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

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

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.