The Global Guy

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.

The last thing that I expect when I come to Antarctica is the chance to get away from station for a few days. Sure, in McMurdo if you’ve got the right job, or are sleeping with the right person, it’s possible to get one of the rare boondoggles to a remote field camp, but I didn’t think that would happen at Palmer. Luckily, there’s a project here for the next six weeks or so that requires a constant source of fresh ice fish for their experiments.

In order to meet this demand, we’ve got to go out on regular trips on the Gould (our resupply vessel) to drop off baited traps, and go trolling the bottom for the particular species they are interested in. It’s a fairly manpower intensive operation, so they’ve been borrowing station members to go out with them for a few days to help out. I got to go on the second cruise last week, and had an absolute blast out there. Due to my position as the only computer guy on station, I didn’t think I’d be able to make it out, but luckily the Gould had an IT person on board that was able to swap positions with me for the three days I was gone.

We weren’t going all that far geographically, only about 30 miles or so away from the station. However, it took about 8 hours time to sail to our destination, passing thru the beautiful Neumayer strait on our way there. The Neumayer is known as one of the most spectacular bits of scenery on the Antarctic peninsula, mainly due to its narrow width, and spectacular mountain scenery on both sides. Usually you can spot humpback whales playing in the water, and there are always plenty of spectacular icebergs to watch. We got extremely lucky on our outbound passage, with perfectly clear skies and amazing visibility. One the way back, it wasn’t quite so good, but there were more whales to spot, including one humpback calf that did an amazing fin breech that unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough with the camera to capture on film.

Fishing is a 24 hour activity, so the ship’s crew was divided up into two shifts. I ended up on the midnight to noon shift which made for some interesting sleep cycles. We found that we had better luck with the type of fish we were looking for during the night shift, which kept me pretty busy. The procedure was to let the net down, drag the bottom for 20 minutes, bring it back up, sort thru the catch for the species we wanted, throw the by-catch back, and repeat. It was repetitive, but it still wasn’t sitting at my desk working on servers so I was pretty happy about it. I was also pleased to be the only one of the group from the station to not get seasick! I wouldn’t mind working on the research vessels when I’m done with Palmer, so that’s a nice discovery to make. In the genetic lottery of life, I lost out on the dancing without looking like I’m having a seizure gene, but at least I got the anti-seasickness one!