A third trip to Erebus!! Thanks to an unprecedented week of great weather, we have completed an entire field season!
We took Friday off to recover from a full day spent at Hooper's Shoulder and Nausea Knob, but we back on the helo schedule Saturday. Once again, I was expecting a weather cancellation, but once again the weather was clear and sunny.
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| Avi taking a picture of the Erebus Glacier Tongue. |
We loaded up the helicopter with our toolbox and equipment, and our pilot, Nick, took off.
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| Beautiful Erebus, seen from the helicopter window as we landed. |
We landed at our site, named CONZ, which is located at Erebus Cones. The "cones" in the name are a long row of ice fumaroles right next to the site.
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| Erebus Cones, aka ice fumaroles. |
The CONZ station has stayed online, so we weren't expecting to have much work to do besides a general service. CONZ, like Lower Erebus Hut, has both a broadband and a strong motion seismic station.
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| Snow buildup on the leeward side of the enclosures. |
There was snow buildup on the leeward side of the box -- not from accumulation, but from wind moving it around. There was also some serious rime icing on the GPS and Iridium antennae.
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| Rime ice on the solar panel. I am taking my own pictures in the background (so, this might be obvious, but photo credits: Avi). |
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| Ice/snow buildup on the enclosure bulkhead. |
From the State-Of-Health (SOH) data, we saw that there was possibly a problem with timing, so we swapped the Q330 datalogger and the GPS antenna for new ones. The GPS didn't lock onto any satellites immediately, and we spent 20 minutes trying every combination of new/old datalogger and GPS trying to get it to lock. Turns out we were just too impatient, and waiting for 20 more minutes solved that problem.
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| Another picture of the site. I am unpacking the toolbox. |
Unfortunately, while we were messing around with the GPS...... our laptop got way too cold and popped up with the "Battery Level Critical" message. Our Clie (picture a 2000s touchscreen device with a little plastic stylus), which we use in case of emergency if our laptop dies, also died. Our satellite phone, which we were going to use to phone PASSCAL in case of emergency if our laptop and Clie died, died as well.
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| Ooh aah more site pictures. I was too cold to take many pictures. Photo credit: Avi. |
So, stranded on Erebus at -25°C (-13°F) with 5 knot (5.8 mph) wind, not to mention at 11300ft (so our brains may have not been all there), Avi came up with the brilliant solution of stuffing the freezing cold laptop in his bibs to try and warm it up.
And it worked! 15 minutes later, we had a functioning laptop! We stuck handwarmers all around the battery to try and keep it warm while we used it (note: do not try this at home).
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| Inside the broadband station enclosure. You can see lithum batteries, the rugged orange 7lb harddrive, a charge controller, and the yellow modem. |
With the laptop working again, we successfully serviced both the broadband and strong motion stations with no more hiccups! Then cleaned up the site and took some hurried pictures (we were both getting very cold).
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| Me being annoying and jumping in front of Avi's camera as he was trying to take a picture of Erebus. |
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| Me with Erebus and the Cones. |
We hopped in the helicopter and made a quick pit stop at Lower Erebus Hut, where Avi and I swapped the charge controller at the broadband site for one with updated firmware (not an urgent fix; we forgot when we were there on Monday).
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| GOODBYE, EREBUS!!!!!!!!!!! |
And with that, our full Erebus field season was complete in less than a week! It has been an exhausting week at altitude, and an exhausting week before that prepping equipment for these sites. I am so happy that we got to do PASSCAL fieldwork and rescue a few offline sites.
And I am for sure tired and ready to come home soon. We have a week of cargo, inventory, and season close-out, and then I'm scheduled to start my journey home on February 9!
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