The second final trip to Castle Rock plus inventorying fun.
My last week in McMurdo has been so busy that I have several posts queued up that I haven't had time to write yet. I am writing this post safe and sound in the (spoiler alert) Christchurch airport on my journey home (which means you get to see full-resolution images now). But stick around for several more fun posts about my last week featuring penguins!!!!!!
For now, I'll write about the day-to-day tasks that had to be taken care of in the week before we left the ice. Most importantly: the annual inventory. PASSCAL has a lot of equipment (like, a LOT of equipment. several shipping containers and rooms full) stored in McMurdo, and we generally like to inventory it every season so we know what to ship or not ship at the beginning of the next season. This meant I spent a lot of the last week walking around with a laptop and a scanner, scanning every barcoded item into our in-house inventory system. Yayyyy!
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| Did you know we have 15 grey boxes with foam and 12 without??? I now do. |
But I guess we did discover some cool stuff while inventorying. Notably, a box labelled "costumes" that contained a single squirrel onesie, and this cool backpack modified for carrying car batteries.
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| Avi modelling the battery backpack. It's got a metal bucket to slide a battery in. I never want to have to carry batteries for distances that would require me to use this. |
We also have equipment stored outside in this little lot, including 90 batteries that needed to be charged.
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| Yes, every crate here belongs to PASSCAL. Like I said: a LOT of equipment. |
Unfortunately, the crates of batteries were iced in, so we couldn't use a forklift to get them out without damaging the crates. We tried chipping away the ice to no avail.
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| Me and my newfound favorite tool, this impressive ice chipper. It makes me feel powerful. But unfortunately there was just too much ice. |
This meant: lifting every single 75lb battery out of the crates, carrying them to a truck, driving the truck to the office, unloading every single 75lb battery, charging them (aka lifting them on the bench top), and then loading every 75lb battery back in the truck, driving back up the hill, and unloading every 75lb battery again. Have I mentioned that each battery is a 75lb chunk of lead???????????
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| Batteries in one of the 3 crates. The cardboard had gotten all icy and soggy so we had to rip the batteries out of it. |
We also built this cute lil node rack that got shipped down to us. It is used to charge "nodes", which are like all-in-one seismic system. They have a lithium battery, internal datalogger, and a sensor at the bottom. They aren't nearly as sensitive as the seismometers we use at our normal sites, but nodes are easy to deploy and you can cover a lot of area with a deployment. For instance, an experiment next season is borrowing 200 nodes to study the Thwaites Glacier. All 200 of those nodes have to be charged over the winter -- Avi and I trained one of the over-winter lab supervisors on how to charge them for us.
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| It looks like a lil robot. Those are the nodes sticking out (the spikes make them easy to deploy by just sticking them in the snow/dirt). |
Aaand of course, another "final" trip to the Castle Rock test site. We had already returned PistenBully 314, so we had to take a Mattrack instead. Sure, Mattracks are way faster, don't have to warm up, and much better on the spine..... but they aren't as cute!!
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| One of the things we were testing was this windscreen for our infrasound sensor. It does not appear to be working effectively, and has just gotten completely buried. Time to figure something else out for next year! |
We added a cable that we had forgotten and did some final rearranging and cleanup. This meant shoveling snow on top of the enclosures to help insulate them. My last digging of the season!
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| I paused in digging to take a picture. Almost there! |
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| Me and the cleaned up test site! |
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| Look at that sign... so official. |
And in other news, the tanker docked! The Polar Star icebreaker ship has broken up most of the sea ice at this point, so the first of the 5 vessels docked in McMurdo this week! They brought more fuel (very important, especially because we didn't get a vessel last year, and were running low). On the trip back, they have to fill the fuel tanks with seawater so the ship stays the same weight and doesn't float too high in the water.
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| The tanker docked at the ice pier! |
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