better than a box of fluffy ducks

I thought I'd post some random facts of the day. I have a few items that will fill in some gaps and offer some random pieces of life in Antarctica.

McMurdo Station was chartered in 1841 by James Clark Ross, Robert Falcon Scott made a base in the area in 1902, and the United States officially established a station on site on February 16, 1956. Our little community can carry up to 1100 people and we sit on Ross Island, about 30 miles off the continental coast of Antarctica. We are situated in a nook between a couple of volcanic hills which shields the town from winds sweeping across the Ross Sea from the South Pole, but when the temperature rises in late December to January, it's location makes for a muddy walk to work. The settlement borders the permanent Ross Sea Ice Shelf and ship access requires melting or ice breaking of the temporary ice shelf to enter the port. Next to the station is Winter Quarters Bay. This icy deep waterway harbors our fuel tanker, our container ship, ice breakers, and a couple of research vessels each season when the ice melts, or is broken up. It also host a great deal of garbage, broken machinery, and pre-Antarctic Treaty items that should not be down there. We share our island with Mount Erebus; an active volcano that is always venting; sometimes it's steam and other times it throws out lava rocks. I also learned this weekend that there is a caldera (mostly covered by water that Inaccessible, Little Razorback and Razorback Islands are part of. It gives some scientists a little hope that they may find other underwater volcanoes in the area; although, that would only be a bonus to the work they are doing right now.

On Sunday I attended a science lecture about a remotely operated video camera that the scientists can play around with under the sea ice. The data and pictures they come back with are amazing. Much of the sea floor in this part of the world is unseen. Divers are limited in depth here (although the water is so clear they can see a long way) and other video cameras have not been as successful in operating in this part of the world. Nick, one of the National Science Foundation's grantees I've met, is an undergrad who is working as an engineer on this project. He's also a diver who took his first swim under the sea ice last week. Brrr!

I neglected to add earlier that on my C-17 flight to The Ice, I was able to get up on the flight deck and see the ice oceans below us from the pilot's perspective. Seeing the vast landscape of ice below our cargo plane was wonderful. And, seeing all the instruments and computers that fly the massive machine was the highlight of our trip!

Usually on the flight down, the body of the plane is filled with commercial airline seating pallets. This year, upon loading the plane, we noticed a string of jump seats down the belly of our C-17. This reduced the number of available seats from 140 to 126. The primarily-democrat community down in Antarctica certainly doesn't need another thing to blame the on the war, but apparently, our comfortable seating pallets were damaged in Iraq and they were unable to get new seats for our flights to Antarctica.

The round trip flight time of the trip I took from Christchurch to McMurdo and back to New Zealand was the fastest ever. They completed the trip in 10:24. Once we landed, they dropped the cargo door in the back of the plane. I was hoping they would do a combat offload (when the cargo is pushed out the back of the plane while it taxis), but they just wanted to have a short ground-time and be ready for the loaders to swap out cargo. After hurrying us out of our seats, they must have hustled to safely arrive back in Christchurch in record time!

A very random-fact-of-the-day is that pencils here fall apart relatively quickly. You know how sometimes the lead rattles inside the wood, or the entire end falls off? In Antarctica, it's so dry that the wood of pencils dries out swiftly, shrinking the writing utensil and causing it to loosen up and fall apart. On that note, we are a station of pencil-users. Anyone who goes outside will usually be carrying a pencil as the ink in pens will freeze up and be useless.

Other than that, I can tell you that the longest penguin dive recorded in the area is 27 minutes. This does not count what happens to penguins when they go out to sea as there is no recorded data on that. I attended a lecture on penguin research by Dr. Paul Ponganis. He works with the penguins that are in the Duracel battery commercial where they strap a video camera on the back of the bird and let them waddle into a hole at Penguin Ranch.

Personally, I've been adjusting, finding a routine of sorts, and getting to know a lot of fabulous people while keeping in touch with friends from last year, too. As Paul, the Kiwi from Scott Base said today, "I'm better than a box of fluffy ducks."