Pressure Ridges…

A few of us went on a trip out to the pressure ridges last night. These are located right out in front of Scott Base, which is about 2.5km over the hill from McMurdo.  Peggy & Anne were our guides for this & we couldn’t have asked for better or more experienced people to take us out there. For both of them this is their 14th season down to Antarctica & Anne was one of the four women who skied to the South Pole in 1998 (I think it was this year)…a 67 day traverse for them on skis!!  An amazing achievement.

Once we got out to the pressure ridges I was blown away.  They look as if someone has spent hours upon hours carving out ice sculptures.  There are so many different shapes & when the sun shines through them they glow bright blue through the ice.

The pressure ridges are formed when the sea ice in McMurdo Sound meets the permanent ice shelf/glacier & because the glacier is much stronger & thicker, the sea ice is pushed upwards under the immense pressure.  It may be hard to tell by the photos, but when you’re walking along right next to them it’s almost impossible to comprehend how much pressure there must be created to deform all this ice.  Once the ice starts to break up later in the summer, it’s an area that is a popular bathing spot for seals & penguins as they swim up through the many holes that are created in the ice.

 

Cape Evans, Shackelton’s Hut & Erebus glacier ice cave…

These photos are from Cape Evans, which is about a 2hr drive north of McMurdo along the sea ice. I was lucky enough to get on one of these trips on Saturday night…however, I was unlucky that a storm just started to set in as we were making our way out of town. We ended up getting stuck in snow about 5 times on the way out & we had to dig the Delta truck out so we could keep going. Then the trip leader unfortunately called the trip off when we were less than a mile from our destination. To be fair, it was blowing a gale, snowing heavily (horizontally), and visibility was getting worse the longer we were out there. We saw four Emperor Penguins huddling up in the distance trying to keep warm and a few seals wobbled past us on our way back so it wasn’t entirely a disaster, but very frustrating getting so close.

We stopped at the Mt. Erebus Glacier ice cave on our way back. The weather was coming in even harder by this stage but we made the call to walk up to the glacier & check out the cave…after all, it provided us with a bit of shelter from the conditions outside! The entrance to the cave is quite small & I had to lie down & slide into it on my back. Once inside it opens up into a room not too much larger than a couple of buses sitting side by side.

The sight inside is surreal. Huge icicles hang down from the ceiling & there are literally hundreds of fluffy looking snow formations all over the place. Because the weather was so bad when I went, there wasn’t a lot of colour but I have seen photos from some of the other guys where the sun is penetrating through the ice from above & creating the brightest blue colours in the ice & filling the whole cave with colour.

The hut in the photos is called Shackelton’s Hut. It was built & used by the explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton & his team when they came down to Antarctica back in the very early 1900’s. As you can see from the photos, there is a real Emperor Penguin on the table that they killed either for scientific reasons or to eat & left there. There are also many tins of food they left & you can see above one of the bunk beds, one of them had written  the names of members of their team who had passed away up to that date. I’ve been told there is still the body of one of their sled dogs buried in the ice, however it cannot be seen from above. They never returned to the hut so what you see inside is exactly how they left it before they ventured out on their epic journey & never made it back.

Not all of these photos are my own, I have used some taken by someone else on a much nicer day, about a week before I went, so you can see what it really is like. If I put all my photos up from the other day, all you would see is white!

Hello Miss Collier & Room 8 Muritai School!

Hello Miss Collier & Room 8!

I hear that you are doing a project on Antarctica & since I’m living down here at moment I thought I could share a bit of information with you.

Here are some photos of the ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear we have to wear down here in Antarctica. As you can see, there is quite a lot!

Do you know why it is that humans have to wear so much warm clothing down here but animals that live here do not?

Antarctic animals such as seals & penguins have a layer of fat beneath their skin which acts like an insulation & keeps them warm.  They are warm blooded mammals, just like us, but because of this extra layer of fat they have, they can survive in extremely cold weather, (sometimes as cold as -80 degrees celcius…and water freezes at 0 degrees celcius so that’s pretty cold!)

It’s very important that we take our cold weather survival clothing seriously down here because since we don’t have that extra layer of fat like the penguins & seals, we could freeze to death in a matter of minutes if we didn’t wear it.

Some characteristics of Antarctic animals you will notice is that a seal for example has a very small head compared to the size of it’s body. This is to minimise the amount of heat that escapes their body as warm blooded mammals lose most of their body heat from their head.  They also have fur on the surface of their skin, this keeps them warm when they are on land by keeping the wind chill off them (the wind chill here is what gets the coldest). Another thing about seals that is quite interesting is that they are almost all black or very dark in colour.  Darker colours absorb more heat from the sun than lighter colours so by having a darker complexion, a seal can warm up very quickly in the sun, then their layer of fat is what keeps that absorbed heat from escaping when they go swimming for food. So when you see a seal lying around in the sun it’s not always just being lazy, it’s usually lying there sun-bathing before it goes back into the water.

With penguins, you will notice they are always active either waddling around, sliding on their bellies, or swimming around looking for food.  They need to keep very active to generate body heat, then this heat is stored in the layer of fat just like the seal I mentioned earlier.  They also have feathers that help to keep the wind chill off them when they are on land. Another cool thing about penguins is that to stop them from getting cold they will all huddle together in big groups (sometimes in groups of a few hundred!) and

by sharing body heat they stay a lot warmer than if they were standing alone.  So when it comes to penguins, team work is often the key to their survival.

So there’s a little bit about what we wear down in Antarctica & why we have to wear it. I look forward to talking to you all soon & hopefully you will have more questions I can answer for you. Just don’t make them too hard!

Snowboarding in Antarctica…

I went for a hike along the Castle Rock Loop trail again yesterday with Stephan from work. After my rather embarrassing & sometimes painful attempt at skiing last week I decided to take the board out for a spin this time. Good choice.

It was a perfect bluebird day, not a cloud in the sky, no wind, & it was a balmy -10 degrees c! So warm in fact we got too hot walking in our jackets & wearing gloves just made our hands sweat. This caught me by surprise a bit…I thought I’d gone out UNDER dressed.

As we approached Castle Rock, Mt. Erebus looked amazing in the distance. There wasn’t a breath of wind & the steam from the crater almost made it look as though it was erupting. About 2 hrs into the hike we’re at the top of the trail, standing under the shadow of Castle Rock looming above us. It’s very misleading how big this chunk of rock actually is until you’re standing right next to it…I guess it is sitting just in front of Mt. Erebus afterall, & that’s massive!

So we strapped our boards on & took of down the hill. I thought Turoa was icy on a bad day, but that is seriously like boarding in 2ft powder compared to this! About the first 3rd of the hill was pretty much all ice, needless to say we had some fairly close calls! But once we made it past that it was surprisingly soft, and when we got down as far as the Kiwi ski hill (about the last 3rd of the whole hill) it was perfect! And the view was surreal…couldn’t believe we’d just snowboarded in Antarctica!!…Even if we got only 20 minutes of board time in, it was worth the 3hrs of walking! First time snowboarding in Antarctica-an experience that I’ll never forget.

 

 

Fire fighting on the ice…

This blog is a documentation of my time spent at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, working as a fire fighter for the  Antarctic Fire Department.

I arrived on October 6th 2009 & will be back in New Zealand on February 19th 2010.

Enjoy!

Arriving in Antarctica…

Hey there!

So I made it to Antarctica as most of you will already know. Sorry it’s taken me a while to get this blog up & running…had a few technical difficulties/was procrastinating a lot!

So a bit of an update from when I first arrived…We flew out of Christchurch on the morning of Tuesday 6th Oct (after being delayed three days due to adverse weather conditions in Antarctica) & after a 5hr flight we landed at Pegasus Airfield, Antarctica. It was a very surreal feeling to step off the aircraft & feel the coldest air enter my lungs I’d ever felt (it was about -25 celsius) , my nostril hairs freezing more & more with every breath I took, &  looking out at the vast whiteness surrounding me. I couldn’t believe I’d just landed in Antarctica!

So the first couple of weeks were spent getting to know our way around the town & in the training room at the firehouse, (I never thought the power point presentations were going to end)! However, we finally made it through all the training that was necessary & broke into two different shifts & started doing the job we came down here to do.

We work a 24hr on/24hr off shift schedule which is great if you want to get out & explore the place as we get every second day off. There are some fantastic hiking trails around McMurdo & some amazing photo opportunities all over the place so there is always something new to see & do.

Scott Base has become a regular hang out spot for us Kiwis at McMurdo & a very welcome, quiet escape from the American noise! And trust me, there is a lot of it! (Not all of them but the few that fall into the ‘noisy’ category definitely more than make up for the ones that don’t)! The Kiwis over the hill at Scott Base have been very hospitable to us Kiwis working at McMurdo & invite us over there for dinner a couple of times a week, after which we all slap our thermals on & make our way down to the sea ice for rugby practice. I’ve played some reasonably cold games of rugby over the years but this definitely takes the cake…last week it was -15 degrees celsius & snowing…great fun though!

During the first couple of weeks we had some spectacular sunsets & about 40 minutes from town you can be up Observation Hill-the perfect spot to make the most out of the new camera. I’m still learning how to operate it but so far I think I’m doing OK, good things take time as they say!

All the vehicles here at McMurdo are bigger than anything we have back in little old NZ! The vehicles they class as their ‘light vehicle fleet’ all consist of Ford F-350 or 550  pick up trucks, I only reach the top of the wing mirror on some of these! We have four of these in the fire department with mat-tracks or grip tracks & a firefighting kit fitted to them & use these as our Aircraft Firefighting rigs as well as a 4×4 Ambulance & a couple of Chieftain trucks on tracks (pretty much like a battle tank with a tracked trailer unit behind it). In town we have two Pierce Fire Engines, a Water Tanker & another 4×4 ambulance as well as a few other Ford pick ups & vans.

At the moment the airport runway is out on the sea ice directly in front of McMurdo, however this is only operational for about two months as the ice starts to break up once the weather warms up in December & becomes too weak to support the aircraft & buildings on it. They’re landing C-17 & C-130 aircraft on it & it’s only 6ft thick…something that requires a fair bit of trust from the surveyors that test the ice strength prior to the aircraft landing! I’m told that the C-17, being the big beast that it is, starts to sink into the ice after about 30 minutes, not noticable with the naked eye, but enough for the surveyors to notice on their instruments…that’s enough for me to start planning my escape route just in case things go bad!!

I’m having a great time down here so far. The people are great to work with, the scenery is breath taking & there is always a new adventure around the corner.

…And no I haven’t seen a penguin yet. They are quite often on the ice runway so I’m told & it’s our job to herd them off out of the way of aircraft so I’ll be sure to get some photos!