Random Writings

It’s now Monday night and we’ve had quite a busy 48 hours! Yesterday three of the Twin Otters flew in and managed to arrive just as the Laurence M Gould was tying up. The sea ice unfortunately prevented the LMG from getting right up close to the wharf – they used a crane and basket to lift people across the gap – and Steve and Tim went on board to introduce themselves and give the usual safety briefing. Because the ship got in later than they’d intended (it was nearly 7pm by the time they were done) the inspectors elected not to start work until the following day. Unfortunately the chief inspector didn’t grant any shore leave that evening, so all the ship’s crew were a bit cheesed off that they were within spitting distance of Rothera Bar but not allowed off the ship for a drink. We were a bit disappointed too – visitors are always a welcome diversion!

Anyway, this morning the air mechanics got on with the task of putting the Dash-7 back together, with the intention of flying up to Punta Arenas in the afternoon. Unfortunately it took longer than they expected so the flight was cancelled – it’ll go tomorrow instead. This gave me a quiet if rather uncertain morning, and so I showed several of the crew of the LMG round part of the base and was then invited back to the ship for a tour, which was very interesting! The Gould is relatively young compared to our two ships (she was built in 1997, whereas the JCR was launched in 1990) but she’s quite different – the bridge and living accomodation feels a lot smaller than on either the JCR or the Ernest Shackleton, but there’s a lot more scientific lab space and facilities. Conversely, as the Gould visits Palmer Station for a resupply every few months, there’s only a very small cargo hold under the aft deck (space for four containers) whereas our ships carry a lot more.

The inspectors saw all that they wanted and were apparently pretty satisfied with our methods, so that’s a weight off a lot of people’s minds!

As for the other ship, the Khlebnikov, she called in on Sunday to say that they had an infectious disease breaking out on board (not dangerous, just unpleasant for all concerned) and so they wouldn’t come and visit after all.

Tomorrow the Dash is going to try and get up to Punta Arenas to pick up a whole load of people – including half-a-dozen builders, the new doctor, and Tristan, who’s my replacement. The Twin Otters will be out doing “circuits and bumps” – landing and taking off again – so that the pilots get a feel for landing on skis again. It shouldn’t be long before we’re getting Fossil Bluff opened up and the season will begin in earnest.

Well, the Dash-7 did fly in on Tuesday and we did get our mail, which was well worth the wait. Unfortunately, when they came to fly back to Stanley the following day the pilots found that there was a mechanical problem with the Dash’s propellers, all four of them. With only enough parts to mend one of them, the plane’s been grounded. The four Twin Otters have been in Stanley having their skis fitted, and one of them’s gone to Punta Arenas this afternoon to pick up the spare parts. We’re expecting two Otters tomorrow from Stanley and another from Punta on Sunday or Monday. Hopefully the Dash will be in flying condition by Tuesday. To complicate things further, one of the pilots has a lung infection and is unable to fly, so the fourth Otter will have to stay in Stanley until another pilot can go and collect it.

Just as all this drama was unravelling, the Inmarsat phone rang in my office. It was the Lawrence M Gould, the US research ship. They’ve got Antarctic Treaty inspectors on board and they want to make a visit to Rothera. On Sunday. So there’s been lots of running around to sort out all the relevant paperwork and look in the last inspection report to see what we were supposed to have done. The Treaty inspections are mostly concerned with environmental matters – waste disposal and management of environmental incidents (like oil spills) – so it shouldn’t be too onerous. It may, of course, not actually happen, as the Gould may not be able to get here through the sea ice – like most modern research ships it’s “ice strengthened” rather than being an icebreaker.

Our final diversion is another ship – the Kapitan Khlebnikov, which will be bringing us 100-odd tourists to look round the station on Monday or Tuesday. There’s no doubt of the Khlebnikov’s ability to get in here as it’s the world’s largest non-nuclear icebreaker, built for use in the Russian Arctic. When it gets here we may only have 30-odd people on base, so it’ll be all available hands to show the tourists all the scientific work we do and how the base lives, before they all hit the Post Office and clear us out of stamps and teeshirts!

Well, three out of the five BAS aircraft are in Stanley today (two of the Twin Otters are still flying down through Brazil at the moment) and there’s talk of the Dash-7 coming to Rothera this afternoon. The weather’s a bit marginal so we’re making hourly phonecalls to the Falklands to update the pilots as it develops. They’ll decide at some point this morning whether to come or not. The two Twin Otters are having their skis fitted and may or may not be with us tomorrow.
Apparently there’s 120kg or so of post that’s built up in the Stanley office, so there are a lot of people hoping that the mailbags will be here today!

I should also add that on Friday our first field party of the season were flown onto King George Island by HMS Endurance’s helicopters. They’re undertaking a series of geological studies to try and determine past variations in the island’s climate. KGI has the highest density of bases of any region on the continent, playing host to around 10 bases operated by different countries. At present part of our team are staying at the Chinese base, Great Wall, whilst a roving party have spent the last night with the Argentinians at Jubany before being helicoptered to another location tomorrow.
I’m talking to the scientists every evening by Iridium phone, as the radio (which was hastily found in Cambridge when it became clear that we were not going to be able to supply kit from Rothera in time) has failed to work.

I like to take life one day at a time, but recently several days have attacked me at once…

It began last Sunday (29th Oct) when we had four Twin Otters fly in from Punta Arenas. All four work for Kenn Borek Air, who are a Canadian firm who operate aircraft on behalf of several national Antarctic programmess. In this case we had one plane working for the US, one working for the Italians and two working for Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, who run an adventure tourism business from a summer-only base camp at Patriot Hills, on the edge of the Ellsworth Mountains. In addition to 12 Kenn Borek aircrew we also met Di and Chris who were ALE’s “advance party” that would open up Patriot Hills ready for the rest of the team to arrive on the mighty Ilyushin-76 aircraft they charter from the Russians.

Anyway, the following days produced a lot of aircraft-related running around. Kenn Borek operate all their Twin Otters on fixed skis during the season, which means that they have to change from wheels to skis here at Rothera. The fixed skis weigh less than the wheel skis that we use on our aircraft, allowing them to carry a higher payload. Anyway, the two ALE planes had flown in with wheel skis on, landed at the skiway (which is a big flat area of glacier about three miles from base, marked with a 2.5km long line of oil drums) and started to change over to fixed skis. The other two landed on wheels on the runway at Rothera.
Monday saw a good deal of ski-related faffery, as the two sets of wheel skis taken off the ALE planes then had to be dragged down to the hangar behind the Sno-Cat and then fitted to the other two planes. These then flew up to the skiway, landed on the wheel skis and then took them off again in order to fit fixed skis. Unsurprisingly, this took all day!
On Tuesday we had a tricky development – Jim, the pilot working for the Americans, got a phone call asking him to go back to Punta Arenas and collect some spare parts for Kenn Borek’s Basler BT-67 (which we’d seen the week before). This was just at the point at which he’d got his aircraft converted to fixed skis! Fortunately for him, a heavy dump of snow had fallen on Monday night, allowing him to land on skis on the snow-covered runway before going back to wheels again. So Jim flew back to Punta whilst the team working for the Italians flew down to McMurdo – they didn’t leave Rothera until 21:30 and I finally handed them off to McMurdo at 01:30, which made for a late night.
Wednesday was another long day. Jim flew in from Punta Arenas and arrived at lunchtime, changed over to skis (the runway still had just enough snow on it) and then flew out to McMurdo.
Two down, two to go. The ALE planes left on Thursday afternoon and failed to get into Patriot Hills due to low cloud – they diverted to a place called Hercules Inlet and went in to land. After the first plane landed, the pilot of the second plane was unable to contact him by any means, and eventually landed at another location and rang Kenn Borek in Calgary to find out if the other plane’s tracking device was still working. It was, so the plane was still either flying or taxiing. About a day of occasional muddled phonecalls ensued until we rang ALE’s office in Punta Arenas and found that they’d heard from the other plane and all was well.

On Friday Tim declared a day off (as everyone had worked on Sunday getting ready for the planes) and, unusually, we got some decent weather and went skiing. The snow conditions on the Ramp (the steep glacier close to base) were good, and when we later headed up to the main ski area, Vals, it was covered in soft powdery snow, which was great.
On Saturday, feeling a little stiff from the day before, Tim encouraged Ags, Jade and I out for a day’s ski instruction. I can now do something more closely approximating a parallel turn although I think I’ve still got a long way to go…
On Sunday the weather was rather less pleasant and so most people stayed indoors. In my case this was enforced by the fact that in spending all day outside skiing I’d managed to chill my back (the day had started warm and got colder, and I hadn’t been wearing a fleece between my baselayer and my jacket) and it stiffened up. I spent a very pleasant afternoon sitting in the library in a supportive chair reading “The Shadow of the Wind” – a complex and gripping adventure/romance/detective story set in Barcelona in the ’50s.

Today, Monday, we’ve learned that the planes are coming! – the final clearances for the Twin Otters arrived in Cambridge on Friday and two of the Twotters have already left Oxford to make the long journey down. They’ve flown to Porto initially, and will then make their way down through the Canaries and Azores to Fernando de Noronha, a small island off the coast of Brazil. From there it’s on to Rio, Montevideo and finally Stanley. We expect to see them on Monday (13th). The other two Otters and the Dash-7 were fogbound in Oxford this morning but should leave tomorrow. But a lot could happen between now and when they finally get here!

Oh, and I should have added to my previous posting that our own aircraft are being held back in the UK by various technical and regulatory issues, so we’re not expecting them to arrive before November 9th at the very earliest. This obviously impacts on summer fieldwork, so a lot of people are concerned that their projects might get shortened or cancelled. No BAS planes also means no mail, so Pauline in the office in Stanley will have to put up with our heaps of mailbags for another few weeks.

…loudly squark pingu. Yes, the summer will soon be upon us and a lot’s happened since I last wrote.

It began with the Film Festival – this is Kirk Watson’s brainchild and he organised the first one last year. Many people made short (and not-so-short) films/videos and then the whole collection were then shown over an evening alongside a sumptuous meal. Of course, the week before was full of panicky people desperately hunched over their editing software or manically shooting the last shots of their creations and in the end we must have had around fifteen individual entries.

Everyone had to “trail” their film by producing a poster – here they all are:

On the night, Riet pulled out all the stops to give us a memorable dinner:

We began with canapes in the bar – home-made pate on toast (best use found so far for the half-tonne of liver in the meat freezer), mini pizzas, garlic mushrooms and the like.


Tom and Lowri help themselves

After the first few films we moved through to the Dining Room and had lemon sole with asparagus:

followed by chicken terrine with tomato sauce, green beans and potatoes

and then trifle and, eventually, cheese.

All this was produced from frozen, dried and tinned ingredients, all the fresh stuff having long since been used up.

The following week, the fire alarms went off just after lunch, and we found ourselves doing a fire and rescue exercise that Tim and Lowri had organised with various peoples’ help. The “fire” was in Giants House, which was suitably smoke-filled, and teams of rescuers wearing breathing apparatus had to go and rescue Jamie and Richard L, both suitably made-up to look burned! Unusually (I’m usually doing radio cover in a major incident) I got roped in to setting up the surgery and trying to remember how to set up intravenous drips, monitor patients and administer injections. The whole exercise was pretty effective in reminding us of how to deal with an emergency.

In the mean time, a lot of effort has been expended in getting the base ready for the coming summer season. The runway and hangar area have been cleared of snow, and we engaged in a three day “scrubout” session to clean the parts of the base other scrubbings haven’t reached recently. The place now looks shinier and the smell of cleaning products is beginning to wear off a bit!

Clearing snow off the runway

We’ve had unseasonably warm weather over the last couple of weeks, with temperatures hovering around freezing and climbing to +3 today. As a consequence, our nice hard snow has turned to soft, stodgy, crystalline clag and there are pools of water forming under some of the buildings. The apron and runway in particular are now pretty boggy. The sea-ice is looking pretty rotten too, and there’s definitely open water only a few miles away.
Our first aircraft of the season arrived yesterday – but they weren’t ours. Our location makes us the only sensible route in and out of the continent in a small-to-medium sized aircraft, so we welcomed two planes from Kenn Borek Air Ltd, who specialise in Arctic and Antarctic operations and who operate under contract to the US, French and Italian Antarctic Programs, and the adventure tourism company ANI-ALE who will, for a hefty fee, organise expeditions to the South Pole or to climb Mt Vinson, the highest peak on the continent.
Anyway, a Twin Otter and a Basler BT-67 (an old Douglas DC-3 rebuilt with turboprop engines) arrived from Punta Arenas, bringing us seven enthusiastic Canadian aircrew and a six boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables! They even managed to arrive about an hour before dinner, which was pretty much perfect timing. This morning they’ve packed up again and flown on to the South Pole before making their onward journey to McMurdo tomorrow. We’ll see them again at the end of the season on their way home.

Basler BT-67, C-FMKB, on the apron at Rothera. This is a new plane this year and they’re very proud of it!

Today’s lunch – I was flight following so Agnieszka brought me a tray of lunch to eat in the tower. Look- salad! Mmm… crunchy vegetables…mmm!

Oh, and yesterday morning we had the extremely unusual appearance of three Emperor penguins at around 8am. They hung around for a short period, then waddled off!

It’s the little things, you know, that make the place feel different. Here are a few of them:

• Static electricity – if you’re not careful in your choice of footwear (trainers are bad) then you get electric shocks off everything and anything. The dry air is the main culprit here – it’s much easier for a charge to build up.
• Leftovers – we often eat leftovers for lunch, as we like to try and minimise food wastage. Some things get recycled into other things – so left-over pasta’n’sauce is often put in a baking tray, given a topping of grated cheese and then baked in the oven. The best recycled food this winter has been a carrot cake whose major ingredient was left-over carrot and orange soup. Oh, and the soup had been made from canned carrots and orange juice concentrate. It sounds foul but was actually delicious!
• Toilets in most of the buildings flush with seawater (fresh water takes a lot of electricity to produce) so you can sometimes smell the sea in your bathroom
• Catering-size everything – giant tins, giant bags of dried food, giant dishes and giant sinks to wash them up in. I think that going back to a domestic kitchen’s going to feel rather cramped.
• Fresh bread every day – or nearly every day. We have a good selection of bread flours (plain white, wholemeal, malted, etc) and we usually have a fresh still-warm loaf or rolls with our lunch. There are also conventional tin loaves for toast and sandwiches. But it’s a far cry from supermarket plastic white!
• Boneless meat – to avoid introducing diseases into the wildlife, the Antarctic Treaty forbids the import of any animal bones. For the same reason waste meat products are incinerated (in the nominally monthly “meat burn”) rather than going down the waste-disposal (“muncher”) and into the sewage treatment plant and then into the sea.
• After a few weeks watching the aircraft come in to land you can tell which pilot is approaching from their style of flying!
• Fox Hat. This is our twice-weekly film night (Wednesday and Sunday) in the bar. There’s a Fox Hat rota, and the person who’s night it is gets to choose a short (usually an episode from a TV series) and a main feature film. Some people rapidly get a reputation for good/bad Fox Hats so the question “whose Fox Hat is it tonight?” is loaded with significance! Oh, and the name comes from a media visit some years ago by a team from Fox Productions, who were afforded lots of help by the base team and faithfully promised to send a parcel of goodies to say thank you. When the parcel eventually arrived it consisted of one branded baseball cap. After some deliberation, it was decided that the hat should be worn by the person choosing the film… although the hat has now vanished!
• Wearing sandals and socks indoors is not considered a fashion crime at Rothera, in fact, it shows your acceptance of base life! Some people do pad around in just their socks (especially in the summer) but this leads to accelerated sock wear and eventual deterioration of the socks themselves. Of course, some people choose to dispense with wearing socks at all whilst on base. Similarly, wearing orange clothing (boilersuits, fleece tops, jackets, etc) and thermal baselayer tops is considered normal behaviour.
• Fostering an unusually precise obsession with the weather. We all look at the display from the automatic weather station with alarming regularity, and have become quite good at guessing temperatures and wind speeds from a 1 minute walk across the yard between Admirals and Bransfield.
• Sewing. Many people have learned to use the sewing machine in Fuchs House and some are pretty expert with it. This comes in handy for running repairs, but also for making costumes for fancy-dress nights! It’s not uncommon to see people wearing jeans/shorts/shirts/whatever patched or even bulked out with different coloured fabric – orange tent fabric is a popular choice.
• Drinking unusual drinks, or indeed unusual combinations of drinks, when the bar is suffering a shortage of something. After an evening in which several people developed a taste for White Russians (Kahlua, vodka and milk) there were then some further variations with Kahlua, amoretto and milk, and indeed the latter plus rum-and-raisin ice-cream!
• G&T on the V – gin-and-tonic on the verandah. Very British – Bransfield and Admirals both have a raised wooden deck outside, and the Bransfield one is a real sun-trap and can be very pleasant on a sunny afternoon, even if the air temperature’s below freezing. Shame about the shortage of gin!
• Wierd astronomical things – at our latitude we get funny effects with the moon. Sometimes it can be above the horizon all day (and visible, faintly) and at other times of the month it won’t appear at all for several days. We also quite often see satellites flashing in the night sky, not to mention the southern hemisphere constellations – and Orion upside-down!
• Finally, all the many, many forms of snow. There’s the urban myth that Eskimos (sorry, Inuit) have an unusual number of words for snow, but until you’ve been somewhere where there’s a lot of it, you don’t really appreciate how many kinds of snow there can be. Broadly speaking, we have: powdery snow, spindrift (fine blown snow that ends up in everything after a storm), soft slushy snow that falls in big flakes in warm weather, sleet, neve (pronounced nevvay) which is snow that’s frozen into a texture like polystyrene, and creaks when you walk on it and is good for making igloos out of, champagne powder (which is a mixture of fresh powder snow and ice crystals – lovely for skiing), not to mention soft snow with a hard crust (nasty stuff), hard snow with a dusting of powder on the top, snowdrifts, windscoops and sastrugi (ridges formed by the wind blowing over the snow)

Oh, and for those that don’t get the significance of the title of this posting, it comes from the film Pulp Fiction, where one of the (American) characters explains that in Europe MacDonalds have to call a quarter-pounder cheeseburger a “Royale with cheese” because Europeans use metric measurements. It’s the little differences, he says…

And it really does, too. Where did the winter go? Suddenly Mat and Tom are out clearing snow from the apron and runway ready for the planes to arrive in 3-4 weeks time. Another month has gone by, and I’m sorry for neglecting the writing and still photos in favour of videos recently. Here’s a brief catch-up of some of what’s happened…

Helen, stuck at Rothera on a winter trip in indifferent weather, pursuaded Tom M and various other people to help her build an igloo on top of the point. This is quite fiddly but very satisfying – you have to cut wedge-shaped blocks of snow using a saw and then position them carefully to make the dome shape. I turned up just as the last few courses of blocks were being placed, and got pressed into acting as human scaffolding, holding the blocks until they were wedged in and stable.
Helen and Ags spent the night in the igloo, but overnight the weather worsened and they woke up covered in 5cm of snow, which had blown in through the door and the cracks between the snow blocks. Subsequently, Helen’s packed the blocks with soft snow and built an entranceway around the door hole, which makes it much more weathertight!

Tom placing blocks

The completed igloo

In other news, I’ve been interviewed by The Guardian newspaper for a new feature called “Readers’ Lives”. I subscribe to the Digital Edition of the paper and print the weekend editions for everyone to read. When the weather’s bad everyone lounges round the dining room on a weekend morning, drinking tea and coffee, eating toast and reading the paper. It’s very civilised! Anyway, my interview should be in the Saturday edition of the paper.

I’ve also been out to help Helen do a CTD, watched by an interested but otherwise totally passive juvenile Weddell seal and tried to get all the IT and radio systems ready for the coming season. We’re also starting to clean and tidy the areas of the base that have been out of use for the last eight months, and tomorrow I’m on digging duty over by the hangar. Catch you later…

On Saturday four of us (Tom, Jade, Agnieszka and I) went out on the sea-ice to go and look for seal pups. We managed to find one!

To those of a cynical and hard-bitten disposition: the following video contains scenes of a very cute fluffy animal. You have been warned…