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".

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!