Note: Old Posts...

Hi again - ive had a few people wondering why ive been lazy enough to only have written a few blog entries... Its because the blogger site shifts posts older than a certain amount to a different page which you can get to using the link to "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page on the right.... Just in case anyone had started reading recently and didn't realise! Rob

p.s. Had a Burns Night last night, i played the haggis in and then me and Tristan (Comms manager and genuine Shetlander) played for a slightly shambolic but obviously enjoyable couple of hours of dancing, and the speeches were pretty damn good too. Hopefully someone had a camera there and took some good picsa and i'll post them in a bit....

A Day Trip in "The Field"...

Hi again after what seems like a very long absence from doing the blog - me and some of the rest of us met people have now installed 3 automatic weather stations ....... got to go. Again! Anyway, ill set some pics to upload and come back to the descriptions later! rob

edit: Now it is later, a few days later in fact, things are still very busy and it's surprisingly hard to find a good time to do the blog updates. But here goes...

This is a view from Bravo Charlie, one of the four Rothera based twin otter aircraft. This place seems very familiar now, but the back of my hand will have to fight to be known as well after 2 years here... The ship moored up at the wharf (left middle of the picture) is the HMS Endurance who were providing accomodation for The Royal Female during her Royal stay on our little bit of rock. We got thrashed at football by them 5-0 (or maybe 6-0: the facts of the case are these, and they are disputed) - they had proper strips and had apparently left trails of silk through the defenses of the Argentinian and Chilean armies, and some other Antarctic bases en route... Personally i think they were taking it all a bit too seriously! Anyway, The pic is taken as we left Rothera to go out to a place on the Ronne Iceshelf called variously Site 8, Limbert, or Shelf to take down and old and increasingly knackered automatic weather station and put up a new one. And the great BAS logistical machine was revealed to me in stages over the next few days as pilots frantically dashed around over an area the size of western Europe picking people up, dropping them in middles of nowhere, digging, digging, digging, cacheing fuel drums, moving fuel drums, pumping and using fuel drums, dragging fuel drums, digging fuel drums out of lots of snowdrifts, unsticking fuel drums attached to other fuel drums with ice, clearing runways and disposing of old fuel drums. Basically it means that once you're away from Rothera, there is no "working day", there are more like working minutes, and they include every minute that you are awake apart from meals and coffee breaks. I didn't have to work that hard, but some of the people who left Sky Blu when we got in had been working in shifts 24hrs a dayt to keep the blue ice runway clear of snow to allow planes to get in. And that means keeping all the snow off an area 800m long and 35m wide clean of snoiw, which there happens to be quite a lot of in the part of the world. It was very interesting anyway. So Ags and I spent the night at Sky Blu, then most of the next day before being flown out to site 8 to do our work, which we finished at 2 in the morning, then slept in the back of the otter before flying back to Sky Blu in the morning.





These pictures are just a few of the many different nice-looking sea ice forms that we flew over on our way to fossil bluff, a re-fuelling and stopover poinbt for more southerly field operations (I'll get a decent map picture at some point and put little arrows on it to make it a bit clearer where im talking about...). The bottom one is meltwater pools on top of sea ice.

(This picture really belongs in the Stork Bowl post a few weeks ago. It's me coming down in the fairly nice powder, taking by Ags who was up there digging holes in snow for a training video on snow shelters).


This is a few from (basically, of) Sky Blu - its at 76 degrees South, so its pretty serious - almost as far south as Halley. Its at about 5000 feet, so the mountain you see in the background are called nunataks which just means the top of a mountain sticking out of a vast quantity and depth of snow and ice. The red building is called a melon hut, and its where the cooking and storage facilities are for Sky Blu personnel, as well as the communications equipment (HF radio, satellite phone for emergencies) and weather station display panel. Apart from a few other nunataks close by, there is nothing around here for hundreds of miles except snow and ice...


Some more nunataks, from the plane heading over to Site 8. I think this picture gives a better sense of the buriedness of the mountains - thousands of feet down to sea level... The upper picture is just some nice cracking of the snow on a hill, the bottom bit dirtorted by the aeroplane window that looks quite good.


One of the Twin Otters having just landed on the blue ice (icerink) runway at Sky Blu.

Me operating the snow blower to get rid of snow drifts at the "fuel farm" so that we could get in with skidoos to tow the barrels to the runway apron (parking for aircraft) for refuelling - it's a little bit surreal standing with a normal sort of petrol pump handle with it stuck in the side of a big red aeroplane...


Here im helping to clear snowdrifts off the runway - the problem is that if theres no wind, the blown snow lands back on the runway and you have to blow it again. But if there is wind to take the blown snow away, then its likiely that there will be more drifting so its a pretty constant concern for all sky blu people.



Here's me relaxing outside my sleeping place - Chris Drurie, one of the artists down here, built it with help from a few of the Sky Blu people, and it was brilliant in every way, except that it didn't have wi-fi and i didn't have a laptop, and i didn't want wi-fi or a laptop anyway. The first night i spent in there was interesting because it was pretty cold and there were a few holes in between the blocks, so me and Simon (Navy pilot/radio operator) woke up with snow over our sleeping bags. Luckily it was so cold that the snow just brushed off... Then the second night Simon filled in the gaps and it was a brilliant place to sleep, although not quite as refined as the inuit versions with their raised sleeping platforms and entrenched entrance tunnel, but it was as good as a tent and more satisfying!

Installing an AWS on Larsen Icesheet

On saturday i got my first flight over antarctic soil! Myself, cathy and matt headed over to the Larsen Ice Shelf, (just near to the Bawden ice rise if you're looking at a map) which stretches over a vast area and is clinging on to the peninsula with freezing cold fingers and trying to avoid the fate of it's more northerly cousin Larsen A, which broke up in 1995, and Larsen B which famously disintegrated over the course of a few weeks in 2002. This tendency towards huge bits of antarctic floating glacial ice breaking into tiny pieces is thought now to be a symptom of very fast warming over the antarctic peninsula over the last 50 years (approximately 2.5 degrees C). We were installing a new AWS (automatic weather station) and getting rid of the old one which has been raised in previously years but is now obsolete. It was pretty strange to be on a piece of snow covered ice that stretched as far as you could see in every direction, and it was a demonstartion of the power of the GPS that we found this little speck of dust on the monstrous sheet of paper straight away, landed trailing skiis (just touching the surface with the skiis on the plane) to test the integrity of the suface, then taking off again to come full circle and land again in the ruts. You might think that there wouldn't be any ruts on an iceshelf, but it was so ridiculously warm, and the sun so uninhibited by clouds that the surface was crusty and soft underneath and we regularly fell through the relative outer solidity into softer stuff below, up to our knees which made certain aspects of AWS erection more difficult than imagined...

Anyway, enough of these words! On to the visual compartments containing many more words than this feeble blurb...

A bit of the Larsen Ice Sheet, with cloud shadows. The closest rock sticking out of the ice is actually Francis Island which is about 100 miles from the edge of the ice. Behind that are the peninsular mountains and Rothera is on the other side of them.

The twin otter at the AWS site - it's a really beauitiful piece of machinery! You can see how deep the ruts are that it has carved during taxiing.


Here's me putting some bolts in to fix on the solar panel which charges the two batteries which are buried in the snow inside a metal case.

Here's me inside the otter heading back from the site - OK it could be a much better photo, and i am really a lot happier than i look - thats the concentration involved in trying to take a picture of yourself whilst being thrown around in the back of a plane full of cargo boxes. But it shows some of the peninsular hills on the Bowman coast which was pretty great.

Here's a photo which has turned out pretty well considering the windows of the planes are all scratched by whatever it is that most commonly scratches the windows of twin otters in Antarctica, and it was generally quite hard to get good photos through them. At some point i'll get to be a co-pilot, which basically means sitting in the jump seat in the tiny cockpit and looking out through the front windows. Which will be nice...

I've got to post this now as i've got to restart my computer for work purposes, but i'll post some more pictures later on once all the madness dies down...

Oh, i don't think i mentioned it too much, but Princess Anne is here for a few days and will be wandering with intent to chat later on in the day, everyones a bit stressed because the ITN people are sneaking about and the HMS Endurance is moored at the wharf and everything has to be itinerised (?) and time has to be locked down and tamed, everything chronologised (Dave!) to the nearest ridiculously small time period, everyone sweating more than normal and normal work kind of being put on the back burner, and kind of getting harder because it doesn't cook so well back there. Anyway, got to dash, cheers, rob...

On The Telly..

Very quick: not much time! Just to let you know that an ITN news team are here at the moment, and they'll be doing some live broadcasts during next week on their 18.30 and 22.30 news programs... If you have a look you might just see me on there.... But if not (and i am pretty camera shy!) then it'll give a good impression of what the area and base is like.

At the moment i'm on standby every day to get flown out to one of our peninsular automatic weather station sites to install a new station. If and when i go, i'll make sure to take lots of pics and post what happens. cheers, rob

Skiing!

Hello, i'm making a quick blog entry today because we're very busy in the met department because everything is going a little bit haywire and the forecaster is demanding heads and solutions... But I had yesterday afternoon off and it was a pretty stunning day so me and a few other folk skinned up to Vals and then took a skiidoo (after going back to base to get some harnesses) out of the "recreational area limit" and into the far more exciting "technical travel area", with a bit of supervision from Kirk, one of the GAs that's been here for 2 years so he knows his stuff. We then got onto ski mountaineering skiis and skinned up to a shoulder of a hill called Middle Stork, where we could ski into a beautiful bowl (Stork Bowl) with snow that was almost powdery! Which is a skiers perfect activity, pretty much... It took about 20mins of uphill for 20 seconds of downhill, but it was well worth it. I did that 4 times and then headed back to base on the skidoo absolutely knackered but chuffed with the first proper skiing on Antarctica that i've done so far... Here's a few pictures:


Stork bowl from near the bottom, with Matt starting the trudge back up to the top for another run. Apparently in winter you can climb right to the top of Middle Stork and ski off there...


Lowrie (outgoing doctor) and matt getting ready to go up for the first time. The sledge on the skidoo isn't needed but Kirk has it as a prop because he's filming a big series of Antarctic survival training videos, and just over the cornice in front of them, he and Ags were building a huge snowhole...

Me at the top of the bowl looking pretty smug i think! Not a bad view from up there...


Kirk wandering back to the skidoo after a hard days hole-digging... Maybe there'll be some better pictures that someone else took that i could post in future. Anyway, back to work. rob

Met Team....

edit: also, if any of the Halley folk are reading who i knew from cambridge or ship journeys - Great to see you've finally got onto glacia firma! All the best for the new year...

edit II: for people reading who don't know, the Shackleton that i did the first leg of journey on has been having a spot of ice-related bother recently, having had to smash through metres thick ice for weeks to get into a place on the ice-shelf where they can unload their cargo and actually get to where they're going to be living for the next year... Unstoppable forces and immovable objects...! Have a look at Dave, Tamsin, Richard or Dean's excellent blogs to see how they're getting on (linked on this page -->)

Real Original Post

Hello, and Happy New Year! Last night we had our hogmanay celebrations in the sledge store, where i was part of the band which entertained pretty successfully (even if i do say so myself!) for a couple of hours before the bells, and everyone generally had a pretty superb night! Pictures are thin on the ground though due to the darkness of the venue, and the unwillingness of the partygoers to risk serious injury to valuable photographic equipment due to wayward and occasionally extreme revelry. I don't think ive ever used the word "revelry" for any purpose previously, nor will i ever again...

Anyway, i'll try to dig up some in the next week from the shared drive, but for now i'll just post our "met team" photo, courtesy of Alistair the resident healthsmith and all-round nice chap:


The cirrus in the sky makes for quite a nice effect i think you'll agree. Left to Right - Me, Matt Balmer (electronic engineer really, but met trained), Mark Maltby (matt's predeccesor, now gone to Halley), Ags (whom i am replacing), Cathy Moore (my boss!). When it comes to the winter, the 3 to the right will be gone, and it'll just be me and matt to run the whole weather malarky. Wish us luck?