Question Time, part 1

So, I’ve gotten some questions that I probably wouldn’t get around to answering in a normal post, so I’m going with a Q&A.

Q: How many other people are there..that you actually interact with ...on a day to day basis?

A: There are 50 of us here for the winter. At work, I might interact with 6 other people, or nobody, depending on if things are running smoothly, or if something isn’t working. Yesterday, a valve on the air handler went out, causing the temps in the cryostats to spike (which is a problem if it goes on for too long), so Nate came out and worked on that. Jared and Jay were also out working on the fire and low O2 alarms (which still may or may not be working). Katie came out to do an inspection of the fire extinguishers, Steffan came out to talk a little about our dewar fill tomorrow, and Trace came out to visit and to grab Nate for another project. So far, that hasn’t been the typical day, though. Usually it’s one or two people, or nobody.

Outside of work, though, I see more than that. Meals are the main place where I see folks. There are a number of people I eat with pretty regularly. There are about 8 of us who are playing volleyball three nights/wk, and another group of us trying to get a weekly soccer game scheduled. Then there are a couple of people who’ve expressed interest in learning to ski, so I’m trying to get something together for next week, and we’ll see where that goes.

Q: How long are the days, i.e. how many hours of light?

A: Right now we have twenty-four hours of light a day, and that will continue until sunset on March 21^st, the equinox. After that there will be dusk for a month or so, and then it will be dark for 4-5 months (this is when the aurora happens, and we are supposed to get really good aurora this year, on account of there being a lot of solar activity going on), then another month or so of dusk, and sunrise, and then light again. Right now it is still pretty bizarre to wake up in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning to go for a run or ski, and have it be full light outside. I’m actually pretty excited for sunset and darkness.

This was taken from the window at the end of my hall, at
about 6:30 in the morning

Even when the sun sets, we’ll only have about half of that time when it is actually dark. The moon is up for two weeks and down for two weeks at a time here, and because of all the snow, it should get pretty bright, even if the moon isn’t full.

Q: What happens to our wastewater?

A: First, it is important to know where our water comes from. All our water is melted out of the glacier beneath us. That water is some of the oldest and cleanest water in the world. It is also not safe to drink. That’s because it is basically distilled water, and a body can only drink so much of that without having a negative reaction. So our water gets various mineral added, I’m not sure what all, but I know that it gets run through a limestone treatment.

As the water is melted and pumped out of the ice, it created a hollow. Eventually it gets to the point that the hollow is too big/deep for more water to be pumped out efficiently. At this point it gets turned over to waste management. The vast majority of our wastewater ends up frozen in the old wells. A small amount of grey water gets shipped to McMurdo and beyond for treatment, but it is very expensive to do that. Jon O, our waste guy, is hoping that we’ll eventually get some sort of waste treatment facility, but that probably won’t happen for a while, if ever.

As for the rest of our waste, we do a lot of separating. There are bins for food waste, cardboard, wood, cans, metals (ferrous, copper, and otherwise), electronics, plastics, glass, non-recylables, mixed paper, paper towels, bio/sani. Our waste guy will go through a lot of this and further divide it. Some of it is incinerated, some is shipped backed to McMurdo for further sorting and then shipped back to NZ or the US. We also have Skua, which is for things like clothes, toiletries, and other fun stuff, that is still usable, but somebody doesn’t want/need anymore. Then it is fair game for the rest of the community. I found a pair of ear-buds in there, and used them to fix my nice head-phones, which I managed to break on the way down here.

Q: What is the altitude like? How long did it take you to acclimatize? How did you do it?

A: The South Pole is located at about 9,300ft above sea level, which compared to Minnesota’s handful of ft, is a lot. Even after about three weeks here, I still get a little winded going up the stairs into the base. When I got here, I gave myself about a week of just walking around before I tried to do any running or skiing. It worked out pretty well. My first run last week, easy and short went well. I’m still doing stuff easier than I would back home. Hopefully in another couple of weeks I’ll be up to doing some hard intervals, but I’m playing it by ear and seeing how my body feels from day to day. For example, I was planning on doing my first run over an hour today. I ended up helping shovel a fuel spill, and was pretty tired afterwards, so a short run and then a nap instead. I’m hoping to do a long ski in a couple of days, but that is also going to depend on how I feel and how long I can stay out in the cold.

Q: What is the helium used for?

A: Helium is used because it’s just not cold enough down here. :)

Seriously though, liquid helium is used to cool things down to about 4.2K, just a few degrees above absolute zero. My main support goes to BICEP2, a telescope that is looking for anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. The helium there is used with some of the electronics. Cooling it down to those temperatures reduces electron and dark noise to a point well below the signals they expect to get from their observations. If there noise were higher, it would make it more difficult, to nearly impossible, to separate signal from noise and to analyze the data.

I also keep track of several thousand liters of gaseous helium. Meteorology and NOAA use that to launch weather balloons. Met launches balloons twice a day, and NOAA piggybacks on them once or twice week. I’m planning on getting out for one of the launches to see what all goes on. When I do dewar fills for BICEP2, we end up having to vent some of the helium in order to keep the pressure in transfer dewar down, such that the fill only takes 2-3 hours, rather than a day or more. This last dewar fill, I set up a fuel bladder, now know as the Bouncy Castle, as a way to capture the vented helium, rather than let it go into the atmosphere. It worked really well, although it got bigger than expected. I was able to fill about a quarter of one of gaseous helium tanks from it. That helium will probably end up getting used by Met, although some of the gaseous helium ends up getting compressed back into liquid helium.

All right, that is all for now. Keep the questions coming and I’ll try to answer them as they come up.