WAIS
WAIS Divide camp, sitting atop 11,000 feet of ice on the polar plateau, is the current site of a 10-year ice-coring project to look into the climactic history of the region. The eventual idea, I suppose, is to say "Global warming is real". This arch contains both major aspects of the project (the right side is run by NICL, the National Ice Core Laboratory, and the left by ICDS, Ice Coring and Drilling Services), and is where I spent my working month at WAIS. The project has a homepage at waisdivide.unh.edu, which I think more or less excuses me from saying anything further about it here. Some work pictures:
Our original crew, ground unbroken. Andrew, Rob, Sue, Dana, Eric, Joe.
Digging the NICL storage basement.
A camera being lowered down the 100 meter 'pilot hole' into which the big drill will eventually be set.
Driller Jayred by his pilot.
(Motto: "Your hole, our goal")
I don't remember why the camp staff dug this hole.
Rob atop one of two outbuildings we made.
The halos never really left when the sun was out. This has a lot to do with the fact that though we operated on New Zealand/McMurdo time, WAIS is in fact in the same time zone as Salt Lake City, so the sun was slightly lower in the sky during our day, enabling the necessary interference with the snow crystals in the air (or whatever).
Here Erik (another GA from Soldotna) and Dave pack up Dave's parasail after an abortive attempt at flying behind the groomer (in the background). Dave eventually made this work, and it was very cool.
There was quite a ski culture at WAIS (probably half of the 20 of us), so Dave took this same groomer, with a drag just like they use at any nordic area, and made us a huge squiggly track in the sastrugi, complete with little hills dozed into the surface. It was about 5k's long and, with all the nonsensical winding, was clearly meant to be a picture of something, though Dave wouldn't tell us what.
It'd all drifted in by the time that I flew out, so I suppose the secret will die with him.
Too windy to ski? The solution is kite skiing. There is, unfortunately, a very real danger of being torn from the face of the earth if you try it in too stiff a wind.
One day, after a bit of a storm, I heard some screaming outside the Arch. When I ran to look I saw a little white feather riding the sky above camp. It swooped down some more and resolved into the whitest and most precious bird. It was a snowy petrel. They say it was certainly doomed.
(Having been carried here by a storm, hundreds of miles from any food, it was lost--you could see so in how it careened in ever wider circles around camp until we all got sad and stopped looking)
Besides that, the only animal for hundreds upon hundreds of miles
we called simply 'Rat'. It became very frisky and hungry and was known for unusual viciousness.
'Twas the flight before Christmas, when...
An MCI (Mass-Casualty incident) drill was held just before the holidays, the premise being someone went crazy and attacked Billy (the construction supervisor) with an axe and threw him down into the NICL basement. The Arch crew, who have all been taking the equivalent of a WFR course, did faux-life support operations while building a scaffold to take Billy up out of the hatch.
It was a blast, but also a bit of a reality check in that it took nearly an hour to get him 'stabilized' and back to camp, where it would have been at very least another 15 hours to advanced medical care. And (the real, unhurt) Billy was hypothermic when we got him off the backboard, which doesn't bode well for how an actual patient would have fared in similar circumstances.
This mysterious obelisk appeared in camp just before Christmas. Conspiracy theories abound.
A favorite bad-weather activity was bouldering. Here Jess (a UW grad student and general awesome gal) almost completes the elusive "Purlin Quest" in the galley.
Earlier in the season tent camping was quite chilly, but with the temperature up to 0F at WAIS (a full 55 warmer than Taylor Dome), I came to cherish my snowy abode.
On the flight this view never ends. The 'real Antarctica", I guess: savage, untamed, beautiful to monotony.
The most precious thing is when, after an hour of effortless V2, you look back and find that the Arch, the visibility markers, indeed every trace of camp has dropped over the horizon, and that you're alone in what seems like it has to be a sound stage, alone except for maybe a sundog, and some tracks, or Erik if he came with and took this picture. And if there's no wind, it's quiet like nobody's business.
This is what made me happy out there: first, that this sort of thing was allowed. Second, that since this is a new camp, every time you ventured out at all (the camp manager assured me), you were crossing ground that nobody human had crossed since beginningless time, ice even that no animal had walked over, and it made me feel for a second like I'd been born in the right age after all.
For everything, though, I was really glad to get back home last night. You've no idea what culture shock this little station can be.