Wooster Geologists

The latest update is that our advance team is delayed another day, and weather at WAIS Divide is looking iffy for another few days. That makes it fairly likely that the rest of our team could be pushed into next week before flying out, although we haven’t yet totally given up hope of getting out this week. Delays are an expectation when going through WAIS Divide, and we have enough wiggle room built into our schedule that we’re not yet concerned about having enough time to get our science done. But for our own peace of mind, we would like to get out soon!

Pretty soon I’ll run out of interesting things to tell you about at McMurdo, but I’ve got at least a couple more posts in mind. Since we’re spending lots of time in McMurdo, I can tell you a little bit about what life is like here and get you oriented to our current location. McMurdo is sited on the southernmost reliably ice-free land area in the world that also can be reached by ship. It’s dry and windy enough here that the snow tends to sublimate away before enough can build up on top to start making ice, so the ground stays mostly clear, making it a great place to build a research station.

Looking down on McMurdo Station from nearby Observation Hill

The map below shows McMurdo’s location on the tip of Ross Island. The solid red line on the map is known as the “grounding line” – it’s where ice goes from sitting on land to floating. Everything to the left of the solid red line is ice sitting on the mainland of Antarctica. Everything to the right of the solid red line is floating ice (or ice on islands). There’s also a dotted red line that intersects with Ross Island. That’s the approximate line between the permanent ice shelf (which is ice that has flowed from the ice sheet out onto the ocean but is still attached to the ice sheet) and sea ice (which is ice that froze out of ocean water, so it was never a part of the ice sheet).

The location of McMurdo on Ross Island, with nearby features labeled. The satellite imagery is from the MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (MOA) 2009 image.

When you stand on the shoreline at McMurdo this time of year, it’s hard to remember there’s an ocean there, because McMurdo Sound is full of sea ice (and also seals; spoiler alert, my next post will contain pictures of baby seals!). It’s also difficult to tell where the sea ice ends and the McMurdo Ice Shelf begins. Most lines between sea ice and an ice shelves are very obvious because ice shelves tend to be much thicker than sea ice, but the McMurdo Ice Shelf is very thin, making the dividing line difficult to spot. It’s possible to drive vehicles and even land planes safely on the sea ice this time of year, and it’s safe to do that year-round on the McMurdo and Ross Ice Shelves.

Looking out over the sea ice on McMurdo sound on a beautifully lit evening.

Most of McMurdo life, however, takes place on solid ground on Ross Island. McMurdo Station was founded in 1956 and is the largest research station in Antarctica. In the summer it houses around 1,000 people, and can support up to ~1,250. In the winter the population dwindles to just a couple hundred. McMurdo was built for functionality, not for aesthetic; it has a very industrial feel. Buildings are fairly austere, although a few are cheerily colored, and they’re all numbered (although there’s no spatial logic whatsoever to which number is where!).  None of the roads are paved and heavy machinery is abundant, so you spend a lot of time walking in wheel ruts. Being new to McMurdo, I made the mistake of brining tennis shoes rather than hiking boots for daily wear. Fortunately, there’s a building where any item left behind by someone in the past is available to anyone else for free, and I happened to walk in 10 minutes after a pair of brand new hiking boots in my size were set out on the shelf. I am at a loss as to why someone abandoned them, but I’m feeling very lucky that I was able to snag them!

A typical scene around McMurdo.

Everyone lives in dorms at McMurdo and eats in the dining hall, which is known as the Galley. Ingredients – particularly fresh ingredients – are often very limited, but McMurdo’s cooking is excellent (particularly when it comes to desserts). There is a store on-site, as well, where you can buy necessities like shampoo and medicines, comfort items like chocolate bars and alcohol, and a range of souvenirs (I confess that it seems strange to me that the McMurdo souvenirs aren’t available to purchase in Christchurch – as it is, they fly everything down so we can fly it back home. On the other hand, it does mean that my family members will get shirts that have actually been to Antarctica!).

The Galley, where an artist-in-residence was giving a talk on Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition.

As McMurdo’s primary function is to support scientific research, many of the buildings are dedicated to science or to getting scientific equipment out into the field. Our team spends most of the time during the day squeezed into a couple offices in the Crary Laboratory building, which also houses equipment for chemical and physical experiments, and includes a set of aquariums on the lower level with bizarre Antarctic aquatic organisms. We also spend a lot of time at the Science Support Center (SSC) where we did our rope training, which has space to set up tents and stage gear inside, the Berg Field Center (BFC) where much of our issued field gear is housed, and Science Cargo where we sort and package all of our equipment on pallets and turn it over to the professionals to get it loaded onto the plane. Our team has approximately 37,000 pounds (yes, that’s the correct number of zeros) of equipment to carry out our science and live fairly comfortably in the deep field for a couple months, and getting it all labeled, weighed, organized, and entered into the cargo system is a huge task.

Our team members putting away an Arctic Oven Tent that we had set up inside the SSC. Getting all the air out is a team effort.

Although we have been working hard, McMurdo also has many opportunities for leisure time. There are several gyms on-site, as well as a great set of hiking trails (which I’ll talk about in my next post!). We have lectures twice a week from scientists and artists-in-residence, either in the dining hall or in the library at Crary Lab. There are three bars (one of them is also a coffee house) that are very popular in the evenings, which often host scheduled or unscheduled parties. And there are several other rooms that provide diversions, such as the craft room and the gear distribution center, which includes skis and mountain bikes as well as musical instruments for loan. We even have several TV channels that get sports or news feeds from the US, and a local channel that plays movies.

The gym that houses the cardio equipment, known as the Gerbil Gym.

We’re really anxious to get out of McMurdo so we can start our research, but it is pretty incredible what kind of support systems are available here. Just across the bay from my dorm is a hut built by Scott’s Discovery expedition in the early 1900s (I will also talk more about that in a later post). I don’t think that any of those men, who huddled in the drafty hut through long Antarctic winters, could have guessed what incredible amounts of infrastructure would be built on Ross Island in just a few short decades.

We’re crossing our fingers that weather holds well enough at WAIS Divide to get a plane out there this evening, but our advance team is currently delayed until tomorrow (December 3rd). The earliest the rest of us will get out is still pencilled in for Thursday, December 5th, but we’re playing it by ear.

Once we do get out of McMurdo, to get to our field sites we fly to the permanent camp at WAIS Divide, possibly from WAIS Divide to a fueling stopover/gear cache at Lower Thwaites Glacier, and then to “Cavity Camp” on the floating portion of Thwaites Glacier. Cavity Camp is very remote, and our site at Dotson will be even a bit more remote. We are bringing everything with us that we need and then some, but to get all the gear there, and in case of an emergency, it’s extremely important that we have good communications among the team members and between the team and operations staff at WAIS Divide and at McMurdo.

Our team leader is Erin Pettit from Oregon State University. She is extremely experienced in field research, and, fortunately for us, is also fantastic at creating a functional and positive team environment. Everyone on the team has assigned responsibilities. Some of those responsibilities are scientific. For example, Atsu is in charge of managing the seismic surveys, Erin runs the ground-penetrating radar, and Martin and Dale are in charge of the drilling. My primary role is to assist Atsu with the seismic measurements, as his setup takes two people to run, and I also have responsibilities for strategizing data collection for a few features of interest and integrating our plans with the big-picture context of Thwaites Glacier and the Amundsen Sea. In addition to science duties, everyone will pitch in to help around the camp. Some people will be on cooking and cleaning duties, for example, while another will keep an eye on the tie-downs and guy lines used to hold gear and tents in place in case a storm whips up. Giving everyone clear responsibilities means that no important task slips through the cracks.

Our camp under Mount Erebus during our overnight shakedown

To work out these team responsibilities and facilitate trust and open communication, as well as to test out all our gear, we had an overnight camp “shakedown” as part of our training. We went out on the McMurdo Ice Shelf to an absolutely stunning location under Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on Earth, which gently steamed under a crystal clear blue sky. Cece and Blair gave us some tips on setting up tents with strong snow anchors, cutting snow blocks, and building wind walls. Bruce and Christian decided to dig themselves a large trench with slots in the sides to sleep in, just for the fun of it (they did, in fact, sleep in their trench, but they failed to dig big enough slots to allow them to turn over, so they were stuck in one position all night). It was actually a really relaxing and enjoyable overnight. If we get that kind of weather in the deep field, it will be lovely trip; but it didn’t give us much experience testing our gear in harsh conditions, which we’re likely to face!

Bruce (left) and Christian (right) starting to dig their trench. They cut slots in the sides of the trench and slept in the slots on our shakedown.

While we were on our shakedown, we also tested out some of our communications equipment. Much of our communication with McMurdo will be via satellite transmissions. We have four satellite phones with us, as well as a satellite internet uplink that will let us send text emails back to McMurdo (and hopefully some blog posts back to the Wooster Geologists blog!). Eight of us on the team also own inReach devices, which are GPS units that also link to the Iridium satellite network, allowing us to text family from home and also to send text messages to each other in the field. For emergencies, we also have a high-frequency (HF) radio with a huge antenna that we can set up – we practiced using that on the shakedown, as well.

Team members setting up the HF radio

We will check in with McMurdo at a specific time every day. If we don’t check in by our specified time, McMurdo immediately initiates search-and-rescue operations, so we’re all responsible for remembering to make that check-in on-time. Since we will have multiple teams working away from camp to take radar and seismic measurements, we will also have set check-in times every few hours with each other. The daily check-ins with McMurdo will also include sharing weather observations and forecasts, which will be very important in planning our activities each day. Although every team that leaves camp carries survival bags, getting caught out in a storm is not something we intend to do!

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) primarily exists to support scientific research in Antarctica. In order to provide that support, one of their most important functions is to ensure the safety of all personnel involved in the research. Much of our time at McMurdo has been spent doing trainings to get us oriented to the station, our environment, and the equipment we’ll be using. I’ve had general trainings on operating NSF’s light vehicles, waste management, medical facilities, fire prevention and response, harassment, and environmental protection. I’ve also done field-oriented trainings on understanding the contents of our survival bags (we carry these with us at all times off station or out of camp; they include things like emergency tents and sleeping bags, a stove, fuel, and food), recognizing signs of hypothermia and frostbite, assessing and managing risk, and driving snowmobiles. We also do trainings that are specific to where we’re headed in the field. In our case, that includes crevasse rescue training.

Our team is headed (as soon as we can get out of McMurdo) for two camps in the deep field, both of which are on ice shelves. Ice shelves are the floating extensions of the ice sheet: they’re connected to and flowing with the ice on the continent, but they are also truly floating on the ocean, going up and down with the tides. Since the undersides of ice shelves are sitting in water, there is virtually no friction at their bases slowing them down, so ice tends to speed up when it flows into an ice shelf. Any time ice speeds up, goes around a bend, crosses a big change in elevation, or hits a bump in the bedrock, it tends to crack, forming crevasses. These crevasses can be hundreds of feet deep and are often hidden by a fragile layer of snow known as a “snow bridge,” which can be very difficult to spot. If you unknowingly cross a snow bridge, it may collapse under your weight, dropping you into the crevasse.

We plan to do our best to avoid crevasses in the first place. Our team includes two professional field guides, Cece and Blair, who will scout all our sites and travel routes before we use them for science. That has been done as much as possible already using high-resolution satellite imagery. Once our advance team gets to WAIS Divide, they will go out on one or two reconnaissance (“recce”) flights to inspect our sites from the air. If it’s safe, the pilot will land, and Cece, Blair, and our team member Martin will run radar to double-check that there aren’t bottom crevasses in our camp location that could disrupt the drilling operations. Once the team gets to the field, Cece and Blair will travel the routes we plan to take and use flags to mark areas that are safe and indicate hazards to avoid.

Proving routes in this way is incredibly valuable and raises our margin of safety greatly, but we will be in a rapidly changing environment, and new crevasses can open or be uncovered during our time in the field. We will ensure that our campsite is in a spot that is really, really safe, so there’s no problem walking around there without extra precautions. Anytime we move outside of camp, however, we will used roped travel, whether that’s on a snowmobile, on foot, or by ski. In this system, everyone wears climbing harnesses, and attaches their harnesses to knots in a long rope connecting the party. Each member of the team is spaced out a good ways – our foot/ski ropes will have a 15-meter spacing between people, and the snowmobile rope teams will have a longer spacing. The idea is that if someone breaks through a snow bridge, the other people on the team will be able to catch them on the rope. When we did our crevasse rescue training in the field last week, part of what we did was learn how to properly lay out ropes for travel, tie the right knots, and clip in securely.

Blair sets up knots in one of the ropes that we will use in the field for roped snowmobile travel

Once a person falls into a crevasse and is caught by the rope, there are lots of options for getting that person out. Assuming the person is conscious and can communicate, the team can start by just trying to walk away from the crevasse and haul them out. It’s really important to communicate, however, because sometimes crevasses have overhangs that the person can get crushed under as the team hauls them out. If the person can’t communicate (perhaps they’re just too far away to hear), or if the team isn’t strong enough or the footing not solid enough to haul the person out by walking, there are a bunch of options.

First, the person in the crevasse will be connected to the rope with two smaller looped cords, attached with a knot called a Prusik hitch. This hitch can slide up the rope easily when not under tension, but holds tight when weighted. One of those Prusiks is attached to the waist of the harness, and the other is attached beneath it and has another loop tied in it that goes around the foot. If the person in the crevasse is able, they will stand up on the foot Prusik and move the waist Prusik up the rope. Then they put their weight on the waist Prusik and move the foot Prusik up, continuing that way until they can wriggle up over the edge of the crevasse.

Me practicing using Prusik hitches to move up and down a rope during our indoor rope training, while field guide Blair watches and gives me instructions

If the person in the crevasse is unconscious or unable to move up the rope on their own, the team up above needs to set up a pulley system to get them to the top. The first thing that has to be done is to make it so the team isn’t having to use their weight to keep the person in the crevasse from falling. This involves digging a snow anchor, in which some sort of stable object, such as a shovel, ice axe, or a piece of metal that has been designed to be a strong snow anchor, is buried a foot or two deep in the snow and rigged so it can be attached to the climbing rope that the person in the crevasse is on. Once the snow anchor has the person’s weight, the rest of the rope team have more freedom to move around to build a pulley system, get another team member down into the crevasse to help the person if necessary, lower another rope to the person in the crevasse, etc. Exactly which technique is used depends strongly on the individual situation. Fortunately, either Cece or Blair will be with every team working outside of camp, so they will be there to make technical decisions and give directions if a crevasse rescue is necessary.

Blair (right) helps Atsu and Doug rig a pulley system that can be used to get a teammate out of a crevasse

These techniques were all brand new to me. We practiced much of the rope work indoors first (I arrived in McMurdo at 3:30 in the morning and indoor rope training started that day at 8 am. I was a bit late, but I did make it!). The day after our indoor training, we spent the whole day out on the ice shelf where a bulldozer had been used to dig a large simulated crevasse. It was really valuable to practice the same skills we learned indoors in an outdoor setting – everything gets harder when you’re wearing gloves and your rope is digging into the snow.

Cece (top) helps Ted with some advanced crevasse rescue techniques in the bulldozed “crevasse”

We don’t expect to need any of our crevasse rescue skills; we intend to avoid crevasses in the first place. But we also need to be prepared in case we need to act in an emergency situation!

Before I dive into the current topic, a quick update on our logistics: Our advance team was supposed to fly out on Wednesday, November 27, but between bad weather at WAIS Divide and the holiday weekend, they are now officially delayed until Monday, December 2nd. Once they get out to the camp at WAIS Divide, they will run reconnaissance flights (“recce flights”) from there to scout the site and start putting in our first field camp on Thwaites Glacier. The rest of our team will follow to get in position at WAIS Divide, probably in stages. My guess is I’ll be listed on a flight that’s aiming to leave for WAIS Divide sometime in the middle of next week; it’s highly unlikely that we’d leave as early as Monday (the day all of us who aren’t on the advance team were originally hoping to fly), and we could get out as late as who-knows-when, depending on weather. That’s all to say: Expect several blog posts over the next few days, since I should still have relatively reliable internet as long as we’re in McMurdo. Things will get much spottier and less verbose (and with fewer pictures) once we move to the deep field!

Now on to the topic at hand: staying safe in the field…

Antarctica is not a forgiving continent. Staying safe in the field requires careful advance planning, a detailed understanding of the terrain, constant vigilance to catch changes in surface conditions, close attention to weather observations, and plans for every contingency. The mortality rate of Antarctica’s earliest visitors was harrowingly high, but modern scientific expeditions are very safe. However, that safety is only achieved by hard work before and during the field season.

Our time in McMurdo has two main purposes: prepare our science and cargo for the field, and prepare ourselves for the field. Preparing our science and cargo for the field would make for a pretty mundane blog post (it involves many hours of testing, labeling, spreadsheets, and packing), but I thought you might find it interesting to know how we prepare ourselves for the field. This is a big topic, so this will be the first in a series of posts on staying safe in the field (which may or may not be posted consecutively). I’ll talk here about staying warm, and in later posts I’ll cover how we train for the field and what sort of communications and emergency responses we have available.

One of the most important aspects of staying safe in the field is staying warm. Everyone who comes to Antarctica with the US Antarctic Program (USAP) is directed to bring our own base layers (the technical name for long underwear), which are typically wool, silk, or synthetic lightweight layers that are worn as the first layer beneath many. These layers are good at wicking moisture away from the skin, keeping us relatively dry and warm. We also have to bring our own socks. I like to wear a pair of silk liner socks under heavyweight wool socks.

After base layers, we move onto mid-layers. USAP provides some of these at the Clothing Distribution Center (CDC) in Christchurch, and typically people bring some of their own, as well. I usually wear a pair of fleece pants over my base layer, as well as one or two light-to-midweight fleece tops. Sometimes I’ll swap a fleece for a lightweight down jacket. Whenever possible I choose mid-layers that have hoods, as these can be pulled over or under hats while keeping drafts off my neck.

Wearing the USAP-issued parka, “Big Red.”

USAP supplies most of our outerwear. We’re provided with seriously warm boots, waterproof snow pants, and the iconic big, cozy parka known as “Big Red.” They also provide us with thin liner gloves, insulated leather work gloves, mittens, goggles, a hat, a balaclava, and a neck gaiter. I was pleased to note that most of the issued gear fits me fairly well; in the past, USAP gear was limited to men’s sizes, and women (especially small women) often found outfitting at the CDC to be challenging. My waterproof pants and fleece mid-layer are definitely a bit big but wearable, and the proportions of Big Red make working in the parka difficult for just about everyone, but especially for smaller individuals (if it’s not too terribly cold, I’ll switch to wearing a smaller down coat I brought myself; many people bring their own outerwear that’s a little easier to work in) . The biggest problem for me is that the smallest work glove size is too large for me, making working in those nearly impossible. Fortunately I brought a few pairs of my own gloves.

I like to wear silk liner gloves under relatively thin work gloves, and I keep mittens in my pockets to warm up my hands when I don’t need the dexterity of gloves. I wear a neck gaiter – just a wide, stretchy loop of fabric that goes around my neck, like a compact scarf – which I can pull up over my mouth and nose when the cold or wind are too much. I tend to wear one relatively lightweight hat and use my hoods for extra warmth. With 24-hour sunlight and a highly reflective snow surface, eye protection is very, very important; I have a pair of glacier glasses with adaptive polarized lenses that do a really excellent job toning down the brightness, and I also plan to always carry my USAP-issued tinted goggles that can cover more of the area around my eyes if it is too cold or windy.

All the clothing I’ll wear on a typical day in the field

Having the right clothing is vital to staying warm, but just wearing the gear is not enough. It’s really important to dress in layers and to proactively add and remove layers as needed. Just as getting too cold is a problem, getting too warm and sweaty makes your clothing damp, cooling things down quickly if you stop moving or if the temperature drops. It takes some practice to figure out which layers work best for you and for the weather conditions, and adjustments have to be made throughout the day as weather changes. Rather than adding more clothing to get warmer, sometimes it’s more important to start moving, or to eat or drink something calorie-dense; your body can’t produce enough heat without calories for energy, and typically it’s important to eat many more calories than normal to keep your body warm in a cold environment (i.e. we eat a LOT of chocolate). When needed, we also use external heat sources; in particular, we sometimes use instant hand and toe warmers in our gloves and boots, and will fill our thermoses and Nalgene water bottles with boiling water for hot drinks and for hot water bottles that act as a temporary heat source.

USAP also provides our camping equipment. We have several types of tents, which I hope to talk about in later posts. One of the most important aspects of staying warm at night is having insulation between the ground and your sleeping bag. Sleeping bags keep you warm primarily through the insulating effects of air trapped by the down or synthetic insulation. Underneath your body, the air is squished out of the sleeping bag, so that’s often where the most heat is lost. USAP provides both a foam sleeping mat and an inflatable sleeping mat, which are stacked on top of each other under the sleeping bag. The sleeping bags themselves are large and warm, and we typically use a fleece or synthetic sleeping bag liner or two to fill in some of the space inside the sleeping bag, or an extra bag over the top to make the whole system warmer. Depending on the temperature and the warmth of the sleeping bag and the temperature of the night, I might sleep in just my base layers, or I may add layers as necessary. I also often wear booties with down insulation in the tent and in in my sleeping bag to keep my feet warm (hot water bottles help with this, too!). We use “mummy bags,” which are sleeping bags that are narrower near the feet to keep them warmer, and have a hood that can be cinched in on cold nights so only your nose sticks out.

The result of all this is that, although it’s common to get cold from time to time throughout the day, there’s usually no excuse for staying cold. You add layers, use external heat sources, eat something, and start moving. It’s a lot of effort and requires a lot of practice and management, but we’re typically relatively warm and comfortable in the field.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you back in the US!