Like No Other

My new favorite thing in the whole universe is the Christmas tree at the South Pole. The second I saw it I fell in love with it:




As it's been explained to me, the tree started a few years back when the night shift iron workers built it out of scraps and discarded metal parts. Each year since, members of the iron crew have added their own ornaments and adornments, resulting in a monstrous sculptural creation with more personality and character than any other Christmas tree I have ever seen. The ornaments are made from nuts and bolts, broken tools, saw blades, gears, and any sort of scrap that can be dug out of the recycling bins in the shops around the station. Limbs of the tree fall off and it requires repairs and adjustements every season.

Working on night shift often means missing most of the main social events of the holiday season. But one perk was that tonight I was able to go outside and watch this year's contributions to the ironworker tree. Below is a picture of iron crew member Kate Allen and boss Erik Nichols, while Kate was cutting her ornament. Below that is a picture of the piece after it had fallen and begun to melt itself into the ice.





Erik's ornament was an enormous snowflake made of nuts. The picture below that is a shot of Josh Miller attaching his own contributions.





I've been working so much and I'm so far away from the regular holiday traditions back home that I've barely been aware of the season. But watching the night shift iron crew decorating their spectacular and bizarre holiday tree put me in the Christmas spirit. I love the creativity here and I feel so fortunate to be able to experience a little of it. Happy holidays to everyone back home!

What Passes for Weather

We're guaranteed to have a white Christmas (of sorts) here at the South Pole. But it won't snow. It is normally too cold here for any form of precipitation. The snow on the ground here is different from the December snows back home. It squeaks when you step in it, and the particles in the air are not snowflakes but tiny, diamond-like fragments of solid ice swept up by the wind. We do get days when the wind whips enough ice into the air that you can see no more than ten feet in front of you. On these "white out" days, the array of flags peppering the landscape begins to make a lot of practical sense, marking the paths back to the station. The wind causes massive snow drifts, and after a large wind storm, the flags above the snow may be the only way to know where the carefully groomed roads once were.

Every few minutes, television screens in the galley display the current weather. This consists of the temperature, the wind chill, the wind speed and direction, and the physiological altitude (mainly a function of the air pressure). Wind determines the "weather" here. Lately, it has been warm and the winds have been mild, but irregular. Last night while I was working, it seemed that every time I looked out the window the landscape had completely changed character. One moment it was blue and sunny, the next it was grey and the sky was threatening to consume the horizon and merge with the ice below. In the space of an hour the view through the science lab window changed colors and moods several times.





Earlier in this blog I posted a picture of some sand-dusted footprints that remained in sculptural relief after a wind-storm at McMurdo. The same thing happens here at pole when the winds have been very high. With each boot-step, the snow is compressed. The wind eats away the loose powder around and (sometimes even under) the footprints before they begin to crumble away themselves. A while ago I took the photograph below after a day of high winds and cold temperatures. You can see the tracks from someone making the trip out to the telescope. Enough ice was in the air that day to create a sun-dog, a glowing ring around the sun that is one of the real treats of being here.



Often there is no perceptible change in the weather for days on end, but everyone still keeps an eye on the screens in the galley that show up-to-the-minute stats. If it's not just out of habit, it is often because the weather page is accompanied by personal photographs submitted by polies. Each weather page shows a new photograph. These are frequently funny pictures from recent parties, or beautiful shots of sundogs. But one very thoughtful person recently submitted a picture that he had of one of my cats, knowing how much I have been missing them. It appeared on the screens during midrats (night shift's lunch) today, and it made my day.

Things I miss

Life is actually pretty comfortable in the South Pole Station - good food, decent wine, and friendly conversation are easy to come by. Comfortable as it is, there are some things I still find myself craving. Good olive oil, hot baths, the sound of the Green Line train going by my apartment in the night. I really miss my cats, more than just about anything else from my ordinary life. They're staying with my parents and having a fine time watching squirrels out the windows, but I hope they don't forget me too much while I'm gone.

Another thing I really miss is my pottery classes. Since last spring, I've been taking wheel throwing classes at Terra Incognito Studio in Oak Park. It's a great place to spend time on weekends and evenings, socializing and working on pottery projects. I'm finding that there's a huge hole in my day to day life without that, and I will be itching to get my hands back into the clay when I get back in February.

When I was packing to come down here, one of the few personal items I brought with me was a coffee cup made by my pottery teacher Conner McKissack. There is something really comforting about a handmade object of any kind in this place. I also figured he'd get a kick out of knowing one of his cups made it all the way to the bottom of the earth. This fall our class was quite intrigued by my upcoming trip, and they even made me pull out my laptop in the studio to give a slideshow from last time I was down here. So, for Conner and the rest of the Terra Incognito crowd, I photographed the coffee mug in a place of honor - on top of the marker for the Geographic South Pole. Cheers to everyone back in the studio!

My Wild Ride

For the last month, one of the major projects on the telescope has been measuring the surface of the 10-meter reflector and adjusting it carefully to create a very accurate surface. This entire project has largely been the job of Chicago postdoc Jeff McMahon, who finally left to go home for the holidays after a long and intense effort to perfect our telescope dish. While my work has not overlapped much with what Jeff has been up to, once in a while I am useful for odd tasks. About a week ago, Jeff realized that he needed a series of big black stickers removed from the surface of the telescope reflector. These were placed there as "targets" for special photographic measurements last season, that helped us to create an accurate surface for the first observations. They weren't a big problem for our regular observations, so we just left them there rather than risk someone walking around on the dish to remove them.

The surface of the reflector itself is made up of many individual aluminum panels that are set by hand (basically by adjusting about a thousand individual screws) so that the total surface has a shape that is perfect to within the thickness of a human hair. It is really an impressive thing! It does not necessarily look as perfect and beautiful to the human eye as it does to the microwaves it is designed to reflect, so you have to use your imagination a little when you look at the pictures. The reflector has lots of marks from stickers and tape that we have used for various iterations on measuring and adjusting the surface. Jeff's measurements had reached a level of accuracy such that the largest of these stickers simply had to go. As the lightest member of the team, it made some sense for me to perform this slightly unnerving operation of crawling around the dish to peel them all off.

The task was actually a lot more difficult than I expected. I tried to dress somewhat lightly so that I wouldn't be bogged down and could move around carefully and comfortably. But consequently, I was freezing cold. We got me up into the dish with the telescope resting on its back (I won't describe how but again, use your imagination). I had to crawl around on two foam pads, carefully distributing my weight across as many panels as possible each time I moved. Inside, the surface of the mirror is actually quite steep and any kind of motion required a lot of care to avoid sliding, falling, or dropping gloves or tools into the center. As I moved around the dish I had to pry off each sticker and remove all of the adhesives and tape used to fix it in place. There was no way to do this effectively with gloves or my glasses, which fogged up uselessly, so it was surprisingly difficult for such a simple task. The whole operation took a couple of hours and I was really feeling the cold by the end of that. But, it was definitely a unique experience I will never forget - how many people get to climb around inside a gigantic telescope, at the South Pole no less? I was also relieved to find out later that my telescope traverse did not alter the overall shape of the dish to within the accuracy of Jeff's measurements. Phew!

Jeff took some pictures while he was standing outside, making sure that everything was going OK. That's me waving. All that plywood you can see on the telescope boom was also part of Jeff's project to measure the dish more accurately, and now that his instruments are all packed up we will put the normal roof back on.

Dirt and decay

The South Pole is one of the cleanest places I have ever been. Outside, the environment is absolutely pristine and essentially unchanging. There is no soil, no solid ground, no vegetation or animal life for many miles. There is no weather, except the wind blowing snow across the vast ice plateau. There is nothing for the wind to erode but the layers of ice and snow. There is nothing that disintegrates or decays or accumulates in the treads of your boots as you walk around outside. Any dirt or dust we encounter is due to our activities here and is made from the materials we import and use on the station.

The new station itself is kept exceptionally clean, so even the imported dust and grime is kept to a minimum. Everyone on station takes turns cleaning the bathrooms and common rooms, and a janitorial staff works around the clock to keep everything looking new.

So, it's with some irony that I will also cite the South Pole as one of the dirtiest places I have been. Rather, I should rephrase that - it is the place where I am regularly dirtiest. All of our water on station comes from melting ice, and this requires a huge amount of energy. Consequently, there are stringent restrictions on water use. Yes, we have running water and modern comforts in the South Pole Station, but we are allowed to take no more than two two-minute showers per week. After a while, you get used to it, and your regular showers back home seems like an extravagant indulgence. But even so, there is something funny about the contrast between the scruffy, sweaty, unwashed population and our spotless station and pristine environs.

Because everything in the station is so new and clean, there is also something endearing about any object that has been here long enough to show wear and tear, decay and change. When I am not working out at the Dark Sector Laboratory next to the telescope, I set up my laptop in the science lab in the main station. Like every other portion of the station, this lab is spotless and new. It was with some perverse pride that I claimed for myself one of the oldest most pathetic chairs on station as my seat for daily work when I first got here. These supposedly were the chairs from the galley in the old dome, and have seen years of constant use.



A week ago, a shipment of brand new chairs came in and we replaced all of the old chairs we had been using in the science lab. I helped to carry the old chairs out and place them in the 'non-recyclable' garbage bin out behind the station. It's silly to develop affection for something so nasty and downright uncomfortable, but I was a little sorry to see the chair go. However, if there is one other fact of the South Pole it's that anything useful gets reused until it completely falls apart. I have already spotted those chairs appearing in common spaces and personal spaces around the station, looking just as out of place in most of those as they did in our high-tech shining lab. Out of place, in a way, like all of our messy human activities in this stark white place.

Unbreakable Beaker

The entire South Pole Station exists solely to support science that can only be done in this unique location. The support is phenomenal, from the logistics and infrastructure support for building major projects to the genuinely delicious meals that sustain us all. The vast majority of the people who come to the pole work to keep this support going, maintaining demanding 60 hour work weeks on shifts that operate around the clock. Many of the crews spend their time doing vigorous physical labor in temperatures below -40F. The scientists are a small minority, who come to the pole typically for short periods of time, and often never fully integrate into the daily routine of the greater station community. While the whole South Pole culture is welcoming and accomodating to diverse (and eccentric) personalities, the scientists still stand out. There is a name for us - "beakers". It can be used affectionately, but is also appropriately applied when you see someone like myself wandering through the galley in a daze, having a visibly hard time avoiding collisions with the people around me. Everyone at the station works hard, but there is something about the relentless and unpredictable schedules of doing scientific work in the field that creates absentminded zombies from otherwise normal human beings.

I've been in that state quite a bit the last three weeks. The calibration measurements that I came here to do needed to be completed on a tight schedule, and were governed by the tempermental moods of the telescope receiver. To perform the measurements, we had to repeatedly cool the receiver down to a quarter of a degree above absolute zero, in order to operate our detectors. Graduate student Martin Lueker from Berkeley was responsible for tending the sensitive refrigeration technology that does this, and he had no easy time of it. We have been operating in less than ideal conditions, keeping the receiver down in our control room tilted at an angle that makes cooling more difficult. The process of cooling could take as many as 17 hours, at which point Martin and I would have to rush out and try to quickly perform measurements in the few hours that things stayed cold, no matter what time of day or night. At the worst, we were getting time windows of only two or three hours to perform measurements, and these could come at any time of day or night. The task of taking measurements was under intense time pressure and required extreme focus, since even a few minutes could mean the difference between getting the data we needed and having to wait until the next time we were cold.

In the last two weeks, I have worked almost continuously, and certainly every waking moment. When we haven't been able to perform measurements, I have scrambled to understand the data from the last set and to plan to make our limited time windows as efficient as possible. Over the last week or so I've switched from day to night shift almost every other day. I counted three days that I worked 20 hour shifts. One of these 20 hour shifts ended just hours before the formal celebration of Thanksgiving, which is celebrated on a Saturday here. I slept for a few hours, then woke up and put on a dress and nice shoes and wandered in to a spectacular candle-lit dinner that I was in no state to appreciate. In the midst of the relaxed and celebratory crowd, I felt out of place and longed for a chance to sleep and feel normal again.

Once I knew the FTS instrument worked well, I knew we would obtain the data we needed eventually. But I wasn't expecting it to be quite such an endurance test. As of a couple of days ago, we were still missing some critical data that we needed to call the FTS run complete. One morning, feeling discouraged, I was slumped over some coffee in the galley and I noticed a french press coffee maker that had been forgotten at the table. It was a plastic and new and had a sticker on it proudly proclaiming: 'Unbreakable Beaker'.

In an uncharacteristic act of desperation, I stole the sticker.

Unbreakable Beaker. It seemed a message meant just for me at that moment, and I took it and affixed it to the bib of my Carhartts on a strip of duct tape. All through the day, I reminded myself to be Unbreakable, and as silly as it was, it really helped! (I can't promise, as the sticker says, that I am actually dishwasher safe though). I think I will keep it for the rest of the season as a reminder to maintain my tenacity and also my sense of humor.

Tonight we finally finished the FTS run. I still have a lot of work to do analyzing the data, and plenty of other tasks for the season. But this marks a big accomplishment and I am relieved that it was a success - we got enough data to interpret the optical response of the receiver during last season. On my last trip back from the telescope tonight, Ken Aird snapped a picture for me, and you can see the little red message that got me through, taped to my bib.