Nowhere To Go But Up

I'm leaving. No time soon mind you, but I will leave the ice. I have known unoffically when I will be leaving, but it became somewhat more official this week when it was mentioned in a meeting. In the world of the USAP, we don't just say "The day you leave for the South Pole" and "They day you get to go home". That's too simple. We say official things like "Your Deployment Date" and "Redeployment from the ice". It sounds so...military. They make us sound like a nuclear warhead or a batallion of marines that are being deployed on a peace-keeping mission to the south pole. Anyway, I was told that I will leave on November 9th +/- a week or so. How's that for official? I will pass through McMurdo, likely with an overnight stay, on the way to Christchurch, NZ. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, it's hard to say at this point), I will be leaving a couple of weeks after many of the winter-over people. They will all have passed through Christchurch and moved on to other travel plans by the time I arrive. So basically, I'll be alone or at the very least catching people that I know after they have already been everywhere. So probably most of my time in CHC will be going solo. At least I can understand a little kiwi. That's about 9 weeks away still, so I need to put that out of my mind.....

In the meantime, it has gotten bright enough outside that I am starting to shut down the aurora-sensing equipment. The all-sky cameras are already off, soon to be followed by CCD cameras, spectrometers, interferometers, and photometers. With the instruments off, it will free up more time for me to do important work like digging out snow.

I have mastered the art of blurry sky pictures. That little bright spot to the right is the moon. It's actually a cresent moon, but you can't tell in this photo. It's pretty cold, so we're not having any wind, so we're getting great views of the horizon.

Only at the South Pole. Only in August. Only on a Sunday, which is a day off for most. Only after free beer and other assorted beverages are put into the mix. Only with the wacko group of people that we have down here. Only with this strange combination do you end up with a group of people sitting in the galley and having a three hour long conversation about feces. It went downhill from there and degraded into talking about other lesser bodily functions. The odd part was that as people walked by and heard what we were talking about, they actually joined our conversation. At various points we involved about half of the station. Not too shockingly, we scared away a fair amount of people as well. I sort of feel bad about that.


....I'm wondering how many people will click on that link....

You may have seen reports of an earthquake in Antarctica. I look at any seismic activity that can be detected from the south pole on a daily basis, but I am always looking at data from two days previous due to following UT for all of my science projects and having to wait until the end of the day to start looking at the data. So, since I finally have taken a look at the big Antarctic earthquake, here is what I saw:


Part of my job is to look at each day's seismic data and determine what I think is an earthquake and seperate that from the noise. For a big event, such as shown above, it is pretty easy to spot the earthquake. For smaller events and events that take place much farther away, it's not always so obvious. It should be noted that the pictures above show filtered data that makes picking seismic events a little easier.

There's aren't many words that I can't say about this month's hash run, but there are pictures....

I've been thinking, I am fairly certain that Antarctica has a 100% employment rate. I bet no other place in the world can claim that. Even the tourists who come here probably all have jobs or at least don't need them. The cost to visit this place ($30k or so for a tourist, 1 soul for employees) is so high that you have to be working or independently wealthy. This is the only continent that doesn't have beach bums or homeless people, not live ones anyway. Maybe Greenland can make some of the same claims, but they're not a continent. This is also the only continent with no McDonalds or Starbucks; some of the jobs here might seem about as meaningful though. There is a church on this continent, but no offical religion, language, borders, culture, or ethnicity. The only natives to this place are cold, snow, and wind. I don't think we have a hockey rink down here either, but there is ice skating....

Oh, if you thought this was about how to get a job in the USAP, a better place to look would be here. There are still some job openings for next season if you hurry.

...is in prison right now. He didn't really do anything to deserve this prison sentence, but he's there nonetheless. His history starts in prison actually. I found him at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility in Canon City, CO. He was locked up after having been picked up in Pueblo for loitering. He was on death row when the lady who runs the dog training program at the women's prison in CC found him and took him in. He was trained by a guy who was there for doing something worse than loitering (how did a guy get in the women's prison you ask? I wonder the same thing actually) to be a guide dog to the blind. When it was discovered that this dog was untrainable, he was relegated house pet status, which is how I found him. I was looking for a dog and I had narrowed my search to the freaky looking dog that doesn't bark and the Australian Shepard. The shepard peed on my as soon as it entered the room while the Basenji waited for 5 minutes (and when he thought nobody was looking) to try peeing. He only looked at me once during my first visit (actually he looked through me), but otherwise was completely ignorant of my presence. I tried issuing a few of the commands that he had been taught, but that only served to make him further treat me like I was not even worthy of annoying him. I decided that he was the dog for me.

The day I went to pick him up (I had to wait until he was over his ringworm that he got from other prisoners), there were several other people there to pick up dogs. We had to have an orientation with our dogs before we could take them home. Most of the dogs were rescue dogs that had checkered pasts. They talked about the Dalmation and the Lab and the scruffy looking mixed breed as they sat in kennels across the room. All of them had cute stories. There were kids there getting excited to see their new companions. Then they started talking about the Basenji. The director of the training program at the prison told a story of the Basenji that her family had brought from Africa when she was a child. The dog had been used in Africa to track lions. She lived on a ranch with an 8ft fence around the yard. The dog would leap over the fence and chase deer. They would let the dog out of the car and it would follow the car for a couple of miles while they drove at 30mph (48.3 km/h). After all of this build up, the cage door was opened. Everyone was quiet, expecting this fierce lion-slayer to come out and eat their young. Instead, they saw this....


The first thing anyone said was, "That's it?".

Here's what the AKC has to say about my dog's breed:


It tooks weeks before my dog trusted me enough to not hide behind the couch from me. To this day, he probably only trusts about 5 or 6 people. When I moved to the south pole, my dad took over the responsibility of watching this very idiosyncratic dog. They go on hikes, sleep in the living room during the middle of the day and spend many a quiet moment together. During his idle time, my dog will stare intently out the window at the neighborhood cat and knaw on rawhide. He sleeps intermittently on the couch, in the recliner, or in his bed behind the recliner. Sometimes he will stretch out in the middle of the floor in a ray of sunshine that is coming through the window. He has a terribly strenuous go of it in his current living arrangement.

My dog is named Jitonga for a tribal African word meaning 'spot'. He is currently back in the clink because my dad is on vacation. Hopefully he will get out on good behavior in about a week.

Apparently, I have bad posture when I'm sitting at a computer....

This was supposed to be a picture showing how much my hair has grown. It just turned out to be a silly picture.

I should probably say something about life down here since I'm suddenly in a posting mood. I've been on a particularly destructive streak of late. Not since I did this* have I cost the United States Antarctic program so much in resources. It started last week while I was playing a heated game of basketball (OK, it was H-O-R-S-E) when I knocked out one of the ceiling lights. I actually knocked down the entire fixture, ballast, bulbs...the whole shebang. It's about a 30 foot (10 meters for you metric folk) from the ceiling to the gym floor. The long fall provided plenty of time to work up enough speed to cause broken glass to pretty much dust the entire court. I cleaned that up, but I couldn't fix the light. That meant I got to fall on my sword and tell the FEMC guys what I had done. This isn't the first time they have had to clean up my mess in the gym.

THEN....

On Sunday night I was caught up in a Lord of the Rings marathon. The extended versions. Oh yeah. Anyway, after the first disc was complete (halfway through the first movie), I decided that I wanted popcorn. I like popcorn but I haven't popped a bag of popcorn since I've been here. I went with a couple of companions to the galley to pop 3 bags of popcorn in the microwave. I took two bags to one microwave, the other went to the far end of the galley. Instructions: pop on high for 4 minutes. I set the microwave for 4 minutes. Two minutes later, the bag sounded like it was done popping. I took it out and smelled the faint smell of burnt popcorn. Just then, the fire alarm went off. "Sunday night is a strange time for a fire drill", I thought, but went ahead and responded to my normal station. People were running around, looking a bit frantic. "Did you hear that loud 'BOOM'?", "Where's the fire?", "Is this a drill?", I heard all of those things as I headed down the stairs to my muster point. It didn't seem like a scheduled drill, so I figured somebody was screwing around and pulled the alarm. I grabbed my walkie talkie as I heard the intercom announce that the fire was in the galley. Funny, I was just in the galley, I didn't see anything.......d'oh! I realized my popcorn had set off the fire alarm. I hurried back upstairs to the galley to let everyone know that it was just a smokey bag of popcorn (actually, the thing never smoked, it just smelled burnt). Once the cause of the alarm was established, a stand down from the fire alarm was called, but there was another problem. Apparently, the BOOM was the galley sprinkler system charging up. The pipes had filled with several hundred gallons of water and were set to drench the galley. The system was shut off before we had a mess on our hands, but the pipes had to be drained. All of that water, wasted..... I got to hear about that for awhile too (No showers for you the rest of the season, let me know if you need help popping any popcorn, etc). The worst part, I didn't even get to eat the bag of popcorn that I cooked.

Since then, of course, I've been curled up in a ball hiding beneath my bed.

In other news, the full moon is up right now. When the moon passes back below the horizon, we should be able to see our first glimpses of twilight. No sunlight reflected off of the moon. Not the suns particles entering our atmosphere in the form of auroras. Real sunlight. Granted it will be bent through the earth's atmosphere and very faint for a couple of weeks, but it will be a very welcome change in the scenery.



*I learned recently that the Sloth is on it's way out of here. It will be sent back to the States. I'm assuming that it will be sold in an auction somewhere. If you see it advertised in your local papers, put a bid on it for me. It has a lot of sentimental value. As was pointed out to me, you can't just own one Sprite, you need two. One for parts and the other to drive for 10 minutes.

...and this post is just to acknowledge that fact.

As I have allueded to on multiple occaisions, I couldn't take a good picture of auroras to save my life. Instead, I have plifered serveral photos from our local public network drive. For the past couple of days, nature has really been putting on a great show for us here at pole.....






A special thanks to Greg for taking these pictures and for making them public. There are more photos on his site. Greg has a pretty nice camera.