The PASSCAL team gets trained in the art of the Pickle and digs some holes.
People come to McMurdo either as as contractors, meaning they support day-to-day McMurdo operations (eg. Maintenance, Hazardous Waste, Fuels, etc.), or as grantees (generally grad students or mountaineers, here to support a specific experiment backed by an NSF-grant). Avi and I are grantees, but a weird type called a "technical event". This means that we are here to support the science (specifically, PASSCAL's instrumentation), but we also manage our own cargo and have a permanent office in McMurdo. UNAVCO employees are also a technical event, but they aren't too common otherwise.
Since we partially manage our own cargo, we got training on the special McMurdo forklift known as the Pickle.
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| The beautiful, rusty ol' Pickle. A quick google search puts them in use in at least 1987, maybe earlier. |
I think they're called Pickles because they are green? Not too sure on the etymology of the name. The Pickles come with a few quirks... they are incredibly slow up hills (as in, I could easily walk faster), and they are prone to leaking. Like, huge, catastrophic leaks. You have to press the brake very hard for it to actually stop. I had to use both feet to stop it from slowly rolling forwards.
They are also absolutely deafening inside while running, so we had to wear huge ear protection and use hand signals to communicate with each other. One person stood out front and directed while the other person drove. We practiced picking up empty skids, but then some folks came by and needed real cargo moved, so we got to step in and save the day.
The Pickle was so much fun. I need to come up with excuses to move our equipment around more often.
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| If you can't tell from my face, I am having the time of my life driving the Pickle around. |
The other big news: our proposed work for the Castle Rock test site finally got approved! Avi and I checked out a Mattrack on Saturday afternoon, loaded it up with a survival bag and some shovels, and drove out to the test site.
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| Mattrack selfie! I drove on the way to the site. It was my first time ever driving in snow. |
At the test site, just the tops of the solar panels are sticking out of the snow. There are 2 plywood boxes and one sensor buried in the snow, and it's PASSCAL's common practice to mark these with bamboo. Then, if the site gets buried in snow (which the Castle Rock site was), we can still tell the approximate location of where we should dig down to find our equipment.
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| The solar panels and bamboo are still above the surface at the Castle Rock test site, which doesn't get that much accumulation per year. |
Unfortunately, some of the POLENET sites are buried in snow higher than the tops of the bamboo. Last year at a site called GLDK, they were unable to see the bamboo, and spend so long trying to locate the equipment with GPR that they didn't have time to dig it up (turns out the team this year isn't the only one to struggle with GPR....). They just flagged it with more bamboo. GLDK is one site that we are going back to this year, and I have no idea if we will have time to dig it out either.
If the bamboo is totally buried, we can use GPR to help find it. Another option that's new this year is a RECCO detector. These are typically used for avalanche rescue -- you can attach a small tag (the RECCO reflector) to your jacket, and if you are buried in an avalanche, rescuers can use the detector to find you. Our goal this year is to attach a RECCO reflector to the bamboo at each station we visit, to make them easier to find in future years.
The RECCO reflector tags are passive; just a small piece of copper covered in a plastic shell. This means the detector can also pick up signals from mixed-metal items that aren't the special tags (including lost keys). We tested the detector at the test site, and it was able to pick up a signal from one of the buried plywood boxes -- we have yet to open the box to see what was reflecting a signal, but my bet is that it is our lead-acid batteries.
This is overall good news for our field season. If we make it to any of our sites, we can use the RECCO detector in combination with the unwieldy GPR to locate our equipment.
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| We also used avalanche probes to determine where to dig. Here is Avi poking around the sensor. |
We spent some time testing out the RECCO and then dug down to the sensor and one of the plywood boxes. Digging in compacted snow is way more difficult than I expected. I am going to be a pro at digging holes by the time I go home.
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| Me proudly standing in a hole I dug down to a plywood box! |
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| The top of our buried sensor. We place a sheet of plywood on top so that future people don't accidentally damage the sensor or cable with aggressive digging. |
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| We also used a snow saw to cut out huge blocks of snow. |
We are planning on heading back out to the test site this week with a larger group to help us dig out the rest of the buried equipment. Then we'll install the new system! I'll have another post about what we are trying to test this season.
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| A scenic view of the lonely Mattrack and Castle rock. Erebus was covered in clouds on this trip. |
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| We even have a very-official sounding sign warning people not to approach our test site. |
Yesterday (Sunday, day 13) was another day off for most of McMurdo. Everyone works 60hr work weeks: 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. This Sunday, I took a walk on the road towards Scott Base and a quick hike up the Hut Point Ridge trail to look at some seals. It was SUPER WINDY on the ridge. The wind was so strong, it pushed me over and I skinned my knee :(
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| Me on the road to Scott Base. |
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| A seal napping with Discovery in the background. |
I also did some arts n' crafts in the Crary library. The library is full of rocks and science books, and has a great view of Discovery out the window. I borrowed some paints and fabric from the Craft Room (a marvelous place), and worked on putting some patches on a pair of pants I found in Skua. Skua is a like a free thrift store. People bring in items/clothes they don't want to take back with them, and other people can take them! We got a bath mat for our dorm bathroom this way.
That's all folks! We are heading out to Castle Rock to dig more holes later today!
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