Midwinter Dinner

This last Saturday was one of the biggest events of the year, the Midwinter Dinner. The galley gets all fixed up, and folks drag out their fanciest clothes. The wintersolstice is a big deal-- the days will now start getting longer! It is pitch dark 24/7 now, but in six weeks or so we'll be seeing some pale light on the horizon, and the sun will officially rise on the 19th of August. I did the math and realized that I'm already three weeks past the midpoint of my contract-- time is flying!

Doing better with the insomnia. I had a month with only maybe three good night's sleep, and it was really wearing me down. I went to the doc for some pharmaceutical intervention, and I've been sleeping like a big dog since. Catching up, in fact. I slept all night Saturday night, but still managed a six hour nap on Sunday, followed by another full night. Guess I needed it!

In this week's pictures you can see the galley all dolled up, some friends dining, and some group shots. The bunch of scruffy looking characters is my work group (I'm the guy in the wild celtic shirt-- my tux was at the cleaners).

Polar Plunge, Sleeping

Well, I think I'm starting to get a handle on the insomnia thing... I've cut out naps, and I sit in the light room staring at the lights for twenty minutes or so first thing every morning. I have been sleeping better, and hopefully I'm over the really heinous part of it. Last night I watched a piece on 60 Minutes called the Science of Sleep. It mirrored exactly some of the dificulties I've been having. I've never gone without sleep completely, but a week of four hours a night was leaving me feeling like death. This last Friday and Saturday night I had completely normal, all-night sleep, and I felt like I was about ten feet off the ground the next days.

This last Saturday Scott Base hosted a "Polar Plunge"-- the second one this year. The Kiwis cut a big hole in the sea ice, and rigged up a ladder to get people out. There was quite a good turn-out, some jumping in their birthday suits, and some preferring a swimsuit. I had DA duty that night, past the time for jumping, so I had a good excuse why I couldn't do it. (In the winter, the general population takes turns doing Dining Attendant duty-- basically washing dishes in the galley. It only hits about once a month for each person.) I did show up after my shift in the scullery, but stayed toasty warm and dry. Maybe next year...

Ob Hill, Sleep

I didn't think it could get any darker, but we haven't had any moon for the last week or so, and it's like the bottom of a white-painted well. With all the snow on the sea ice and ice shelf, the meager light of stars and planets is reflected, so it never really gets pitch dark. There are a lot of street lights in McMurdo, so there is a lot of light pollution. With all this darkness, I'm finding that my sleep patterns have started to suffer. I have had mild insomnia for most of the time here. I usually go to bed and sleep well for about four hours, toss and turn for a couple of hours, then sleep okay until my alarm goes off. I frequently have spectacular, technicolor dreams during those last couple of sleep hours. I have had some great flying dreams, and some that seem more real than reality. Spooky. Most days I have a hard time making it all the way through without a nap. I haven't read up on the latest research on light depravation, but based on my own experience, I think my body is trying to establish a new cycle. I bet if I had no job or other commitments, and slept when I felt like it, I would sleep for four hours, be up for four hours, sleep for four hours...

We normally have only one-day weekends, but we get a two day weekend on the first weekend of the month. This, thank God, was our two-day weekend. Not a minute too soon. I got up at a descent hour on Saturday morning, and had an urge to go for a hike. I put on my ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear, and headed out. I walked down to Scott's Discovery Hut on Hut Point, and then back through town to Ob (Observation) Hill. It was dark, slick, and windy, but I made it to the top. I'm so glad I did that-- it is all too easy to get sucked into the inertia of reading and napping with no exercise on weekends. If any of you find some interesting research on circadian rhythms and light depravation, please pass it on. Thanks,

Lee

Bad Mandolin Haiku

I've been whiling away the time checking in on a message board called Mandolin Cafe: http://www.mandolincafe.net (as some of you know, I'm an aspiring mandolin player). One of the threads on the cafe is mandolin-inspire Haiku-- here are some of my posts:

A bird in the hand
Is better than no mando
Must ignore the noise

(I have a "loaner" mandolin which is noisy and poor-- frustrating)

Sun won't be back soon
Cold and dark, so dark and cold
Mando warms the soul

Oh the stars twinkle
Chill air penetrates the coat
Inside for practice

Music of the spheres
Astronomy inspires me
Write a mando song

Such extreme darkness
Star flicker like a pinhole
Warm and light inside

Hogging the thread now
No one else comes out to play
I plink on alone



In answer to your question: yes, I do have a lot of time on my hands!

Astronomy, word for the week

Hi All,

Well, it's getting seriously dark now. It's not quite pitch dark all the time, but we can see stars pretty much 24/7. There is an odd quality to the night sky here that I've never experienced in the northern hemisphere... bright stars seem to flash in colors in ways that I've never seen. It's called scintillation, or twinkling, but it's much more pronounced here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_%28astronomy%29). If you look out at Sirius, it appears to be a bright flash of white, followed by a bright flash of red, then blue. I suppose this is accounted for by the cold, dry air, but it really is different. Big stars look like psychedelic beacons. The air is so clean, and so dry, that more stars are visible, and it seems (to me) that the brightest stars (betelgeuse, sirius, canopus, rigel...) are much brighter and more "twinkly" than I've ever seen them. We have been very fortunate in having some major Iridium flares lately (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_flare). Some of you may have seen them without thinking twice about it, but they are particulary dramatic here. Iridium satellites are always facing the sun, and at certain times they "flare" or show a bright reflection to folks on the ground. We, with time on our hands, note when Iridium flares are going to happen, using tools like this (http://www.wikihow.com/Find-an-Iridium-Flare) to determine when and where they will be happening. You can go outside at the proscribed Iridium flare time, and see a bright streak across the sky.

I use a really cool tool called SkyGlobe, which is free to whomever would like to download it: (http://www.sidewalkastronomy.com/skyglobe.html). You can input your coodinates, and see the whole sky as it appears from your position. This is really cool, because you can note a bright planet or star in the sky and use SkyGlobe to figure out what it is. It is especially helpful here, because the heavenly bodies don't move in paterns I'm familiar with. The moon is up for two weeks and down for two weeks-- totally different than what I'm familiar with.

It's so different here. You would probably never be able to see the stars at all in a big city-- we are immersed in darkness and starlight.

I've been reading a lot lately, and keeping track of words I've never heard of-- here are the words of the week: Vulpine (foxlike), and Argot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot).

Cheese,

Lee

AHT Tour

This Thursday the Kiwis had an open house for the yanks. They let us come over and see the work the Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) have been doing (http://heritage-antarctica.org/aht.htm). They are working to conserve the artifacts that were left behind by Antarctic explorers at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is actually quite a bit of stuff in those huts, and some of it is in remarkably good shape. The conservators, Carla, Lizzie, Therese, and Susanne, have a nice blog at: http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica/. Ironically, Lizzie is the only Kiwi in the group. Therese and Carla are Canadian, and Susanne is from Virginia. They were very gracious in answering our questions, and they let us look at some cool artifacts. There were some jars of gooseberries that looked almost edible. There all sorts of cool broken pots and things, as well as some food containers that looked almost new. You can see a webcam of Scott Base at http://www.antarcticanz.govt.nz/education/2568.

Smurf Fire

Well, it's been a pretty eventful week. On Monday morning we had a town safety meeting on fire prevention, where we watched videos of some of the big building fires we've had here at McMurdo. After the safety meeting I went up to T-Site (a facility on top of a hill here where there are a lot of radio transmitters) with my boss, Mark. On the way down, I said to my boss "look, you can see the Smurf Hut from here". The smurf hut is a small, blue warm-up shack that the fleet operations folks use on various projects-- they just drag it around behind their equipment, for a nice place to get warm. It was pretty posh-- it had a microwave, computer with wireless internet access, a nice couch, a phone... you get the idea. It was ironic that I happened to notice the lights from the hut from the hilltop, because it turns out that about that time, it was catching on fire. In my office we have a radio console that monitors all the frequencies in town-- we're among the first to hear about it when something happens. About ten o'clock we heard the fire dispatcher announce that the Smurf Hut was on fire. Antz went to get a long lens, and I went up to the Crary lab library (http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/support/crarylab.jsp) to watch the fire through a spotting scope. The hut was out at the Pegasus runway on the ice shelf, several miles from McMurdo, so it was just an orange blur on the horizon. That picture is also a pretty good representation of how dark it is these days-- it was probably taken around noon. Since the ice is white, things look a lot brighter than they ordinarily would. The sun never gets anywhere near the horizon any more, and it's pitch dark for about twenty hours a day. There was a buzz around town-- the Smurf Hut drama was more exciting than anything that had happened in a while. The hut had a 500 gallon and a 200 gallon fuel tank (both full of jet fuel), so it burned pretty bright for quite a while. We chided the station manager for being a jinx. The last time he held an "all hands" safety meeting, the fleet operations folks dropped a bulldozer through the ice. They went out to get it, and dropped the rescuing dozer through the ice, too! The search and rescue team went out to help, but they got off-course in a blizzard, and rolled the Hagglunds vehicle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYm5USbSt8c) they were driving. They had to spend the night in a small mountain tent, in the raging blizzard. This time, the safety meeting topic was fire, and guess what? We told the station manager to please not have any more safety meetings, lest someone get hurt.