The bright light of the Antarctic sun forced me to pull my goggles off my forehead and over my eyes. The main cabin of the C-17 had been fairly dim, and now the sun gleamed white off the stark Ross Ice Sheet upon which we had landed. The trip from Christchurch was relatively uneventful, though I did take a tour around the plane including a few minutes up in the cockpit as we crossed the boundary from ocean to ice-covered land. The military plane was exceptionally loud, so in addition to the ECW we had to wear, we also had earplugs for the entire flight.
All the passengers were greeted at McMurdo by large transport vehicles which took us up to the Swiss Chalet, in which we received our introduction briefing and got our housing assignments. Building 166, room 207, along with some of the other IceCube drillers and deployers that were on my flight - Anders, Nick, Tim, and Tom. We went to grab our luggage, with a brief stop at Medical to pick up our altitude sickness medicine for when we redeployed to the South Pole (at high altitude).
A view of McMurdo Station, looking up the hill towards a dome that houses some NASA research, or so I was led to believe.
The medical facility is where you go for all your aches, pains, flus, altitude sickness, frostbite, broken bones, and maiming injuries.
Building 166, it so happens, is dubbed the "Hotel California" - seemingly perfect for my west coast origin! But room 207 in the HoCal is known as the Bunkhouse, or Man Camp - 28 beds packed into a single long-ish room, with about 18" of clearance to pass between. I don't think there's a comparable bunkhouse for women. Due to various work shifts, it was guaranteed that someone would be trying to sleep in here at all hours; and also guaranteed were people coming and going at all hours, trying to stealth their way through the too-cramped passageway wearing far too much clothing. We each claimed a bunk that appeared abandoned, dumped our stuff, and headed off to the laundry room for linens.
McMurdo is not what you'd call a pretty place (no offense, MacTown!) It has the feel of a mining town, sans vegetation; just industrial-looking buildings surrounded by either white ice and snow or black volcanic dirt, rock, and frozen mud. In my brief layover, I didn't get to see much of it, partly due to the blustery winds and snow that made it difficult to walk around town. A few places of interest:
Building 155 is the heart of town, housing the cafeteria, store, and computer lab among other things. The meals here were not bad, especially considering how difficult it is to get fresh foods down here!
Gallagher's is a bar on base that often hosts live music; unfortunately I did not get to check it out because instead I went to...
The BFC (many acronyms, but really stands for the Berg Field Center, which provides supplies and equipment for field camp expeditions) hosted a random party on Friday night, including a stage with several quite talented bands. There was a box of costumes in the back, so people were wearing crazy wigs, hats, and outfits. I never did find out what the party was celebrating, though it was mentioned that one of the BFC crew (happens to be all women, thus the acronym also stands for "Building Full of Chicks") was having a birthday.
The Coffee House is a dark, low-slung building in which people can sit and play card games, enjoy tasty coffee beverages (and free hot cocoa!) along with an assortment of wines from all over, mostly Australia and New Zealand for obvious reasons. It is disconcerting to sit in a dark coffee house playing cards until 10 pm and then step outside into full daylight.
Because all the waste (and we mean ALL the waste) must be transported off the continent, recycling is taken very seriously here on Antarctica.
On Sunday afternoons the Crary Science and Engineering Center hosts a tour of the building, so I showed up to get an overview of the interesting scientific investigations taking place all over the frozen continent:
Volcanoes! McMurdo Station is on Ross Island, built up over centuries by the actions of Mt. Erebus, an extremely active composite volcano. Its eruption pattern currently is frequent small eruptions of very hot, low-viscosity lava contained in an open lava cauldron about 300 feet across, at the bottom of a 1000-foot-deep crater. These frequent small eruptions ensure that it won't blow up and destroy the whole base any time soon. Scientists have planted cameras on the rim, allowing them to monitor its activity. An even cooler way of studying Erebus is to set off explosive charges which create longitudinal pressure waves in the rock; these waves bounce off changes in density of rock, allowing them to map out the shape of the magma chamber that supplies the volcano. Now that is awesome science, exploding dynamite to study active volcanoes!
Isostatic rebound! Antarctica has a sheet of ice across the entire continent, at places 3 to 4 kilometers thick. This huge mass of ice weighs down the underlying crust, pressing it down into the mantle. However, as the ice thickness decreases, the land underneath springs back up, and scientists can measure this uplift using GPS sensors that can be precise to a fraction of a millimeter! If global warming causes the ice sheet to decrease, this "rebound" of the crust will compound any effects of ocean level rising.
Microbes! There are several experiments investigating Antarctic microbes, primarily looking at how minor changes in the temperature can have huge effects on the sensitive Antarctic ecosystems. In some of these experiments, scientists are looking at how microbes can survive in such harsh, cold, dry climates; this might give us insight into what life could look like on Mars or even the Moon (consider that scientists recently proved that there is water on the moon!).
Sea life! Despite temperatures of 28F (-2C), sea life is abundant under the ice sheets of Antarctica. We got to touch critters in an Antarctic touch tank, including sea spiders (tiny, spindly crabs), giant isopods (think of a roly poly bug, except bigger and swims!), scallops, sea anemones, etc. The plankton that survives under the ice feeds these creatures, which feed fish, creating an enormous ecosystem that tops out with "charismatic megafauna" such as penguins, seals, and whales.
Sea spiders are kind of like crabs, again this species lives in the freezing waters under the Antarctic ice shelves.
Isopods are the same family as roly-polys, but these Giant Antarctic Isopods live in the freezing waters off Antarctica.
These lava bombs are tossed out casually by Mt. Erebus during one of its flashy, splashy eruptions. It is very light, kind of like pumice or scoria.