Adam Down South

This web page is the public journal of Adam Lutchansky, a Power Plant Operator at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Adam is living at McMurdo from August 2007 to February 2008.



PICTURES



30 Aug 2007 Photos that people took during winter 2007 and posted on McMurdo's communal server. Pictures from Common Drive Aug 2007
07 Sep 2007 Photos and maps showing the location of McMurdo Station. Also an explanation of why this location was chosen. McMurdo Location
23 Sep 2007 Pictures from flagging an ice road to Cape Evans. Flagging Cape Evans Road
23 Sep 2007 Simple animation of sea ice forming and melting around the continent over a one-year period. Sea Ice Animation
04 Oct 2007 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in September. Pictures from Common Drive Sep 2007
05 Oct 2007 Photos from a Sea Ice training course. Includes a penguin encounter. Sea Ice Class, Penguins
08 Oct 2007 Maps that I've found useful. Maps
04 Nov 2007 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in October. Pictures from Common Drive Oct 2007
05 Dec 2007 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in November. Pictures from Common Drive Nov 2007
05 Jan 2008 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in December. Pictures from Common Drive Dec 2007
22 Feb 2008 Photos from my trip to the South Pole. South Pole Trip
22 Feb 2008 Photos of the two McMurdo power plants where I work. Power Plants
22 Feb 2008 Photos of the five ships that visited McMurdo in 2008. Ships
23 Feb 2008 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in January. Pictures from Common Drive Jan 2008
23 Feb 2008 Photos that people posted on McMurdo's communal server in February. Pictures from Common Drive Feb 2008
23 Feb 2008 A mix of photos taken by a couple friends during our excursions. Photos with and by friends
16 May 2008 A belated post-Antarctica epilogue. Epilogue


ENTRIES


Click here to skip to the latest entry. Otherwise, continue below to read the entries in chronological order.

30 Aug 2007

10 days on the ice so far. Already I've lost a linear conception of time - some of the days have slid by without interest; some were so intense as to warrant memorization. The best measure of time past is the length of the days. The last time I checked, we were gaining half an hour of visible light every day. McMurdo Station is at about 78 degrees latitude, and at such extreme positions the winters and summers are exaggerated and the spring and fall are abbreviated. This is because the poles are usually either constantly exposed to the sun or constantly exposed to darkness. Each season is a study in a particular part of the day: summers, with the sun circling constantly overhead, is daytime. Winters, night. It is coming into spring now, and although the sun spends a minority of time above the horizon, every minute of daylight is a sunrise or sunset. The sun moves low, horizontally, heavily. The effect is ridiculously beautiful.

My trip down here started with a flight out of Juneau on the 13th. The preceding night was one of frantic packing, as rather than spend my last days of liberty preparing for my travels, I took my motorcycle up to the Yukon Territory for a couple days of roaring between mountains and across the interior forests, getting back to Juneau just in time to visit friends and go ptarmagin hunting in the alpine valleys behind town.

From Juneau the first stop was Denver, the headquarters of Raytheon Polar Services Corporation (RPSC). RPSC is, for the time being, the prime contractor for support services of the US Antarctic Program (USAP), and it is RPSC that hired me and will write my paychecks. After a few days of OSHA-mandated safety training, some repetitive paperwork, and another day of consistently self-contradicting instructions, we were flown to New Zealand on commercial jets.

Changing hemispheres isn't just a geographical and cultural change, but also a change of seasons. We stepped onto the plane in the lush heat of late summer and stepped out into the cool quiet of late winter. New Zealand wasn't radically different from the US, and their seasons are relatively mild, but the timing of the seasons was off, and everything about the natural world was reversed. The dirt smelled different. The birds were thick with feathers. Water was clearer. I was flushed with memories of winters and springs in Southeast Alaska, my home, and I stod ready to drink hot chocolate, stealth around forests with a rifle, and run miles across half-frozen mud.

After two days in New Zealand we boarded a C-17 military transport for McMurdo. I was on the first flight of the season, the first physical contact anyone had made with McMurdo in 6 months, the first of only four consecutive flights before the station was to be left in isolation for another five or six weeks. The flight path is desolate, heading south from Christchurch and covering 1,700 empty miles of ocean before the trivially populated continent of Antarctica appears in the horizon. The landing field at this time of year is a 10,000ft long, 150ft wide path of compacted snow laying on top of thick ice, surrounded by an effective infinity of snow and ice. The landing lights are staked in the snow, and electrified by a small group of trailers that serves as ground support. The infrastructure is ethereal - besides the trailers and lights, the airfield is nothing more than flattened snow, and in a bad snowstorm will be wiped out of existence in a couple of hours.

My flight marked the start of WinFly, or Winter Flights. The population of McMurdo was around 120 during the past winter season (Feb 07 - Aug 07), and in three or four flights we raised the population to around 350. The job of the WinFly group is to maintain the station and to prepare it for the summer season which starts in October and is always the season of heavy research. The population by December will break 1000, and several outlying field camps will be opened. I believe there will be only 3 ships this year, a Swedish icebreaker that is contracted to open a wide and safe path to the station, a container ship, and a fuel tanker. We use JP-5 fuel here, and we store AN-8 fuel here for delivery to field camps and the South Pole Station, which require the anti-freezing additives of AN-8. McMurdo is the logistical and transport hub for half the continent, and most of the land area of the station is devoted to staging fuel and materials.

More later.


12 Sep 2007

9 hours 46 minutes of sunlight. We're gaining only 15 minutes a day now, but the sky is clear and the sun is slanting through the shutters of the power plant and lighting the generator motors with a wide-spectrum glow, vibrant under the large sodium lights that otherwise illuminate the generator room with a tranquilizing orange.

Despite my temperature gauge hitting -20F, the sun is inescapable this afternoon, and for the first time the impossible legend of continuous summer sunlight hammering UV-saturated rays on the dry snow has gained some feasibility. It is piercingly dry here, and the sterility of the surroundings often feels absurd for such an exotic place. There won't be above-ground life anywhere near McMurdo Station for a couple of months, and never will there be the huddled lichens, gnarled trees, and anemic, short-lived flowers one associates with summer in a desolate place. There is nothing now but ice and sky, rocks and wind, and the Station.

The weather has been hit-and-miss here. When I arrived on August 20, we stepped out of the cargo plane, windowless but for a couple iced-up portholes, onto grainy, plastic snow, and choked on air measuring -33F. The sky was clear though, and with the sun only a couple degrees above the horizon we had a moment to take in the vivid majesty around us - the surrounding plain of snow that covers the sea, and the pink and purple mountain ranges that circled the distant horizon, clearly visible to 50 miles. The next day visibility was only a few hundred feet as a small blizzard moved in, and the day after that was once again clear. There is nothing here to impede the weather, and it changes fast. When we landed, our plane never shut down its engines, anxious to regain the security of altitude.

August and September are considered the coldest parts of the year at McMurdo. The temperatures are higher than in winter, but the emergence of the sun causes winds to stir and push their way across the continent. A person can keep reasonably warm if there's no wind, but once the air begins to move, it rapidly strips away your warmth and moisture before continuing without pause to drive the cold in through your muscles. Few people here spend much time exposed to the elements, the exceptions being the outdoor technicians who spend half an hour bundling up for the cold every morning, and the occasional recreational travelers, usually found with frost in their eyelashes, and buried so deep in cloth that their smiles are only visible as creases in the skin exposed around their eyes. For the rest of us, dressing for the day is a compromise between being warm while outdoors, and gambling on the fact that we are usually only exposed as we stride between buildings, trailers, and heated cabs atop heavy equipment.

Last week I volunteered to help mark an ice road with bamboo flags, which usually amounts to riding around exposed in the back of a pickup, frequently jumping out to drill a hole in the ice and plant a flag. The informational email made it clear that this was an important project, but a hopeful goal was that we would all manage to avoid frostbite. I showed up wearing almost every piece of clothing I had, and I carried the rest just in case. It was -17F and blowing 23 knots. But when we got out on the sea ice and started making our way to the job site, one of our three vehicles, a tracked vehicle called a Pisten Bully, similar to a Sno-Cat, lost hydraulic pressure and we had to return to the station. The next day another team attempted the same task, and the other two vehicles, another Pisten Bully and a pickup on tracks (as seen in a fire/rescue truck configuration), had similar problems. We'll try again this week with snowmobiles.

Showing up on the first flight of WinFly gives a person a terminal view of the lifestyle of winter, which runs from February to August. There are normally more than 200 people wintering, but due to budget cuts the station only hosted 120 people this year. The job of the winter crew is not to explore and thrive, but to simply keep the station defrosted and running. Whereas most summer crew are in Antarctica for adventure, glory, and curiosity, the winter crew are generally just here to live a quiet life in a fascinating place. At crew orientation in Denver, we were asked to be gentle when we arrived.

With 350 people now at McMurdo Station, the population seems slightly higher than the perfect amount. The dining hall is just slightly too crowded for a quiet meal, the video selection is often thinned out, and I've met far more people than I can recall having met. I spent my first couple weeks just smiling and saying hello to everyone I saw, abandoning any effort to figure out who I was supposed to know.

Despite living with 350 people now and preparing to live with 1000+, the people living here want to be here, and everyone makes sacrifices for the opportunity, so the social atmosphere is very friendly. Mainbody takes a bit of getting used to I'm told, but once one gets into the proactive mood, it's supposed to be a damn good time. For now, however, the idea of more people arriving inspires in most of us WinFly personnel feelings of apprehension and xenophobia.

Even before I secured a job at McMurdo, I'd heard a lot about the place, mostly people who had passed through the station. The few people I'd met who actually lived at McMurdo described it as a bustling, interesting, and crowded outpost, whereas the people who were here as transients painted a grim picture of dust storms, decrepit buildings, alcoholic inhabitants, and a lack of activities. The fact of the matter however, is that this is not a place to be a visitor. To minimize the environmental impact, there's a limited amount of turf at McMurdo, so rooms are fairly small, the gyms and bars are crowded during peak hours, and the recreational resources are hidden away in whatever space could be spared. During the summer season (aka mainbody), this place gets crowded, and the male to female ratio is about 2:1, causing all the men to develop an instinctual frustration with the arrival of any additional men. So when any people at all show up at McMurdo for a few days complaining about conditions which are further aggravated by their own arrival, I can understand that no residents are keen to share with transients the best hours for certain activities, the word-of-mouth opportunities, and the hidden gems that make this a great place to live. Transients are left with nothing to do but to mull over reasons to leave town.

For just these conditions, WinFly seems to be a great time of year to show up. The population is a reasonable size, the dorms aren't too crowded, one can make connections, and there's opportunity to secure the best volunteer positions. I'm already working in the library (about 8m x 20m), the bowling alley (the southernmost in the world), and the heavy vehicle maintenance facility (which is short of hands).

More later.


28 Sep 2007

13 hours 39 minutes of sunlight. The sun now has the upper hand. McMurdo is at 77° 51' S, and at this latitude there is a nine week transition from when the sun is above the horizon 100% of the time to when the sun is below the horizon 100% of the time. The sun doesn't dramatically rise and set as it does in most parts of the earth, but instead it slowly moves higher and lower in the course of the day, circling enthusiastically but never making it far from an average angle above or below the horizon. There's only a total of about 18 weeks each year when the sun's wanderings cross the horizon.

This effect is most extreme at the north and south poles, where the sun circles each day at an almost constant angle above the horizon (in summer) or below the horizon (in winter). This angle only changes a fraction of a degree every day, and the 9 week transistion we experience at McMurdo is only a one day transistion at the pole. One day there will be no sunlight, and the next day there will be nothing but sunlight. The first day of sunlight at the pole involves the sun appearing partially above the horizon and holding this position while it makes a full 360 degree circle. There is only one sunrise per year at the South Pole, and only one sunset. But the process and the colors last for weeks.

McMurdo sunrises and sunsets still last for hours each day. They will soon be occuring in the middle of the night as the time between them shortens, and eventually there won't be any time between and they'll unite for a vivid finale before fading, bleached out by the nonstop sunlight of the austral summer. In preparation, we've been bidding farewell to the stars. In a few days I will be working a night shift at the power plant, 6pm to 6am, and I'll be awake nightly to witness this conclusion of the austral spring.

The power plant where I work is the steel heart of McMurdo, sucking in 3,000 gallons of frigid fuel each day and expelling exhaust and 1.7 megawatts of electrical energy, channeled throbbing across the high voltage lines that lace the buildings together like arteries feeding sheet metal flesh. Beyond the conventional domestic uses, this energy is used to light the station during months of darkness, power our large satellite dishes, activate the science experiments, and to energize the tools and machines that allow us to survive independent of the rest of the world.

We have six Caterpillar D399 generator engines, heavy diesels each the size of a minivan, and each engine is attached to a 800-900kW generator. We run two, three, or four of these engines at a time, and we've been running them for 27 years. The power plant was supposed to be completely gutted a couple years ago, with new engines, piping, and electrical distribution systems installed, but for unclear reasons this project has not yet been executed. It is my job to monitor and operate the systems in the power plant, nursing the engines through their last seasons. They are solid and simple engines however and we have a dedicated mechanic who is usually able to rebuild them on site, and with each rebuild the life of an engine is extended by several more years.

McMurdo on the whole is in its prime, and with the first summer flight touching down in four days, WinFly activity is at its peak. The ice runway immediately adjacent to the station is essentially complete, and is on schedule to host the C-17s, C-5s, C-130s, LC-130s, and Twin Otters that conduct the majority of the air transport on this half of the continent. All of these planes are US, Kiwi, and Canadian, but apparently there will also be an Aussie Airbus 319 (similar to a Boeing 737-700) flying down.

Dorms that stood vacant for the winter have been opened up, equipment has been dewinterized, snow has been shoveled away, ice roads have been opened, winter projects have been wrapped up, and McMurdo finally stands in acceptable condition for the austral summer frenzy. There will be more than 600 people arriving at McMurdo in the first 8 days of summer flights, and almost 1200 people will arrive in the first month. The crew that was here for the winter is nervous to leave before their winter home is commandeered by the crowds, and they are anxious with stress and excitement.

WinFly is going out with extravagance, and in addition to the small parties that occur dependably two or three nights a week, McMurdo celebrated the annual WinSock musical festival last weekend, featuring 5 or 6 bands, and last night Scott Base, which opens it's doors and its bar to Americans every Thursday night, hosted several of the same bands. This weekend the carpenter (carp) shop will be hosting a party which has the potential to have everyone hung over until Tuesday, when the first flight gets in.


22 Oct 2007

Two months and three days on the ice. It's 1:30am and snowing, and the sky and ground are both a subtle, nondescript grey. The sun revolves around the island in a tilted circle these days, still taking refuge behind the mountains to the south but no longer falling below the horizon.

WinFly came to a close a few weeks ago, and the summer season, or Mainbody, began. Pegasus Airfield has been left to the snowdrifts, and for the past weeks C-17s have been making flights three times a week from New Zealand, landing a mile away from the station at the Ice Runway. The Ice Runway is just that, a 10,000ft airstrip built of thick seasonal sea ice. There is no insualting layer of snow as there is on Pegasus. A village of buildings, generators, a tower, and radars has been towed out onto the ice to direct and receive the flights. Several miles to the east, Williams Skiway has been cleared of snow and likewise hosts a small enclave of service buildings, boasting even a galley. Ski-mounted LC-130s will be landing at Willy Field starting today.

The first C-17 to touch down at the Ice Runway marked the start of the season, and by the third flight everything had changed. The 120 people who spent the winter here have all packed their bags and fled north, and taking their place are 800 summer residents. The scientists have arrived in mass. Military pilots and support staff have filled their barracks. The contractor population has exploded. Any spare beds are packed with crew bound for the south pole station, and as they head south for the summer they relieve the 56 crew who were at the south pole for the winter, who wander the halls of McMurdo wide-eyed and weary as they wait for the next flight to New Zealand and the real world.

Those of us who hosted the station for the austral spring season of WinFly have been dilluted and overwhelmed by the numbers and unfamiliarity of the summer crew. Those who have spent previous summers here are happy to see old friends. But those of us who are are in our first year are oppressed by the sea of strangers. It is now possible to be annonymous, and compared to the winter and WinFly residents, summer crew seem loud, oblivious, and unaccountable.

Every effort had been made to warn us about this effect. During the last couple weeks of WinFly the station was at equilibrium. Everyone knew each other, the dominant attitude was one of casual professionalism, and I got to hang out with penguins. But now I walk into a packed dining room and hardly recognize a face. Short-timers are here, such as the scientists who are only down here for a few weeks at a time, and whenever I see snowmobiles racing across the ice or helicopters disappearing among the inland mountains, I'm always fighting the recognition that there are now people here with jobs dramatically more interesting than my own.

Helping the transistion, I am working a night shift and will probably remain on this shift for the remainder of the season. This has restricted my access to some of the activities on station, but has spared me from much of the daytime crowding. The overall population of the station will average about 1000 people during the summer, but soon about 200 of us will be working on a night shift. For the past weeks the nights have been quiet and activity has been relaxed, and it has been easy to meet many of the other night crew workers, relieving the sterile indifference of annonimity. Working in the power plant has been uneventful and easy.

The station reaches full activity by 9am every morning, and I sometimes hike to a vantage point to watch this outpost come to life. Old ice and young rock surround us. Red parkas filled with yawning workers move across the snow. Planes land as the outside world sends us people, fuel, and materials. We supply the south pole, but use most of these materials ourselves, producing data as well as photos and stories. Raw materials on this continent are abundant, and the challenge of extracting them tears at pioneering hearts. But we are not looking for a fight, and we extract nothing. I stand watching the station awake until I am content, and then I go to bed.




22 Dec 2007

The tilt of the earth's axis has reached a fully reclined position, summer has swept south to McMurdo, and life is easy. Today is the austral summer solstice, and for the past few days the sun has been rotating around us at a nearly constant angle, never dipping or rising, just spinning around us at a lazy glancing angle, while all the shadows pace around in circles. Daytime temperatures were recently staying above 40F and people were walking and working outside in t-shirts. Anyone showing bare skin outside must regularly baste themselves in suntan lotion to avoid frying their skin under the rotiserrie of the infinite daylight, burning raw with UV rays spilling through the ozone hole above.

Activity at McMurdo is at its peak, and the station is fulfilling its role as the continent's premium logistical, scientific, and transport center. We host 20 or so airplane flights a day but our runway on the sea ice immediately adjacent to the station has melted away, the ice too thin to handle any traffic, and all airplane operations have moved to our two more distant fields. Fifteen or so miles out of town, Pegasus Field has reopened and hosts heavy wheeled aircraft such as the C-17 turbofan transports, each C-17 being almost the exact size of Scott's ship HMS Discovery, arriving now three times weekly from New Zealand. Seven miles out of town, Williams Field handles all ski-equiped aircraft such as the LC-130s, the Twin Otters and until recently, the Basler.

The Basler is a rebuilt DC-3 that has been strengthened, lengthened, toughened, and outfitted with modern avionics, materials, and machinery, including a pair of powerful turboprop engines and a set of retractable skis. These modifications are performed by Basler Turbo Conversions LLC of Wisconsin. It was a Basler that conducted the first flights of the austral summer to the South Pole, as it can be operated at a ground temperature of -60F, a slight advantage over the -50F rating of the LC-130, an advantage that allows us to touch down at the South Pole a couple weeks earlier than with LC-130s. The power of the twin turboprops allows the Basler to land and take off in rough snow with little distance, making the Basler a viable transport platform for the deep field camps as well as the Pole. Two days ago however, as our Basler was lifting off from the Mt. Patterson field site far east of McMurdo, the plane lost control, smashed down hard enough to rip the landing gear off, and skidded and spun across the ice to a halt. I originally heard that an entire engine was ripped off the wing, and that the other engine lost its prop, but while the engines and props just got pretty mangeled they stayed in place. There were no injuries and the passengers were evacuated from the crash site, but the plane will never fly again. Images of the wreck are available here and here, although the NSF has been sloppily suppressing information about the crash (the NSF is terrible about disclosing mistakes of any kind, so we operate an extensive rumor network, which the NSF tries to control by suppressing even more information, thus causing even greater rumor proliferation so as to fill the informaiton void) (the Basler story wasn't reported in the US until the Kiwi press found out and published an article for which the NSF refused to provide any comments), so I'm not sure how long those photos will be online.

Rivaling the activity of our fixed-wing aircraft, the station's 5 helicopters (three Bell 212 Twin Hueys, and two Eurocopter A-Stars) seem constantly airborne and regularly fly in the light of the middle of the night. Surface vehicle activity has declined with the thinning of the sea ice, but several weeks ago a team departed McMurdo driving a number of Pisten Bullies and treaded agricultural tractors, following a previously established trail from McMurdo to the South Pole Station. Land traverses between the stations have been conducted for decades, and this year's traverse will maintain the trail, departing McMurdo laden with route markers to replace those that have blown away, and explosives to tame the mountain ice which annually cauterizes the trail cut through the ice in previous years. Transportation infrastructure on this continent is built directly from the elements, and nature grants it little respect.

All the field camps are up and running now, and new camps are being established. Scientists and media crews transit the station, always keen to get to the field or ecstatic to be back. The station population has never dropped below 1000 people since late October, and summer society and mindset prevades everything we do. I remain on nightshifts to avoid the crowds.

The summer season is fun, but has been shit compared to WinFly. The Winter and WInFly seasons are dominated by people intending to escape the outside world, but Summer is dominated by people who, often without realizing it, are doing their earnest best to bring the outside world to Antarctica. Despite the regular connections with the outside world we now enjoy, the ease of local travel in the summer exaggerates the effect of isolation, as a 5 mile trip away from the station is no longer the small gamble with death it was during WinFly, and dependably superb visibility makes the peninsula look a lot smaller. Due to travel restrictions however, there is no increase in the range over which most contractor residents are allowed to travel recreationally. With the onset of summer, the tightly packed layout and accomodations of this station on the edge of the least populated continent on earth became not so much a necessity as a ridiculous irony.

The weather for weeks has been warm enough to enjoy a beer outside and to go running with bare arms, but yesterday we got our first snow and cloud cover in weeks, and it was a beautiful relief from the oppressive regularity of blue skies. The temperature of the air and snow was too high for the snow to stick to the ground, but the thick assault of flakes came down as large wet wads, falling white but smashing transparent against the earth. I wandered into this assault with several friends and a haphazard nonchalance, catching the flakes on our tongues and giving refuge to the flakes on our shoulders.


Latest Entry:


16 May 2008

I never managed to write a final entry while on the ice, but my flight back to the real world was three days late which did at least give me time to post some more photos, the links for which can be found at the top of this page. Also at the top is a link to an Epilogue page, written in May 2008. That link is repeated here.

Check the weather at McMurdo Station!