Rellen went to the South Pole on 1/28/02. She sent several communiques on this trip that I found so impressive that I decided to put them up on a Web page. Since most of us will never make it to the South Pole, here is a secondary experience for you:
From e-mail sent 1/22/02:
A "boomerang" flight is one in which the plane takes off and completes a
portion of its flight before turning around and returning to its place of
departure. The flight between Christchurch and McMurdo Station is 8
hours. If, at the halfway mark of 4 hours, the weather "does not meet
minimal standards" (the military classifies everything!) at McMurdo, the
plane turns around. There is not enough fuel on board to circle and wait
for clearing at the destination. This is terrible because you spend 8
hours on a cargo plane just to finish where you began and then have to
face doing it again the next day. This happened last week to some of my
AMANDA friends and has happened to some people I know more than once.
I've been really lucky and have never experienced this.
I did boomerang twice today without ever leaving the ground. We were
picked up at 5:15am. (Yes I, Rellen Hardtke, got up at 4:30am this
morning. ;-)) We were brought to the Center (the "United States Antarctic
Passenger Terminal") and, upon arrival, told that the flight was cancelled
and to go back to our motels. At 6am, a few seconds before we were
deposited downtown, a radio call came to the shuttle and we were told to
return as the flight was back on. We started procedures at the Center
about 6:30am. At 10:15am (it's still not clear to me why it takes 3+
hours to get us and the plane ready, but it does), we were packed in, seat
belts in place, and taxi-ing to the runway. Looking good! Then the
weather in McMurdo fell below minimum standards and the plane turned
around without taking off. The prediction is that it will worsen today,
so we are free to leave and go back to town. We'll try again at 6am
tomorrow. (Even though I'm tired, this result is a 100x better than real
boomerang flights.) So I have another day of summer here...
As I told someone of you already, a CNN crew is down here filming for a
documentary. They're a bit annoying, but pretty nice and respectful in
general. There is no doubt that the presence of TV cameras fundamentally
alters the people around or in front of the camera. Sure, much of what
politicians do and say is for the cameras. No surprise. But watching CNN
work here is very interesting. I think it's like quantum mechanics.
(Seriously. Stay with me.) Quantum mechanics says that you can not
measure the thingy you're trying to measure without fundamentally altering
the thingy itself and disturbing what the thingy was doing in the first
place. (O.K., maybe that's not verbatim what Heisenberg said, but that's
the gist of it.) Anthropologists had this problem too, right? How do you
study a group of people without fundamentally altering their behaviour
(oops, New Zealand-British spellings are creeping in) by your presence?
It's tough. Likewise, I believe that TV cameras may be fundamentally
changing our world and our history. Not a big surprise to many of you, I
know. But (I'm almost done), one of the CNN cameramen just came here from
Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Who knows who gets killed or not killed, or saved
or not saved, because of the presence of TV cameras there? We know that
the world responds to a crisis when there are video pictures. In
Afghanistan, whose lives have been determined by what terrorists, bombers,
and/or innocents have wanted or not wanted to be seen on TV? (I'm done.)
Apologies for the long email. Any others will be much shorter.
Cheers from the land of indistinguishable vowels and fush'n'chups,
Rellen
From e-mail sent 1/25/02:
Travelling in Antarctica is a business of hurry-up-and-wait. So you learn
to always have a book with you (and to sleep in weird palces). Today, we
had 2 delays, a cancellation, an un-cancellation, a delay, and then a
final cancellation of our flight to South Pole. We'll try again tomorrow
morning at 6:30. Weather and broken planes are responsible for almost all
delays, so I guess that's not much different from the rest of the world.
It is a 30-45 minute drive between McMurdo Station to the runways on the
Ross Ice Shelf. (Check out the bottom of your globe if you have one.) En
route, we had some nice views of Mt. Erebus. There were also about 2 dozen
elephant seals sunning next to an open crack in the ice. They're sort of
boring and smelly, but they seem content enough.
We spent part of the day waiting at a hut on the ice near the runway. Few
of us had bothered to get up even earlier than we had to in order to eat
breakfast, and we were able to grab some food in the hut which includes a
galley for those who work all day at the air field. At one point, an Air
Guard fellow named Gator (but he looked just like Goose in Top Gun)
started making everyone waffles. It was one of my "surreal" moments, where
whatever is happening is absolutely bizarre because it's odd in its own
right, but then surreal for its location. All I good think was, "My god,
some guy named Gator is making waffles for us ON THE ROSS ICE SHELF."
From e-mail sent 1/28/02:
I arrived at the South Pole about 11am Saturday morning (which is far more
than I do on any other morning before 11am!). If you're curious, the South
Pole operates on New Zealand time, which is 18 hours ahead of Ohio, 19
ahead of Wisconsin and 20 ahead of Montana. The way I think of it is
"Madison is 5 hours ahead of South Pole, but on the day before." So 11am
Saturday was 4pm Friday in Madison.
I am very excited because, this year, my quarters are not in the tent-like
military-issue "Jamesways", but rather in the "hypertats" which are metal
buildings. The big bonus is that there is a plywood hallway between the
4'x7' rooms and the bathroom! That means you don't have to put on your
ECW gear (and take it off and put it back on) to use the restroom. This
is great. (All living quarters are heated to cool, but livable
temperatures. I generally sleep in long underwear, socks and sometimes a
hat.) After traveling on cargo planes and residing at the South Pole for a
few days, life is really reduced to the basics. It's all about the warmth
of your clothes and shelter, drinking enough water, how well you can
extract oxygen from the very thin air, and how accessible a restroom is.
The temperature on the day I arrived was -27F with a windchill of -49F.
The temperature right now is -35F with a windchill of -53F. The
temperature will continue to drop gradually now as we head towards winter.
The warmest temperature ever recorded at SP was +8F in December of 1978.
The coldest temperature ever recorded here was -117F in June of 1982 (not
including wind chill).
I've met a remarkable number of people here who will be spending their
third, fourth and fifth winters at Pole or McMurdo. The saying goes, "The
first time you winter for the adventure, the second time for the money,
and the third time because you don't fit in any where else." I believe
there is some truth to that. A fairly large fraction of folks here do not
have attachments in the outside world and find a great deal of acceptance
and comraderie here. One woman (attractive and articulate) said that she
had zero attachments other than her cat and if she could have her cat with
her, she would never come off the ice. That doesn't hold true for
everyone of course. Some people winter over with their significant
others. Others decide to spend a year away from their families. I find
folks here to be very friendly and otherwise well-adjusted. If they stand
out in any other way, it is that they tend to be very outdoors-oriented
people. They often spend their off-ice time in the mountains, Alaska,
camping, hiking, or in some exotic corner of the world.
My good friend Katherine is wintering over this year for our AMANDA
project. A few minutes ago, she told me that she felt sorry for how
isolated a friend of ours is now that he is working in Australia. I find
that funny given her residence!
From e-mail sent 2/9/02:
Last night was the first really bad cold we had. The wind was strong and
the wind chill approached -70F. It may sound strange, but there's a huge
difference between -55F and -70F. When I walked to MAPO yesterday
afternoon, the wind was still, it felt balmy (in my 4 layers) and I didn't
have to cover my entire face. When I left MAPO last night, the flags were
stiff in the wind, the wind found ways through our ECW gear, and the walk
seemed entirely too long. Some of the vehicles here are put away for good
when the temperature (sans windchill) reaches -40F and that happened
Monday. Today is a little worse with the latest windchill at -78F. Other
than getting cold, the weather has been very good. It has been sunny and
clear 24/7 since I arrived a couple weeks ago.
Some people have been brave enough to ask what I'm doing here...
Each of the 600+ detectors we have frozen deep into the ice is connected
to electronics at the surface by 1-2 miles of optical fiber cable. Since
neutrinos travel at nearly the speed of light, we need to know exactly
when each of the detectors saw the blue Cherenkov light from the speeding
particle. "Exactly" means on the scale of nanoseconds (10^-9 seconds).
There's not a clock in each sphere, so the signal has to travel to the
surface before it gets a time stamp from a GPS clock. But, what matters
to us is when the sphere was hit, not when the signal got to the surface.
So I shoot a powerful laser down each fiber and see how long it takes for
the signal to come back. Then we can subtract that duration from the
surface time stamp and know exactly when the particle passed each
detector. And that means we can reconstruct the path of the particle and
figure out where it came from in the sky.
From e-mail sent 2/14/02:
The temperature continued to drop at Pole this week. The wind chill broke
-70F, then -80F. Fingers or a nose left exposed hurt within seconds. I
am amazed at the people who spend all winter at Pole when the wind chill
is routinely below -100F. In my cushy life, "survival" is not a
consideration, unless you're crossing University Ave during class breaks.
I just keep returning to the same thought, that Pole is bizarre. I noticed
that everyone had dropped the "negative" or "minus" when discussing the
temperature. The "forties" and "fifties" meant something very different
at Pole than they do in Wisconsin.
There was a "straight-through" flight scheduled for Feb. 13 that I got a
seat on. A straight-through flight means that a cargo plane takes you
from Pole to MacTown and, without having to spend the night in McMurdo, a
plane is ready at the airfield in McTown to take you to Chch. It means a
lot of flying in one day, but you're more likely to make it to Chch
quickly. Sometimes trying to get off the ice with the several hundred
people leaving from McMurdo can mean delays of a few days.
For the first time in my stay, the weather was poor at Pole the morning of
my departure. The sky was overcast and the wind was blowing snow across
the polar plateau like a regular Antarctic postcard. The wind chill was
-91F. Luckily, the skies were clear enough for the LC130 Herc to land and
whisk us away.
All 3 of my Pole trips have been at the end of the summer season. The
scene has been the same each time. Many of the winter-overs come to the
flight deck (a particular patch of snow and ice) to say good-bye to their
summer friends who are leaving. There are lots of hugs and good wishes
exchanged. With everyone in their puffy ECW gear, they looked like overly
affectionate sumo wrestlers to me. No one can tell who you are as
everyone is in the same ECW gear (red parkas or Carrharts), so people mill
about squinting at your name tag to see if you're someone they will miss
and then you are subsequently acknowledged and grasped.
Shortly after takeoff from Pole, we were informed that there would be no
plane to meet us on the runway in McMurdo, so we would have to spend the
night after all. Oh well, everyone thought. That was about par for travel
in Antarctica.
It was actually snowing in McMurdo when we arrived, an event rarely
observed at Pole. Pole, being a desert, receives less than 8 inches of
snow in an entire year. The 2-mile thick ice sheet has accumulated over
100,000 years.
There were more than 100 seals hanging out near Scott Base, New Zealand's
science station, a mile down the road from McMurdo and closer to the Ross
Ice Shelf. The seals travel miles under the ice between the open crack
they were lounging beside and the open water where they can again come up
for air. Someone remarked that it was amazing that anything could get that
large having to fend for itself in the seemingly barren Antarctic. All I
can say is there must be tons and tons of fish being eaten under the ice
by seals. Some researchers study the the killer whales (orcas) of the
Antarctic, another huge mammal that flourishes near the coast. This year,
scientists confirmed that there are 3, not 2, sub-species of orcas. They
plan to study the new, slightly smaller, ones more next year.
After taking the giant "Ivan the Terror-Bus" from the airfield to McMurdo,
I found a lounge to watch a little Olympics on TV. (Good thing I made it
out in time to hear about the skating scandal.) I didn't miss TV at Pole,
but I did miss the radio.
About 5:30pm, a fellow from my flight came to tell me that we had a lift
to Chch after all and that we were to report in 45 mintues for transport.
If he hadn't seen me earlier, or been kind enough to come back and tell
me, I would have missed my chance to make it to NZ that day. After
waiting on the ice shelf for a few hours, we took off about 10pm. It got
darker as we flew north, into the latitudes that still went through light
and dark cycles daily. At one point, about 3am, a fellow amandroid
motioned me to one of the little round windows in the side of the plane.
The amazing, huge blue-green curtain of the aurora australis was hanging
over the Orion constellation. Last year, Todd and I were riding with my
folks north of Green Bay and saw a spectaular display of the northern
lights. I had rued the fact that I would never see the southern lights as
I would never be at Pole during the winter. (I rued the prior, not the
latter.) It was a wonderful bonus to an already neat trip. Luckily for us
in the plane, the magnetic pole is several hundred miles from the
geographic pole, so the lights were to our left instead of directly behind
us. It was also interesting to me because, being in the southern
hemisphere, Orion was "upside-down" in the background.
From e-mail sent 2/16/02:
We arrived in Chch about 5am Valentine's Day. The first thing you notice
upon returning to New Zealand is the water vapor in the air. I don't mean
the sticky, strength-sapping humidity of August in the Midwest. I mean
air that feels good on your skin, air you notice walking through. At Pole,
the cold dry air makes your throat and lungs raw. The humidity at Pole is
0.03%. (The average humidity in Wisconsin in February is 53%.)
The other thing you immediately notice in Chch is that your sense of smell
has returned. Or more accurately, that you've returned to a place with
something to smell. There are very few scents at the South Pole. There
is no vegetation, no earth, no animals. Even the smell of food in the
galley is damped by the lack of water molecules in the air to carry it.
The overarching smell at Pole is JP8 fuel, the lifeblood of the station. I
felt guilty but it was important to not sit next to a "fuelie" during
dinner. Fuelies are the men and women who handle the unloading of the
dozens and dozens of tankers that bring the liquid JP8 to Pole. Water
conservation at Pole is elemental because so much energy (JP8) is required
to melt water from the surrounding ice. But, understandably, the fuelies
are permitted a second load of wash each week, as opposed to the normal
ration of one load. Water conservation accounts for the other smell
available at Pole, that of unflushed toilets.
So New Zealand smelled wonderful, even at 5am after 7 hours on a cargo
plane. (It's known as the Garden City, and rightly so as there are public
and private gardens everywhere.) I had been working the night shift at
Pole, so I spent much of the flight reading a good book (Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver, a favorite author of mine). We were also lucky to
have only 23 passengers on our plane. The next day's flight had 141. So
we had considerably more room than other end-of-season flights, and we
appreciated it.
The folks who work here for the U.S. Antarctic Program are wonderful,
friendly Kiwis. They were all ready for our plane, even at 5am. They
bussed us to the terminal where we cleared New Zealand customs, listening
to Shania Twain sing from the speakers in the empty airport. (Yes, you
have to go through customs and have you passport checked when coming off
the ice.) Our bags were then bussed to the CDC (Clothing Distribution
Center), a few hundred yards from the terminal. It was warm and
wonderfully humid so I decided to walk there. It was a mistake, as I was
still wearing most of my ECW gear that was required on the plane. Wind
pants, long underwear, wool socks and heavy winter boots made for an
uncomfortably hot walk. I'm sure I looked awfully funny to passing cars.
We all made it to the CDC and dumped out our stuff. We returned our ECW
gear item by item as they were checked off the list. (No CNN reporters
this time.) The staff had our stored bags (anything not taken to Pole,
like summer clothes and extra luggage) ready for us so that we could
re-pack our personal items and head to our hotels. The weird thing was
that we were checking in at 6am. Several people got turned away until the
appropriate check-in time of 2pm, but I pointed out that our reservations
had been for the night before and that we were just "late" in arriving for
the night. They looked it up and found out that I was right, so
thankfully I didn't have to lug all my stuff around Chch for 8 hours.
I think about Kath and how truly excited she is to be wintering over. I
don't get it. I respect it. But I don't get it. There are people and
activities I miss terribly after just a month; I couldn't imagine leaving
it all behind for a year. I told her to be safe and have fun. She
promised to do both.
This afternoon I'm off to Australia for a couple days and then I'll be
back in Madison on Feb. 20. Thanks for sharing in my little trip!
From e-mail sent 2/6/02:
Since the work I'm doing at Pole probably isn't that exciting to you, I
thought you might find these things interesting instead...
Altitude: 9,355 feet
Effective altitude: 11,600 feet
Reason for the difference: The atmosphere is thinner at the poles of the
earth.
What does a grocery list look like for a South Pole winter? Among many
other things:
13,000 lbs beef
10,000 lbs chicken
575 lbs peanut butter
500 lbs chocolate chips
10,000 tortillas
250 gallons ice cream
Oxygen in the air: 60% of normal sea level concentrations
Temperature at which water boils: 200F
Average weight of clothes and equipment worn by S.P. workers: 35 pounds
Minimum daily calories needed by South Pole construction workers: 5,000
Distance between New Zealand and South Pole: 3,000 miles (45 degrees of
latitude)
Year South Pole was first reached: 1911, by Roald Amundsen (Norwegian)
Percent of Antarctica not covered in snow and ice: 2%
Distance the polar ice sheet moves each year: 10 yards (towards South
America)
Number of people the current station was built to accomodate: 18
Number of people wintering over at Pole this year: 57
Number of people at Pole on a given summer day: 200
Current temp -38F
Current windchill -68F
From e-mail sent 2/8/02:
In addition to SP numbers, I thought you might like to know some SP
vocabulary, `cause people here talk a little funny...
the ice: Antarctica (usage: How long have you been on the ice?)
skua: (pronounced skoo-ah) to search other people's throw-aways for things
that may be of value to you, named after the Antarctic seagull called a
skua. There are large boxes around the station marked 'skua' that people
toss potentially re-usable things into. (usage: If you're looking for
clothes for the `70s party on Saturday night, check the skua box.)
freshies: fresh fruits and vegetables, a rare delicacy on the ice.
Freshies and alcohol are the only things on station that are locked up.
(usage: We haven't had a freshie flight in over a month.)
midrats: contraction of 'midnight rations', the fourth meal of the day,
served in the middle of the night for people working the night shift,
holdover terminology from the days when the South Pole was a military
station
amandroid: anyone working on AMANDA
polie: some one who has spent a lot of time on the ice at the South Pole
station
beaker: scientist, distinguished by their bright red parkas (as opposed to
polies, who regularly wear Carhartts)
toast: the slowed mental state one attains at South Pole due to so little
oxygen in the air (usage: By July, the polies are toast.)
Jamesways: the Korean War era tents that most summer visitors stay in
JP8: the aviation fuel that powers everything here, from snow vehicles to
heating and electricity
MAPO: (pronounced may-poh) the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory, a blue
building on stilts where AMANDA electronics are housed and many amandroids
work, about 0.7 miles from the dome (usage: She's in MAPO and won't be
back til midrats.)
the dome: the geodesic dome that houses the main functions of the station
like the galley, communications, and computers
slushies: your favorite alcohol mixed with pure, ancient snow from the
clean air sector, traditionally consumed on Friday evenings (usage: Are
you going to slushies tonight?)
Clean Air Sector: area upwind of station where atmospheric research is
conducted. The air here has not been touched by humans since it left
Argentina. Visitors are prohibited from entering this area, as a single
person exhaling can be picked up on their instruments.
MacTown: McMurdo Station, the U.S. station on the Ross Ice Shelf and the
stop between New Zealand and the South Pole
Chch: (pronounced cheech) Christchurch, New Zealand. Your point of exit
and entry to the real world when coming and leaving the ice.
Return to Bruce Broker's introductory page.