Lost

The other day, we received a box from the South Pole some 850 nautical miles south of here.  This in itself was quite normal.  As the main resupply and transit center for the South Pole station, we receive loads of boxes for and from the Pole, but this one was different; it contained a dead bird. 

The bird was identified as a snow petrel; one of only two types of birds we see on this side of the continent - and only spotted very rarely.


Snow Petrel


It is extremely unusual for birds to fly as far south as the South Pole as they mainly feed on krill, which is only found in open water.  Needless to say, there isn't any open water between here and the Pole so one doesn't usually see birds beyond the Trans-Antarctic Mountain range that separates the coastal region of Antarctica from the polar plateau on which the South Pole sits.

For some reason, this bird (not the one in the photo - that one is definitely alive) made its way over more than 800 miles of snow, ice and mountains to arrive at the South Pole and die.  I wonder what had malfunctioned in its brain or what it thought it would find further south. Perhaps it was programmed like me - too stubborn to turn back once it made the decision to fly south?

The Life of an Emperor

The Life Cycle of an Emperor Penguin

I've received lots of questions about the emperor penguins so here is some information about them and what they are doing on the runway road.

The life cycle diagram above is helpful in understanding what emperors do on an annual basis. The ones pictured in the previous blog are about 30 to 40 miles away from the open water and have wandered to this spot in order to molt. This stage isn't depicted in the diagram but occurs some time in late January/February.

During molting, emperors develop a completely new set of feathers, which push out the old feathers. The new feathers grow to one-third their length before the old feathers are pushed out in order to keep the critters from having no insulation. Emperors have the most feathers per square inch of any bird (up to 100) which gives them superb insulation. During the molting process, the penguins cannot be in the water so they find a spot somewhere safe on land and do not eat during the 34 day process. The only nourishment that the emperors get during this time is a small amount of water extracting from the snow that they eat.

To give you sense of size, these emperors are the largest variety of penguin. They can be as tall as 3.7 feet (1.1 meters) and weigh between 60 and 90 pounds (27 - 41 kilograms).

Once the emperors have a complete set of new feathers, they will waddle slowly back to the ice edge and feed in the ocean until April, when the cycle begins anew.

Since they are so irresistible, here are some close-ups taken by Michiel on Saturday night.

      

University of Antarctica

My desk is in the same building as the Post Office.  Any "strange" mail that is received there is passed on to my boss.  Usually, this mail is sent by philatelists hoping to get a cancellation on an envelope for their collections.   Last month; however,  the post office received an interesting looking envelope addressed from Nigeria.  My boss opened the earthy-smelling envelope and pulled out four hand-written applications to the University of Antarctica with passport-sized photographs of the applicants attached.

Now we ALL know that there is no University here in Antarctica, so we had to Google it.  What we discovered surprised all of us.  Someone has gone to enormous lengths to design and publish a VERY detailed and complete faux website for a University that doesn't exist and used our military post office address as the Admissions office address.  It's an ironic twist of fate that Nigerians ended up being the victims of an internet scam.

We used all of the resources at our disposal to discover the identity of the masterful genius behind this farce, but we have only identified who the domain is registered to (a guy who shares a last name with a baker on station who is revealing nothing) and have also found indications that someone in Poland may be involved, as well.

Sadly, the University is way more exciting, enticing, green and interesting than our real lives but we can dream of eating the delicacies served at the campus restaurant, taking classes on the aboriginal people of Antarctica, and strolling in the Botanical Gardens.

Enjoy!  University of Antarctica (UAnt) website

You might be interested to note that one of the Nigerian applicants to the program is interested in studying infant mortality.  I guess we should work on having more (or any) babies.

Restoring Sanity in Antarctica

I love the Daily Show and Jon Stewart and felt really disappointed that I wasn't in the United States to participate in the Rally to Restore Sanity that took place on October 30 on the Mall in Washington, D.C.  Apparently, there were others here in McMurdo who were similarly disappointed.  They joined me for our own satellite rally.  Ours was scrubbed of any political messages, mentions of the company we are employed by or any images that included buildings, clothing or anything issued by the National Science Foundation or could be construed as the NSF supporting our cause or point-of-view.

Our images were posted to the Rally website and even became favorites on the website "Reddit" but the staffs of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report never responded to the photos I emailed them.  These two were the best photos we took.  (Special thanks to Christine Powell and Holly Troy!)

Where In the World Are We?

Yes, it has been a long time since the last blog posting .  We've been here at McMurdo Station in Antarctica since August (Michiel) and October (me).  It's been a particularly difficult and overwhelmingly busy season for me which has precluded me from wanting to do anything remotely computer related during my precious off-time.  We are in the final stretch, though, and will be leaving the ice on February 19 for much warmer climes. 

To ease me back into blogging, here are some photos taken last night on a recreation department sponsored road trip out towards the runway to see some emperor penguins.  The penguins seem to like the little snow berm along the road and have decided to hang out here while they go through their annual molting process.  You can see that one of them is much further along in the process than the others (and I'm not referring to the photo of me!)