Dispatches from the Bottom of the World: Penguins and Boats and Crevasses, Oh My!

The Polar Star in McMurdo Sound

Exciting happenings this week. We had the US Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Star, make its way to McMurdo this week. They left this morning, and we’ll be getting the fuel tanker in this afternoon. And the cargo vessel is scheduled to arrive on the 31st. We also had a private yacht visit station with tourists, and there should be one more cruise ship stopping by in the next couple of weeks. Things are about to get very busy around here.
The Polar Star broke up some of the ice in the bay near station, but by the time they got here, a lot of the ice further out was already clear. Some of the folks who’ve been down here many seasons have said that they’ve never seen so much open water. And it happened fast. It seems like things were still pretty closed in less than two weeks ago, but this week there is open water in pretty much every direction.
And with open water has come penguins. During the marathon there was a group of Emperor penguins hanging around aid station #2. And closer to station we’ve had a ton of Adelies playing in the water. We got what might be the last nice weather of the season early in the week, and a lot of people took advantage, taking the short hike down to Hut Point to watch the Adelies and get a little bit of sun.

Adelies hanging out at Hut Point

The Adelies were very funny to watch. Where the Emperors are stand-offish and a little grumpy seeming, the Adelies are gregarious and curios. If there were folks sitting close to shore, one Adelie would walk up to them and check things out, and suddenly there’d be four or five standing around the person, almost close enough to touch.
I didn’t get that close to them, but spectated for about an hour, watching the penguins make their clumsy way across the rocks and ice, and then jump into the water and porpoise out to some other piece of ice.

My own work has been variable the last couple of weeks. I had a grantee in town last week, and then another in town this week, so that has given me some extra things to do. I’ve also been working on swapping in new computers for CosRay, since the station is finally upgrading operating systems on the network computers. It has been interesting working with IT to get IP addresses assigned with all the right permissions and such. Facilities has been working on rerunning a lot of the power lines around station and they are to the lines running between station and Scott Base, which means that CosRay is also facing a short power outage in the next few weeks, so I also learned how to run a UPS backup battery test in order to make sure that the system would remain powered and continue transmitting data during the power outage. Everything went well there, so now I am just waiting on word for when the outage will happen, so I can keep an eye on things.
Earlier in the season I applied to be part of the winter Search and Rescue team. Initially, Loomy, the guy in charge of SAR, put me in as the first alternate, but one of his team members failed the PQ and I officially joined the team and started training with my new teammates. So far it has mostly been classroom/indoor training on pulley systems, knots, self-belaying, etc, but every other Thursday we head out into the field for some more practical experience. For our first outing we spent the morning at the crevasse simulator not too far from Happy Camper. We got introduced to the various anchoring systems, and then set up a main line, belay line and two edge kits.

Jamie doing edge duty

Then we started putting people over the edge and into the “crevasse”, which was a large pit that’s been dug out by Fleet Ops just for the US and Kiwi SAR teams to practice on.

Looking up at my edge crew from the bottom of the "crevasse".

We had lunch out there and then packed up our gear, hopped back in the Hagglund and found a real crevasse to play in. This time Loomy treated it like an actual response, told us what he wanted and expected us to get things set up. We actually got things set up pretty quickly, although we had to redo the anchors on the belay line so that they would pull evenly, but Loomy was pretty pleased with us. Once everything was set up, we started dropping people into the crevasse.

Jonathan tying in to the main and belay lines

Chris, Gavin and Jamie hauling someone out of the crevasse on the main line

Rebecca holding the main line

Going down into the crevasse was very cool. The ceiling was covered in huge ice crystals. I grabbed a couple on my way back up to the surface for a closer look. The crevasse itself was a few hundred meters deep, and we were able to get lowered most of the way to the bottom before it got too narrow. All in all, it was a pretty awesome day, and we’ll be heading out for another adventure this Thursday, so I’m looking forward to that.