been moved. So we rang around to try to get the position of the new site. Inspecting the plane however showed that the heavy landing had damaged the rear left ski.

The twin otter at M83. Its broken but you need to get closer to see it.

Close up of the broken ski.

This happened because the sastrugi was massive. Sastrugi, are small wind created snow dunes that make the snow surface bumpy. At M83 the sastrugi was about 3 foot high in places which is massive. It turns out that the bad sastrugi was the reason why they moved the original site. The sastrugi had actually damaged another plane in the same way. Suddenly we didn't know if we could get back. We refueled and Ian expertly took off again in really bad conditions. The trip back was uneventful. We saw more funny optical effects and I took a brief spell at the controls under Ian's watchful gaze. We landed back at Halley in what must have been 15 foot visability and nearly missed the end of the runway. I think Ian was concerned about the plane and just wanted to get it back so that they could get it fixed. The plane had to be flown to Rothera in order to be refitted, in fact they just swapped planes so that Halley wasn't left planeless.

The weather was amazing the next day and I went cross-country skiing in the morning and skijouring in the evening. The photos below are pictures in the evening.

Anto looking good infront of the Laws platform.

Anto takes the jump.

Kirsty takes the jump.

Me learning to snowboard. I'm think I am ok. I also think I will get a board as it is so much fun.

Me pointing out the mirages on the horizon.

The next day was also gorgeous, but I was stuck indoors as I was on gash. As I explained on the ship, when you are on gash you have to do all the cleaning. The difference here is that you are on your own and you have to remain on the Laws platform. For some people this is like a day off work but for me I felt massively couped up. The internet was also down so I couldn't escape. I think cabin fever may be a problem for me. At least I know what to expect now and I think it might be different when there is the internet and the weather is not so good.

We then had the long blow, and nothing much has happened. We have been mainly working indoors. For me this has been designing and making some electronics to do with the AIS radar. I will explain some the different radars and the science soon. I can do this because we have recently given a talk to the rest of base explaining what we do.

The blow is over. The internet is back and I have also had a haircut. This happened after a game of pool with Craig, one of the old winterers. He said he was having a haircut that evening and that he was having a Mohawk. I didn't believe him and he said I should have one. I then said that I would have one if he did. He then had one and so did I . It turns out that he normally has a Mohawk and thought it was really funny that I only agree to one if he did. I think it looks ok.

My new mohawk hair.

Now that the internet is back I will update more often.

The Piggott platform rises - pirate night - A84 what a trip - More skijouring

2006-01-16T23:36:00.000-02:00

Its been a long six days since my last entry. I guess it is a good time to take stock of what has been happening, as it is nearly three weeks since we have arrived. I actually feels as thought we have been here for about 5 weeks according to Anto and me but not according to Kirsty (who correctly thinks we have been here for 3). I think it is because of the long hours, the fact that the base is very small so you get to know the place very quickly and because there is so much happening. I hope that this 5 week feeling is not going to make the two years feel like three and I suspect that when things calm down the winter will pass very quickly.

As I mentioned in the last post, the buildings have to be jacked because of the snow accumulation. Last week the jacking took place on my platform (the Piggott). Essentially you put a powered jack on each of the legs and jack it up. Each year the platforms have to be jacked about 1.5 meters because of the accumulation. The jacks only move about 30 cm so the jacks have to be raised and the process takes a while. For the Piggott this took a whole day. Through out this time people had watch the progress.
Raising the piggot.

There are also many cables going into the ground feeding electricity and data to and from the experiments, and people have to watch that they don't snag. Of course there is also the pipe taking waste from the urinal and the sink. We don't have a toilet as such but what they call a rocket bog. You poo onto a specially designed paper pouch and when you are done to press a button and the pouch gets dropped into a pan and burn until there is only ash which is then put in the trash compactor. I haven't used it yet, but will tell you when I do. Anyway this raising took place middle of last week as the weather improved enough for them to work. It was still pretty miserable but the wind died to less than 20 knots.

The final raised position, you can tell by the height of the steel legs against the roof of the building.

As the weather improved the mast erectors also were able to get going on raising the SHARE radar. This involves removing the antennae off of 16 masts, adding new sections to the masts and then reattaching the antennae. Once again this is all due to the snow accumulation problem. My main responsibility is the AIS radar but as the SHARE people were a bit short handed I was roped in. This is actually a lot of fun and you get to put a harness on and climb up high masts. Once they have done the SHARE mast raise they will go on and do mine. The SHARE has 16 short masts all about 10m high whereas the AIS has two massive 45m monsters. Most of my time has been taken up with this SHARE raise this week which is good fun.

So the weekend comes around and our one day of freedom from the 11hour days arrives. This weekend there was a pirate themed disco, I think inspired by Peggy's (Alex's) broken leg. So we therefore all got dressed up as pirates. I will try to post some photos of that party soon, but is very difficult to choose them as they are so embarrassing. I got terribly drunk, something I didn't think was possible because you are only allowed a bottle of wine. I must have drunk more. Hopefully I didn't make a fool of myself.

The next day (Sunday) is a day off for everyone, well that is unless you are me and are lucky enough to get a co-pilot trip somewhere. Normally the plane will also have a day off, but because of all the bad weather, they were flying. At ten whilst lying in pain in my bed from the pirate night before (still will a dirty moustach drawn on my face) I was woken up by the BC (Base Commander) with the words, "A84 thirty minutes". So in 30 mins I had to get up get some warm clothes, have breakfast, make lunch and get to skiway. Thankfully the doctor was on hand to give me some paracetamol. A84 is an automatic logging site close to 84 degrees south which is 360 nautical miles from the pole (I think). This is closer to the pole than I am to halley which is at 75 degrees south. It is also probably the farthest south I shall every go. I just wish my head wasn't hurting and that I wasn't missing out on the fun that everyone else was probably having on a sunday.

Leaving Halley for A84, airborne for the first time.

The plane was a twin otter. A twin turbo prop about 30 years old. They don't make these planes anymore and they are really tough. They travel at about 120 knots and it took us more that 4 hours to reach A84. It such a long way that we took fuel in the back on the outward journey. Because the planes are so good and that they don't make them anymore they rebuild them when they crash. In fact Victor-Bravo-Bravo, the one that I was in had been flipped and was totally burnt out a few years ago, I will try to find some pictures to post. At the wheel was Ian.

Ian the pilot at the controls.

On the way there, I slept most of the way in the back. We arrived and it was a beautiful day. The outside temperature was -16 degrees and there was 20 knot wind. I quickly did my job, which was to service the LPM and LPR that was there. The LPM or Low Powered Magnetometer is shown below. Essentially is measures the changes in the magnetic field.

Me servicing the LPM at A84, you can just see the plane in the distance.

This is important because the sun and earth interact and the suns magnetic field wobbles, this in turn affects the earths magnetic field and sometimes results in aurora. Other times it causes satelites to fail. If anyone has watched "The Core" they will know how important the earth's magnetic field is. The LPRs are Low Powered Riometers, these look at background radio noise (from distant galaxies) and uses this signal (which is affected by the atmosphere) and satelite data (which isn't) to work out what is happening in the atmosphere. I carried out the servicing which is essentially just to swap the loggers, thereby getting last years data and the hardware, and putting in brand new stuff. I did this with DJ one of my bosses. After that we helped Jacko the mast erector demolish a 15m mast. We then spent another hour digging up rubbish from the site (old equipment) and loaded the plane up to the gunnels. I then got to be co-pilot on the way back.

I got to fly the plane for about one hour and a half. There are very few features on the Antarctic plateau which makes flying difficult as you don't know where to aim. You do have a compass and GPS though. One of the really amazing things are the mountains. We saw both the Therons (named after the ship that dropped in the wintering forward team) and the Shackletons (both ranges named by Vivian Fuchs in the great transantarctic expedition (Fuchs and Hillary)). I know you won't understand this and I hardly do but it is amazing to see the ground. All we get to see here is snow and ice and anything that is not white is amazing.

The Shackletons poking their heads above the surface.

We aslo got amazing views of the ice shelf that we live on and from the plane I can understand why is weak and threatening to break up.

The Brunt ice shelf with strange wobbly streaks of stato cumulus, code 5 apparently according to Frances.

Halley base as we approach finals. The bottom of all the buildings are in fog. The time is 15 mins past midnight and Ian plonked us back on the ground very smoothly.

Having left at about 11am and returned at 12.15 in the morning on my day off it was tiring but fun. I didn't even get a day back although I was allowed a lie in. The weather has also got very good so I have taken every opportunity to go skijouring. I have also been kiting, just learning how to control a 9.5 sq m traction kite. When I get good enough at kiting and snow boarding I will combine the two.

Skijouring.
Oh yeah a plane arrived from Rothera and on it there was post. I got a letter from Rachel, which makes her the bestest person in the world. Everyone else is encouraged to write to me otherwise I won't write to them. You can find the address here.

Shelf ice - Snow - Skijouring - Sex

2006-01-10T22:06:00.000-02:00

So another week has started and its still all go down here on the Brunt ice shelf. I should remind people who email me to see if I have made landfall, that in fact Halley is on an Ice shelf. This means that there is actually sea below the ice (approx 200m thick). The whole ice shelf is sliding off the continent and the base is moving at about 500m a year northwards and is predicted to break off in the next 5-10 years. The snow is also accumulating which means that the buildings are build on legs that have to be jacked up every year. The accumulation of snow is slightly more complicated in that if you put a great big building on the surface you get a wind tail. That is just behind the building you dump snow which results in the formation of a small hill.

Underneath the building you get less snow and you get a wind scoop (misnomer). This results in the legs of a building being forced in as the snow builds up on either side. So not only do the building get jacked, but occassionally they have to cut the leg of at snow level and straighten it out and weld it back. This all takes time and can't be done if the wind is too high.

After the last entry (friday) it started to snow and the wind increased. This has been both good and bad. It is bad because vital work can't be done. Oh yeah we work our 11 hour day on saturdays as well (have I said that before?). So saturday wasn't amazingly productive for most people and for me it was just slightly trickier to walk to the Piggot platform and the AIS radar.

All the snow was good however for skijouring. This involves getting some normal skis as opposed to x-country skis and a very fast skidoo. You then get a bit of rope and get the someone to drive the skidoo around very fast. So on sunday (our only day off) I went skijouring. This was after a samba practice where we started to learn some new tunes. The skijouring is pretty amazing and really good fun. I used some ski-mountaineering skis and we (Andy, Kirsty and I) got hold of the vehicle mechanics skidoo. This was a polaris which I think is capable of about 65 mph but I couldn't tell because the speedo was broken. Anyway the mechanics also made a jump and it was so much fun Kirsty and I decided to stay out and miss dinner because of this. I got pretty good by the end and could ski alongside the skidoo and take the jump without falling over. When you did fall over, and I did a few times you just land in wonderful powder. I will definetly do this whenever the weather is better.

Apart from that there has not been too much excitement. This week I am on melt-tank duty in the mornings. The melt-tank does what it says. It melts the snow (clean snow from a clean snow area) which we then eat and wash in etc... This has to be filled up in the morning and evening. I am on the morning team which consists of Brian, Bob, Jeff and me and it took us about 20 mins this morning to dig enough snow. If you look at the last entry you can see the photo I took from the melt tank looking up. The melt tank originally was built on the surface but was allowed to bury under the accumulated snow. Now the tank is about 30m below the surface. So snow has to be shovelled down a chute into the tank. This chute can get blocked easily so when you have dunk snow in you have to listen very carefully to make sure that it isn't blocked. There is a distinctive double bounce (there's a kink in the chute) and splash. When the tank is full a red light comes on to tell the shovellers to stop.

Arrival at Halley - Day off - X-country Skiing - Alex breaks his leg Continued.

2006-01-06T22:11:00.000-02:00

Proof that I have finally arrived. The Laws Building is in the background. There are also masts behind me which are for the HF radio which is used for communications with field parties.

Once again, I have to appologise for not updating the blog earlier. I should explain that I didn't update the blog after I arrived since I was a bit tired from doing 12 hr shifts. Now we are only working from 8am to 7pm which is nearly as bad. The work is also quite physical and just moving around in the ice/snow is difficult. We do have skidoos for when we have to carry stuff but the base is actually quite small and it is usually less than a ten minute walk anywhere.

As I explained earlier. The base has this sort of tardis thingy going on. Its fairly large on the inside but from the outside it looks tiny. Because of the flatness of the ice you can see the base from miles away (see last entry) and from a distance the base looks pretty big. Howevery when you get closer it becomes smaller. So when we finally arrived at the base, my immediate thoughts were that the place looked a bit industrial and the accomodation reminded me of a youth hostel. I also found out that I had drawn the short straw and been given the room with Dan the chippie from last year, who is well known as the loudest snorer. I mean you can hear this guy from miles away and the whole bed shakes. Everyone I met on the base tried to show me to what they thought was a spare room (it was actually taken by Nicky the Chef- {begin rant} which means that there are three girls in single rooms - I mean what gives them the right to privacy bla bla $%£& them damn them to klfds {end rant}) for me to sleep in. As it turns out I have got hold of some amazing ear plugs and can sleep really well - the guy next door can't and is having trouble because of Dan's snoring.

Another view of the base. Photo taken from about 500m away from the Laws at Wonky caboose close to where we camped out for co-pilot training As you can see everything is now very small and close together.

After a day off after relief we had the weekend and new year. On the day off, I slept in for a while and then tried to go x-country skiing. This is a lot harder than you think because the skis are thinner than normal, have very little in the way of an edge so you end up sliding laterally and are not clipped in at the heel so you have to balence on the balls of you feet. I went around the perimeter (5km) and only fell over twice, once right in front of everyone. I also put my head around the door of my new office.

The office on the Piggot platform. Its pretty normal. My desk is the one of the left. The white thing on the left of the computer is a light box, that is used in winter to give us an endorphin kick and stop SAD.

The next day I did very similar things and went around the perimeter again on the x-country skis this time only falling over once but this time a bit worse than before. It was new year but it felt very difficult. At about 9pm local time when it was turning 12 in the UK there was a massive queue for the two outside phone lines so for the first time in many years I didn't phone anyone. To celebrate here we had a curry night and then ended up playing in the Salsa band in front of everyone which was surprisingly well received considering the amount of noise we made (the building nearly fell apart and an air vent fell off the roof and hit the Kev the old chef).

The day after new year, I went skiing again, this time with Kirsty. We got about half way around the perimeter before I remembered that there was a football match going on. This was on a specially prepared groomed snow pitch. As we arrived at the base to remove our skis we noticed Vicky the doc getting ready to go out. She had been called to the pitch as someone was injured. By the time we got to the pitch Alex was being transported back to the Laws Building on the back of a skidoo. It turns out that he has broken his ankle and will be in a plaster and out of action for 6 weeks.

Alex and I do a bit of team bonding. This was on Signy about a month ago.

As you can see a normal healthy person. I get to drive him around on a skidoo to take him between the platforms. The broken ankle thing is really annoying for Alex as he was supposed to go out to one of the automatic logging stations further south. So he misses out on co-pilot training, getting a flight closer to the pole and seeing antarctica from the air. Very annoying.

Alex just before Vicky the Doc changes his first plaster.

Which brings me neatly to Co-pilot training. When you get flown around you have to do co-pilot training. This is because the weather here is so variable and although you might be able to take off and reach you destination you might not be able to return. If this happens you have to know how to pitch a tent and live out on the snow. You always carry 20 days of food for everyone in case you get stuck. Last year Bryn (the old AIS engineer (my job)) got stuck out for 11 days. Your other job as co-pilot might be to fly the plane for a while when the pilot is having a rest, oh and you have to give a weather report back to base. We (the electronics chaps) are on the top of the list for flights so had our co-pilot training first.

Chris and I get ready for bed. As you can see the tent door is firmly open. The tin shack in the background is Wonky caboose which has a few beds inside. You can use this when you feel like getting away from the base.

Bryn (the guy I am taking over from) working on one of the AIS receiver pre-amplifiers. In the background you can see the two 45 m masts that hold the log periodic transmitting antenna.

Looking up from the bottom of the Melt-Tank access shaft. the little square is the trap-door onto the surface.

Arrival at Halley - Day off - X-country Skiing - Alex breaks his leg.

2006-01-02T18:25:00.000-02:00

Its the first entry of the new year and I have been a bit slack in updating the blog. Its all my fault. I also got the title wrong in the last entry as I should have said that it was day 5 of the relief but I was so tired that I got it wrong. The relief all sort of merged into itself. Spending all that time doing quite a mindless thing like driving over bumpy ground at 8 mph will do that. So the relief did end and for me it ended on the 30th of December. That meant that in total the relief lasted all of 8 days. On the final day I woke up and we first of all did a normal run (sort of) in that we drove to the half way caboose and then back to the ship for lunch. It was unusual as we had the night shift in the back of the sno-cat drinking as they had just come off shift and had to be transported to Halley.

The night shift causing trouble in the back. Notice the missing rear door. Fish the one on the right drove another sno-cat into the back of our one. That is the night shift for you.
We left the ship finally after lunch with the day shift cargo handlers and drove all the way to Halley. We had passed the half way caboose a few times but it was pretty exciting to keep on driving into unknown territory. On the right the McDonald Ice Rumples grew bigger and bigger until we drove straight past.

The McDonald Ice Rumples named after the fundraiser who orgainised money for rescuing Shackleton's crew from Elephant Island.
Then about 12km out of Halley you get to see a long thin building on the horizon, immediately more and more buildings emerged. Then for the next hour or so it got closer. For some strange reason Halley station looks bigger the further you are away, because as you come closer the legs get longer and the main building gets shorter. Also from a long way away you think that the buildings are miles apart, but when you are here you find that they are closer together. Another strange thing is that like the tardis, when you get into the base it seems bigger again.

This was taken about 10km out. It looks pretty big considering the distance. I have annotated the picture. I live on the Laws and work on the Piggot. The Drewry is the summer accomodation.
Have to go now, have co-pilot training which involves camping out tonight and learning to survive in the cold. Will finish off the news and add photos later. Maybe the title will give you a flavour of what has been happening.