Fixing The Weather Atop a Giant Ice Dome

Law Dome, the driver of all weather patterns around these parts, is a huge dome of ice that rises about 1360 meters above sea level and is a few hundred kilometers wide. Ok, so it's not a perfect dome and there's some short and steep bits and other long shallow bits but you get the idea. Anyway, there's a weather station at the top which is visited once a year for servicing and sometimes repositioning and all the fun things that go along with that.

What is there to see around this place? Nothing but white. More white than I can think of a descriptive word for... And depending on the light, maybe a hint of blue under the snow. Last week I travelled with Mark the mechanic and Mark the plumber to do the yearly maintenence on the weather station. We spent days packing all the fuel, tools, food, and recovery gear that we may possibly need as the site is about 115km away from Casey and the trip there was going to take about 12 hours. So we were up well before dawn and off station by 7am when it was still pitch black.

The work itself was over pretty quickly: get the batteries recharged over the first night and return to service in the morning, the weather station started up as it should, the wind generator needed to be emptied of snow and the data was within calibration - happy days! The harder part was being outside in -17ºC, but it was rather pleasant because there was no wind. Also, the white out conditions made it impossible to know where the ground or the horizen were.

We broke camp around 8.30am and had a very sedate start to the drive home. By the time we parked up for the evening we were only 30km from station, but very tired from staring at white and the GPS screen. The final leg saw us arrive on station in time for Saturday brunch of bacon, eggs, baked beans and smoked salmon quiches. Delicious!

Can you pick the horizon here?

Caravanning Antarctic style.

A sign post left over from the days of the old Wilkes base. The base was in use 1957 - 1969

Jono (Mark the plumber), the signpost, vehicles and look at that, the cloud is breaking up!

Weird Things In The Sky

Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs) are clouds that live - as the name suggests - in the stratosphere, which is around 10 to 25km above the ground. All the other clouds we see are in the troposphere and that's the same part of the atmosphere that we're in. PSCs are generally seen just before sunrise or after sunset and are made up of water-ice or water-acid compunds, forming when stratospheric temperatures drop below -90ºC.

There's chemical reactions ascociated with PSCs involving chlorine and bromine that, when mixed with sunlight, are understood to deplete the ozone in the upper atmosphere. Also, pretty much all the chlorine and most of the bromine comes from human activity - go us!

Actually, Wikipedia has a pretty good description of them and the page can be found here.

A slightly out of focus photo of a PSC. As one of the expeditioners here put it, they essentially look like "an oil slick in the sky".