The Global Guy

So the last boat has left, and we’re on our own for the next 90 days. Not much of a period of isolation I admit, but I’m really looking forward to it. This is a great crew, right up there with the crew at the South Pole Station my first time there. Despite the lack of wildlife right now, I’m still constantly awed by the beauty of this spot. Every day the wind and waves bring something new to our harbor to look at, and the ice formations are like our own private sculpture garden that someone modifies on a daily basis.

The days are starting to get longer again with about 15 more minutes of daylight each day. We’re trying to take advantage of it, but the weather hasn’t been cooperating all that much lately. We’ve had a bunch of snow storms and windy days, and the harbor has been getting so iced up that we can’t put boats in the water. Nevertheless, we do what we can to get out which more often than not means heading up the glacier in the backyard. A couple of the guys have dug out a ski chalet that’s protected from the wind at the top of the hill, and it usually has a couple of people hanging out between runs up and down the slope. It’s a great spot for photography with a nearly 360 degree panorama of the ocean and surrounding islands.

One thing that we’re all watching for is the first appearance of the pack ice from the south. Pack ice is usually defined in a broad sense as any sea ice that’s not attached to land. Every year Antarctica nearly doubles in size due to the sea freezing and breaking up into chunks of ice ranging from open pack where the ice isn’t very thick to close pack where it’s just a constant sea of floating ice chunks bobbing about in a tight mass. We’ve been watching satellite images of the approaching pack, and it’s gotten to about 30 miles to the south of us moving towards us at about six miles per day. While it will be cool to see, what we’d rather have is fast ice which is frozen sea water that’s actually in a more or less unbroken sheet. When we get the fast ice, we’ll be able to set up ski trails going between the various points of land down here which will be yet another recreation opportunity. Woohoo!

If the pack gets here before the sea surface freezes, it’ll be tough to set up extensive ski trails…in fact that hasn’t happened since the mid 90s. What we need is a few days of constant cold and calm weather that’ll let the sea freeze over without the wind blowing it apart and out of the harbor. We’ll know one way or the other in the next couple of weeks!

Happy Midwinter all! This has to be the most unusual midwinter I’ve ever celebrated down on the ice, and as a result it just doesn’t seem like such a big deal. We’ve still got the summer crew here, its still light outside for about five hours a day, and there is a boat parked on the pier that we can use to get out if we needed. The boat and the summer crew will be out of here on Friday, and we’ll start our short “winter” season. It looks like our final number is going to be 20 people sticking around for about 90 days before we get the boat back and the summer season begins again.

I’m scheduled to be back in Chile on the 20th of October, and then I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do. I’ve started polishing up my resume in preparation for the first real job search I’ve done since I graduated from University. I’d prefer to end up back in Austin, but I wouldn’t mind either Denver or the DC area. Either way, I’m excited about actually having a permanent address for a while. I’ve been saving a good bit of money, so I should be able to actually buy a house and have a place of my own to live in where ever I end up settling. I never thought it would happen, but I’m looking forward to being stationary just as much as I was looking forward to traveling a few years ago!

The temperatures are dropping, and the days are getting significantly shorter. Compared to the South Pole, or even most of the northern states in the US, this is going to be an easy winter. Still, for the banana belt of the Antarctic, the 16 degree F temperatures (~-10c) are relatively frigid. We’ve been very lucky this season, with noticeably fewer bad weather days than the average. For me, that means that I’m trying to take advantage of the weather to play with my camera while there are still interesting things to photograph. There’s an ice cave near the location of the old Palmer station that opens and closes depending on the amount of glacier calving. Right now it’s open, and it offers some really challenging photo opportunities. I’m still working on perfecting how to capture it, but each time I go out there, I get a little better results.

One of the best things about the short day is that the sky and mountains have taken on an almost permanent pastel cast to them. I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m actually getting tired of taking sunrise and sunset photos! The local wildlife population has dropped pretty significantly, although there will probably be a few hardy seals and birds that stick around for the duration. Right now there are a couple of elephant seal colonies that don’t show any signs of leaving, some giant petrels and seagulls, and of course there are the ubiquitous “antarctic chickens” that have found the unlimited food source of our sewer outfall.

Other changes include the slow dropping of the seawater temperature. It’s not cold enough to freeze solid yet, but we are starting to get formations of pancake ice, and slushy water which is the first step in the process. The sea hasn’t actually iced over everywhere for a few years, but this has been such a weird season for weather patterns that anything could happen.

Before we get any really serious ice though, we’ve got to get the rest of the summer crew out of here. We’ve got one more supply vessel run before we shut down for the winter, and it’s scheduled to arrive here next Friday. It’ll bring our winter supply of veggies, beer, and packages from Amazon.com, and then it’ll take away the last of our trash, and everyone but 20 people. It’ll leave here on the 24th, which is three days after midwinter. Following that, it’s a quick three months of keeping everything stable, and then I’m outta here a month after the first boat of the new season.

This crew is a really good bunch of people, which is an extremely welcome change from the previous season at Pole. I don’t think I’ve talked about it before on here, but last year’s personality dynamics at the south pole left a lot to be desired. It’s really refreshing to be back at a station with a fun atmosphere where people seem to want to be here instead of just waiting for the winter to be over.