Thanksgiving Morning

Thanksgiving morning in McMurdo always falls on a Saturday.  We don't get the real Thanksgiving Day holiday, but the closest Saturday and Sunday are days off and we celebrate Thanksgiving with our annual 5K running race at 10:00 AM.  The Turkey Trot almost always brings out some great costumes and a variety of attitudes and seriousness about racing.  Here are some shots from this year's event. 


The starter turkeys

 



The start and finish line are at the Chapel

 

Completely overheating with my 4 layers of clothing

 By the way, it's definitely a benefit being over-40 in these races as my "competition" consisted of a group of 9.  I think I came in fourth in this grouping after a very poor performance, multiple lace tyings, dead mp3 player and fighting a cold.

WAIS Divide for Thanksgiving

Michiel won't be spending the rare two-day holiday weekend with me in McMurdo this year.  Instead, he is out at the WAIS Divide field camp installing their email server.  WAIS stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet and WAIS Divide is a multi-year camp primarily focused on getting ice cores for scientific research.

Rather than trying to explain it, I'll let these videos, one of which is narrated by my friend, Gifford Wong, tell the story.

http://science360.gov/series/WAIS+Divide/bba68a0e-1005-484d-a343-cb458621a1a6

How Not to Land A Plane in Antarctica

On October 8, 1970, a Lockheed Constellation aircraft flown by the US Navy in support of Operation Deep Freeze (the official name for the military support to the Antarctic Program) was carrying 80 passengers from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station.  It was the first flight of the 1970 season and the weather that day was, well, not conducive to landing.  The aircraft, named "Pegasus", made six low passes and the pilot attempted to land in zero visibility with winds gusting to 40 miles per hour in 90-degree crosswinds.  No one was killed; only 5 people on board were mildly injured.  The starboard wing was torn off completely and the tail unit was broken.

The plane was attempting to land at Williams Field, which is several miles away from this area on the permanent ice shelf.  The crash site is now adjacent to our permanent ice runway called (not coincidentally) "Pegasus" and serves as a destination for occasional after-work morale trips.

The environmental group has plans to remediate this site (meaning:  disassembling the plane and shipping the parts off-continent), so I decided that it was finally time to get out there.  Getting to Pegasus field involves a one hour drive in a Delta, which can be bumpy and uncomfortable, but there was nothing else going on this past Saturday evening, the skies cleared up on the way out and I got to sit in the front cab, so it was a really pleasant road trip.

Pictures of the Pegasus Plane.  They had a lot of snow this winter, so the plane was even more buried than prior years.

The view of the Trans-Antarctic Range from the Pegasus site.  So peaceful...

Photos I Wish I Took

The warm temperatures have been melting all of the roads and the snow on the hills and mountains, creating a huge amount of run-off.  This relatively warm run-off flows into Winter Quarters Bay and raises the temperature of the water which speeds up the melting of the Ice Pier from underneath.  Remember that Ice Pier I mentioned in a prior post?  It now has 4 feet of good ice and the rest of its thickness is slush.  Not good news...

The powers-that-be have been brainstorming alternative methods of off-loading all of the cargo arriving by resupply vessel since the Ice Pier has finally and officially been deemed un-usable.

They are down to 2 options:  offload all of the cargo in Lyttleton, NZ and fly 150 extra C-17 missions or use some kind of modular "Lego" pier to do an offload here.  Too bad the NSF didn't want to consider other options when the alarm bell was sounded by our Fleet Operations personnel back in August.  Over half of our cargo has already been containerized in California and ready to load onto the Resupply vessel.  This cargo will likely get re-prioritized and need to be re-containerized.  

On a brighter note, everyone who bet money on the NSF missing their stated deadline to announce the new subcontractor for the USAP is now richer.  Although...no one would have bet against this happening.  After two contract extensions, we were supposed to hear today who our new "boss" will be, but it is silent at the Denver Headquarters.  Many think that we'll hear right before Thanksgiving.

Finally, to end my week on a happy note, here are some great photos that I WISH I took.  They have been "borrowed" from the public photo storage location on the network.  Enjoy!



Penguin Chick under one of its parents



McMudhole

The gorgeous weather of the last few days has turned our roads into slushy mud pits, but it sure is nice to feel the warm sun on a face that doesn't need to be covered from the wind!

Olympic Competitors - Another Reason to Love McMurdo!

Last night, I attended another installment of the wonderful new talk series here in McMurdo called "Secret Lives".  It features two people each week telling stories of their off-ice lives.  Yesterday's was particularly exciting; it starred our Nurse Practitioner, who is an Olympic level figure skating judge, and the head of our Housing department, who competed for 12 years as the brakeman for the two-man bobsled team representing TRINIDAD!

Curtis was a star sprinter and was recruited to train in Lake Placid, New York for the Trinidad and Tobago team.  He competed in the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and in 1998 in Nagano, Japan.  He talked about the mechanics of racing bobsleds (or bobsleigh), the agony of being in a thin piece of fiberglass moving at speeds up to 90 miles per hour with 4 g of gravitational force and the effects of crashing (ripped off skin).  He balanced those stories with tales of luxury and grandeur at the Olympic Games (masseuses, chefs at your beck and call, drivers and interpreters, and designated driving lanes on the roadways just for athletes).  Utterly fascinating!

There is another Olympian on station who also competed in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.  Deborah is here with the military and I've gotten to know her through my IT training classes.  She competed in the biathlon for the US.  

Olympic results are here:

Curtis: http://www.todor66.com/olim/1994w/Bobsleigh_Doubles.html                    
Deborah:  http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/no/deborah-nordyke-1.html
  
Hooray for our tremendous community!



The control towers and buildings at the Ice Runway

 I admit it...I love the flying machines of Antarctica.  On Sunday, the people who work the airfield and the crews who fly the various aircraft allowed the community to come and check out these beautiful planes and helos up close.  We even got to sit in the cockpits of some of them!


LC-130 Hercules - flown by the New York Air National Guard

 





In the cockpit of a Bell 212 helicopter - normally flown by PHI



The most beautiful of the Antarctic aircraft, a Basler BT-67, flown by Kenn Borek Air of Canada.



A DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter - also flown by Kenn Borek.

 It is a real privilege to be able to say that I've flown in almost all of these (except for the Twin Otter) and every time is still thrilling.

At the end of the day, we also got the opportunity to go up into the Air Traffic Control Tower.

Inside the tower

 The interesting cloudscape added to the enjoyment of the day and the beauty of the photos.

It's HOT!

Well, it's hot for Antarctica.  The snow and ice on the roofs and eaves of all the buildings is melting off into giant puddles.  The roadways have a super slick surface of hard packed snow.  The sun is bright and shiny; the sky is blue and the winds are almost non-existent.  Conditions like this never last but while we have them, everyone is cheerful.....except for the people who are concerned about the thickness of our new new ice pier, which is used during annual vessel (goods, supplies, and vehicles) and tanker (fuel) offload.

At the end of last season, the new ice pier floated away in a storm.  It's been spotted some 20 miles or so away from station, complete with electrical poles, quonset hut, and bollards for tying up the ships.  Here is a photo taken from a helicopter of the ice pier lodged in annual sea ice.

The environmental team will work on removing all of the material out there on the sea ice but in the meantime, fleet operations have been working on making a new ice pier this winter and winfly.  With our incredibly warm temperatures this year, the new new ice pier is only 9 feet thick but it should be 17 feet thick at this point in the season.  We'll see how this one works out for us...