Reader Demographics

Hello people out there in the world! Thanks for taking the time to read my drivel, I appreciate the readership very muchly.

Blogspot have been kind enough to offer the ability to track where hits to the site come from and I thought I'd share some of the places around the world that have been reading this thing recently:

How is Australia not at the top of the list?

So as you can see there's a fairly diverse selection of countries from just about every continent, although I'm not sure if I've quite cracked the African market. Maybe stories from a frozen land are so far removed from the imagination? Anyway, there are few countries that aren't shown in green on this map that have, recently, been visiting this page, including: Russia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and France.

The above picture is from a few months ago, sometime around the middle of May. Following are the listings of this week, month and since the dawn of time.

This week. Hello Asian friends!

The past month.

Since the beginning. Hello to all those Rusiian supermodels reading this page (don't destroy my illusion, please)

It's pretty cool that there are people all over the world willing to read the inanity I put up here. As long as you're all somewhat entertained, job done.

Ze Plane! Ze Plane!

Sunday saw us turn the clocks back to our childhood when toys and friendly competition were rife. The toys of the day were these rubber band powered balsa wood planes, known in Antarctic circles as "Hangar Rats", that we spent the afternoon throwing around the wallow.

A number people went to special effort to decorate or modify their planes in some wonderful attempts to win the prestigious design award. There was replica Israeli insignia, a Red Baron, the Green Hornet and the official station airline, however the winner was the triplane by Mark J.

Triplane

The first flights were cheered well, but there were some early problems as planes crashed into walls and rubber bands broke. The first casualty only took two flights. Chad's plane lots its wings on about the third flight and he spent the rest of the time launching it like a missile at the other planes. After about an hour of flying the planes and everyone getting tired from walking up and down the stairs, Mike decided to try and shoot down the competition. In the end, despite a few disintegrations, the most spectacular crash was awarded to Allan for his especially destructive wall-sled-stairs-floor flight.

Green Hornet with what look like fried eggs

The Triplane crashes

Getting the plane out of a ski

The Israeli plane gets stuck

Official station airlines

Jeremy and his double wing creation

Someone's cheating

The aftermath of destruction

Sadly, the Green Hornet didn't survive as the sheer power from the rubber band tore the fuselage apart. The Triplane and Ninja airlines survived.

Red Baron is hiding away, ready to pounce

We tried one outside and even then these planes don't land well

Interviews and Zombies

Last week I was interviewed by a local Perth radio station. It's a good laugh although my voice sounds a little odd.

Then on Saturday we had a zombie night, complete with morsels of tongue, brains, livers, cheeks and tripe (my old enemy). Here's a few great photos, most of them from Michael S. I wonder how a zombie would've done in the interview, the groans probably would've had a bit more clarity. Check out the next installment of "This Week at Casey" to see the rest of the photos.

Zombie chef waiting for his meal (photo: Michael S.)

Abrar attacks!

Well dressed zombie

Dr and his victim

Someone got Tim the chippie!

Photos of asian zombies taking photos of food

Zombie groans (photo: Michael S.)

Wildlife Returns!

After months of darkness and hibernation and a large number of blizzards blowing the sea ice away, we finally had some calm and relatively warm weather to take advantage of and take advantage we did. Jukka the Comms Tech and I wandered over to Shirley Island, across a small channel of sea ice that luckily doesn't get blown out when the winds come, to see what we could see and maybe spy the first seal for the upcoming spring birthing season. Luckily Tim and Young Ben had already been out there the day before, so we knew exactly where to look.

So, we donned our backpacks with camera in hand and sauntered off from station, down the snow drift and over the sea ice. The seal didn't really take much effort to find as she was in the only really logical spot, right at the shallow edge of the ice and having a nice rest. We welcomed the first viewing of wildlife with great excitement.

There she is, the first weddell seal

Having a scratch

Jukka waits patiently while I faff around with my zoom lens

More posing

A very blue iceberg sitting in the channel between the mainland and Shirley Island

4am on the Fuel Farm

A couple of weeks ago we did the mid year fuel transfer from the lower fuel farm to the upper fuel farm. You can read the slightly more official and definitely more boring story here. The monitoring of transfer was conducted by crack teams of expeditioners, taking watch in 2 hour periods over the 24hrs it took to complete the transfer.

My group, consisting of Jukka, Aaron and Ben M (Young Swayze) on the upper fuel farm and Matt the Viking, Ben H and me on the lower fuel farm were given the dubious honour of trying to keep ourselves awake during the 4am - 6am shift of death. Our previous shift had ended at 10pm so trying to squeeze some sleep in there was vitally important.

What's the best way to keep yourself awake at these times of morning? Well may you think that coffee and other warm drinks are the answer, but you'd be wrong. The correct answer is: singing and putting on ridiculous accents over the radio. You see, every 15 minutes we were required to call the upper fuel farm and compare the amount of fuel in the tank we were draining to the amount of fuel they were filling and that number would give us a good indication as to whether or not there was a leak somewhere in the 500m hose.

We had some lovely renditions of "If you wanna be my lover" by the Spice Girls, "Like a rolling stone" by Bob Dylan and "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot. It's a pity none of these were recorded, we could've made millions from people laughing at us!

The sun, at midday, was pretty much following the cloud line towards the left of frame until it set about 2 1/2 hrs later.

Ben suddenly realised he was having his photo taken

The fuel farm

The big sign so that we don't forget where we are.

Home sweet home, with a pretty awesome ice cliff in front of it.

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".