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".

Midwinter Madness

Midwinters, as far as I'm aware, is commonly considered a pagan celebration for... um, something. There's probably dancing and mild nudity with a bit of fire thrown in for good measure and maybe something about rebirth of the sun. Anyway, down here the Midwinter celebrations mark the middle of our 12 month posting and essentially act as a bit of Christmas within the wintering crew where we have a too much food and argue with each other give each other presents.

Another tradition is a swim where a hole is cut in the ice and we jump in one at a time for a dip in the lovely cool water. The look on some people's face will make you think that the water is a little on the frigid side where perhaps they'll need to do a little searching later for some special appendages, but that is a lie! Just look at me swimming like a duck having a bath. Unfortunately we had to wait a few days for the wind to calm down so that we wouldn't freeze as soon as we got out of the water, but we still had to move quickly to get our footwear off before the shoe laces froze in place.

Enough rambling, here are some photos of food, our decorations and mostly nude men.

Flags of the world and, as usual, Michael eating.

Wilfred made an appearance and a very funny speech

We each gave each other a present, inside this pretty wrapper was a book of amazing photos taken around Tasmania

One of 3 desserts for the evening, a Troll Doll... Or, panncotta with Turkish style fairy floss.

Aaron was moving quickly to get dry

Ben H enjoyed his dip

The hole. Would you be willing to jump in there?

"Splish splash, I was taking a bath"

Matty had 2 goes. Yes people, there's someone nuttier than me down here.

Caning Along the Cane Line

While we don't have any actual roads down here, there are routes between the field huts and the runway that are marked by canes set up in a nice neat line and, with all imagination possible, are called cane lines. The canes are made from bamboo cut into 4 to 6 metre lengths and have a steel can tied to them about 3/4 of the way up.

The idea is two fold:

1. When driving in really bad weather where the wind is strong and the visibility virtually non-existant and by having the route marked with these canes set at reasonable intervals apart, we can have a pretty good idea of where the route is. Following the GPS also helps...
2. Also, with the steel cans being picked up by the radar, that system can also be followed. Back-ups for back-ups and all that.

Last week I went with Mick and Matty for a couple of days worth of drilling ice, placing canes and generally having a good time with the machinery we took with us. We left later than expected and dragged a hut, known as The Silver Chalet, behind a tractor. Yup, we took our house with us like snails (thanks for that one mum!). As the days are so short, by the time we reached the start point at 5.30pm, the sun had been down for a couple of hours and we were hungry, so we set up the Chalet and got to work on unfreezing dinner. Good thing we've got a chef on station to prepare all this delicious food.

The night was windy but we were toasty warm in the hut. I'd like to say we had another late start because of how warm were over night, but the real reason was that an alarm was set to remind us to fill up the generator... at 2.30am. All we could here was "boing, boing, boing, boing" coming from somewhere in the hut. Took about 5 minutes to find the offending iPod in a cupboard, which was duly put next to the culprit's head who failed to wake up until he was yelled at, turned off the alarm (or so we thought) and then "boing, boing, boing" came back about 15 minutes later. So, a restless night and a late start was followed by a spectacular sunrise and brilliant day. We spent the day with one of us on the quad bike, one driving the Hagg and one driving the tractor with the quad and Hagg people doing the drilling and cane placement every 250m. The process was slow as we had to keep the track exactly on the GPS route, plus the tractor only goes about 15km/h with that kind of load on the back. Another short day with first light around 8.30am and sunrise about 10.45am, the sun saying 'hello' for about 3hrs and last light fading by 3.30pm, all followed by a beautifully starry night with a sickle moon and slight aurora. Pity none of the moon and aurora photos came out very well.

The amazing pre dawn light.

The red Hagg carrying a drill on the back and the tractor pulling the Silver  Chalet

We actually rested well that night and were up at 8.00am to get an early start to finish the job, then plod along on our way back to station. We finally arrived just in time to catch the last part of light which helped us with refuelling the vehicles and packing everything up. All in all a great trip out, but I've left off one important thing: there's no toilet attached to the hut and we don't leave any waste out in the field. For pee we have large buckets with screw top lids that also take the grey water and for poo, we have the wag bag. You haven't lived until you've squatted behind a tractor for protection from the wind in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica and taken a dump in a bag, all while your fingers slowly freeze. Needless to say I held on as long as I could and made sure I only had to do it once in the trip. Has to be said, it was one of the best views I've had while squatting.

I'm not sure how well it can be seen, but on the horizon and especially on the right are some heat lines causing weird reflections and refractions off the ice.

I drew a face!

How to Guide for Families and Friends

One of the things that we generally miss out on celebrating with family and friends are birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Mother's/Father's Day and all those sorts of days that are all about gathering people together. Although with 21 men on the station this year, I'd be surprised if anyone gets a Mother's Day present... alright, that's a lie because mum sent one to me.

Apparently a very odd story, but definitely a good Mother's Day present for me...

The first thing to do is to know your expeditioner well or get to know them if you don't. Next, pick out one or more things to send to them and wrap in a box or envelope or other such thing. Write strict instructions that the parcel should be delivered on a specific date to the expeditioner and then write the address as found on this page. After that you should check the shipping/flight schedule, the lunar calandar, consult some sort of almanak, ask the locals if their bung knees are playing up and post the package in the hope that it'll arrive at the AAD in time to be sent to the station before either the expeditioner leaves that station or winter arrives and nothing can get in.

Unfortunately we're in the middle of winter so no cargo will arrive and I'll be out of here by about the time the next opportunity comes along, so don't send anything to me. Feel free to send something fun or completely useless down to the station just for the hell of it as I'm sure someone will get a laugh.


My family has been spectacularly brilliant and hilarious in helping alleviate the problems with missing these days by sending in a box of stuff at the beginning of the season and writing dates on everything for when I'm supposed to open them. There were chocolates that I didn't need, but were delicious and t-shirts that I did need, but didn't taste as good, plus a few books that have been well digested except for the one about the discovery of vegemite because I'm still getting through the other ones I brought with me. Mum did pretty well at having a box of stuff put together from all the family - made me laugh a lot.

Multi coloured birthday beanie from the multi talented Jannelle of Macquarie Island.

A polar bear made from really tiny blocks from a formerly really tiny person, Jen. Think I might give the making of its own post.

Thanks for sharing the love on my birthday Liv!

Postcards from the South

Greetings and salutations from the frozen South, the land that has so much ice its sheer mass is keeping the Earth on an even keel and balance out all those big continents in the Northern hemisphere. Well, I'm sure someone around the world believes that one...

A few short months ago I was contacted through a marvellous network of people working off the 6 degrees of seperation theory and asked to send a postcard to the Handley Homeschool in Redmond, WA, USA. And now I'm finally getting off my lazy bum and doing as I promised and posting a photo of the postcard before sending on the next available post..... on a flight in Novemeber.

Pillip Law on the summit of Arthurson Bluff, Oates Land, with a Bell 47G helicopter, 1962

In the mean time, email and phone calls are definitely the best ways to stay in contact with people down here. Unfortunately video calling software is generally blocked as they are peer to peer based and they don't let us have those sorts of programs. Of course, for these sorts of conversations to work each side has to actually remember to reply to the other, which is something I've been guilty of not doing recently. Sorry people.

Living in Antarctica

In case you're wondering, yes, I did sing the title to the tune of James Brown's "Living in America" although I think that's about where the similarities end. What I really want to highlight in this post is what our living space actually looks like, how we entertain ourselves and all of that sort of stuff. The fact is we still try and lead a so called 'normal' life in that we go to work, watch movies, try to keep some semblance of fitness and have socialise together.

The station with the Red Shed in the middle and Green Store to the left

The main living building here is the Red Shed (such an original name) which contains our rooms - and with such small numbers we even get a spare! - a library, the kitchen and mess, a bar and pool table, a cinema and a sadly now defunct climbing wall. Apparently there's a new one being put in next year but we don't get the benefit of enjoying it. Actually, I hope they make it a bouldering wall as that'll make using the wall easier if only one person wants to do it.

We also have a spa and sauna and both are used fairly regularly, plus skis for the more energetic people.

A typical cold porch where jackets and boots can be placed so as to leave all the snow and ice outside

Anyone for cross-country skiing?

If someone feels like doing a spot of sewing, here's the place to do it

My spare room -what's that peering out the window?

My room is much cleaner than it has been in a while and yes, the building is warm enough that I use a doona cover and mattress protector to keep me warm at night.

The music corner

One defunct climbing wall

Billiards goes with...

Darts...

And beer!

The table tennis comps can be ferocious. Well, they would be if we used the table.

Library with an incomplete puzzle

And the rest of the library

We even have air hockey!

A cardio room (the weights gym is hidden in the Green Store)

Movie time!

In reclining chairs and dark corners

A few years ago the Comms Techs had a little project building this arcade machine

"The Wallow" that occasionally turns into a dance floor complete with flashing lights and mirror ball.

The mess

And a phone booth for all clandestine calls. Otherwise feel free to call from any other phone and run the risk of having people come past and listen in on your conversation.