Turning the heat up

Our Fosdick Mountains team is still in McMurdo playing the wait-for-good-weather game until we can get an aircraft in to the field site. The Fosdicks are roughly 750 miles from McMurdo across the Ross Sea. They are a coastal mountain range and are thus subject to severe storms and long stretches of bad weather. What has come to be known affectionately as "The Great Storm" pinned down the G097 crew in 2006 and ruined most of their camp. The most famous "casualty" of that storm was a Skandic skidoo that was carried a few hundred feet by the winds.

Overview of Fosdick Mountains (satellite imagery from Polar Geospatial Center).  We will be working mainly on the north side of the range.

Dr. Jo-Ann Mellish's B470 crew invited us out to help them collect infrared images of seals as they haul out of the water through holes in the sea ice. 

The Fosdick crew in infrared while out helping G470 collect imagery of pupping seals

Seals hauled out.       NMFS 15478  

Detail of Weddell Seal and blowing snow. NMFS 15478

Weddell seal and blowing snow with Royal Society Range in background. NMFS 15478

We've been keeping busy in Mactown but the time is coming for us to get out! I remain optimistic. Every day for the last week Chris Yakymchuck (phd student) and I have been scheduled on the Basler aircraft for put-in to our camp. But each day we've been cancelled due to weather. We've been coming up with a variety of ways to increase our chances of good weather. This morning Chris shaved his head to appease the weather gods. Photos soon to come and we'll find out how that worked tomorrow, our next shot to leave town.

Marie Byrd Land Awaits

Another season in Antarctica has begun again. The addictiveness of this place is palpable. From the moment I got the invitation to join the Fosdick Mountains geology expedition last spring, my excitement has only increased. Marie Byrd Land is on the opposite side of the Ross Ice Shelf from McMurdo Station and the transantarctic mountains. It is a barren land. The Polar Plateau flows towards the ocean and cuts through a variety of micro ranges. The Fosdicks are a sub-range of the Ford Ranges.

Drinking beer in Christchurch The Fosdicks are the site of perhaps the most notorious storm in recent United States Antarctic Program history. Five years ago their camp was overtaking by an unusually strong storm with near-hurricane force winds approaching 100 knots. The winds were so strong snowmobiles were thrown through the air, tents were destroyed, and it took all they had to huddle inside of their best shelter, a ninety pound canvas tent called a Scott tent, and hold the walls in from collapsing. It is a story that is retold every year in the survival school here. The snow is too hard to dig down adequately for snowblocks, so we've decided, upon the recommendation of the legendary mountain guide who was with the Fosdicks crew in the "Great Storm," to bring a chainsaw to cut down.

Getting to the Antarctic Terminal in Christchurch, New Zealand Our project is under to co-leadership of Dr. Michael Brown, the principle investigator, Dr. Fawna Korhonen, co-P.I., and Dr. Christine Siddoway, co P.I. Christine has arguably spent more time in Marie Byrd land than any other person, since her first trip to Antarctica in the late eighties as a grad student.

First sighting of the continent This season we have two halves. The first includes myself and Tim Burton as mountaineers, Fawna, Chris Yakymchuck (PhD student), and Tim Ivanic (Curtain University, Australia). We are all packed and ready to launch for the Fosdicks as soon as the weather and availability of aircraft allows for our departure. The plan this year is to put in an advance team that includes Chris Y and myself with a Basler (a retrofitted DC-3 twin engine aircraft) to the north side of Bird Bluff (named for the massive snow petrel rookery that lays their eggs there each austral summer). Then two LC-130 ski equipped aircraft flown by the New York Air National Guard will bring in the remaining three team members and the remaining thirteen thousand pounds of gear. We have a total of seventeen thousand pounds in total, which includes skidoos, twelve drums of fuel, tents, climbing equipment, cooking and survival gear, and food for two months for five people. It is a staggering amount of gear and it took five of us nine long days to pack and prepare all that gear. The support staff who run McMurdo station, where our project is based out of and supported from, have done an amazing amount of work to support our project as well. Everything from building and preparing skidoos, to preparing cargo loads, to checking and repairing field gear. The field area demands that we camp on glacier near the mountains that the geologists are most interested in sampling. We have moderate amounts of over-glacier travel with skidoos and large payloads to accomplish in order to build camps in the variety of locations in which me might work. Tim and I have spent considerable time preparing out five sleds (think Santa sled not kiddie sled) to be appropriate to handle the loading and packing needs of our travel. While establishing new routes over the glaciers, we will rope the skidoos together and the riders to the machines in order to prevent certain death in the event that one punches into a crevasse. The ultimate goal of our travel choices are to avoid at all costs a crevasse fall. This we accomplish by careful route selection and a fair degree of conservative choices. We have hundreds of pounds of one-inch nylon rope that we've spliced together and prepared specifically for use with our skidoos and sledges.

All of the geologists have been trained in the basics of glacier travel and crevasse rescue in the case that Tim or I punch into a slot and need rescue. Most of our time will be spent either at outcrops mapping and collecting samples, traveling to and from sites, or sitting in the kitchen tent during bad weather. We have two, two-burner stoves, ten cornish game hens, two stovetop ovens, a bunch of baking supplies and a deep reservoir of cooking talent. It will be a memorable season now matter what happens. The logistical complexities of our five-person project are just a small piece in the bigger picture of the many, many projects going on this year in the United States Antarctic Program. All of this is under the direction and funding of the National Science Foundation. Our project, unlike many of the larger projects that now seem to dominate the "landscape" of Antarctic science, is small and old school. Get dropped off, do a bunch of science for a while, get picked up. We have no support staff. We do everything for ourselves once we are out there. It is a good feeling to know that simple projects like this still happen. Luckily the only tools we really need for the science work are rock hammers and Brunton compasses. The "outcrops" we are sampling and mapping are really 500-800 meter granite peaks that make the rock climber in me drool uncontrollably. But the most efficient way to access the rock is to stroll up the base of the cliffs. There will be some ropework involved; specifically roped glacier travel and perhaps some fixed lines to help the geologists access certain parts of the outcrops. The Fosdicks are located on the coast, which combined with a variety of other factors make it magnet for bad weather. The season is going to be a great one with many adventures, follies, and successes ahead of us. The landscape here is no different than it ever was. It is a surreal wash of ice and rock with a few living things scattered about the perimeter. Snow and ice rule the world here, as does the wind. Seeing the tenuousness with which life exists gives one pause to reflect on the value of these brief yet beautiful lives we lead.

CTAM

On November 29th seven members of my field team arrived at McMurdo Station. With me we had eight; two mountaineers and six scientists. Our project was to complete a transect through the Transantarctic Mountains placing magnetotelluric data loggers every ten kilometers. Loads of work went into the planning and preparation for the trip.

G494 clockwise from bottom right: John Stodt, Graham Hill, Jamie Pierce, Kate Selway, Phil Wannamaker, Yasuo Ogawa, myself, and Virginie Maris. The brainpower in this group was astounding. Each of the geophysicists brains must be worth a million dollars. They never ceased to impress me; both with ability to explain in simple terms the complex science we were attempting, but also their dance moves.


G494 is our project code, G for "geology." The project was based out of the Central Transantarctic (CTAM) helicopter camp. Below you will see an aerial photo of camp. The runway is 2 miles long and the buildings behind are enough to luxuriously support up to eighty scientists and staff. CTAM is located precisely where it is because of its proximity to sites of geologic importance and because of its beautiful weather. Often called "The San Diego of Antarctica," CTAM was THE camp to be at this season, and our project's success was largely due to the incredible support provided by camp staff, the helicopter and fixed-wing teams, and the perfect weather we enjoyed.



CTAM camp was a carbon copy of the standard Antarctic field camp, scaled to size for this particular operation. We had a 2-mile military spec runway which allowed the Hercules LC-130 aircrafts, operated by Air National Guard from New York, to carry large loads in and out of camp. We had 2 dedicated Bell 212 Helicopters (think MASH: Vietnam era machines), one Twin Engine Otter flown by Ken Borek Air out of Canada, a mechanical tent, a communications tent, two fifty-foot science tents, a 130 foot dining and kitchen tent, a wash tent with hot showers, two heated berthing tents, a medical tent, six outhouses, two pee-holes, a tent city for personal tents, a large cargo yard, a 5-mile recreational trail, 2 50 KW generators running 24/7, three 5000 gallon fuel bladders, 15 skidoos, and many other things I'm forgetting to list. The community "tents" are in fact wooden-arched canvas-topped tube-shaped buildings with wooden floors and diesel powered stoves. This ain't your average camping trip. The main theme here is fossil fuel. Lets just say that each banana we had at camp was probably the most costly banana on Earth.

A Herc landing.


My responsibilities as mountaineer included helping decide where to put the transect. We did this using a combination of GIS and on site information. Before ever leaving the US there was a rough plan to put the line over the mountains, but flying at altitude would have severely limited our cargo capacity in the helicopters, in addition to the poor weather often in the mountains. So we decided to put the line as close to camp as possible, but also in a place which offered a line as close to perpindicular as possible, and lastly in locations that were free enough of crevasses that we felt safe landing and being unroped. I won't mention how many times I got out of the helo and immediately stuck my ice axe directly into a crevasse. Most of the unseen crevasses were small, thankfully, and we had no incidents.

After we picked out the line on the map and assigning GPS points to each preliminary guess Phil, Jamie and I flew over the line twice, once very close to the ground, then at high altitude, to get a sense of general crevasse patterns and likely hazard, then low to look for what kind of aircraft we'd need to land there. Many places were too rough for the Twin Otter so the helicopter was the only option.

The helicopter shadow provides reference for scale. The shadow's length is 40 feet, so the crevasses are roughly 3 times that wide here.


Twin Otter shadow for scale as we bank a turn while scouting sites on the plateau.


Then we trained everyone in crevasse rescue and developed a protocol for how to establish the sites safely. Ropes would have made everything much to complex on account of the 1.2 kilometers of electrical wire we'd be laying down. Jamie and I luckily had the foresight to bring our skis just for this purpose. Skis are a common risk management tool on glaciers, and often negate any need for a rope. So Jamie and I were therefore tasked with laying out the electrical lines at each site. Each site has a center where the data logger, batter, and solar panel live, and then in a + formation aligned with the compass directions, there were four 150 meter electrical lines. At each site we had to establish a safe zone for site center, then drag each electrical line out, and the end of which we buried a titanium mesh sheet which served as an electrode, attached to which was a preamp that would boost the low signal strength Phil and the team expected from the snow of the glaciers on which we were placing the instruments.

Jamie Pierce out working the electrical lines. This is what we did at all 33 sites.


Site center. Yasuo Ogawa connects all the bits and pieces to the data logger while John Stodt works in the background.


The season was a great success. We got 33 sites installed, and good data from all but one site. Phil wants to return next season to extend the ends of the line further and thereby increase the depth to which the MT data will be accurate.

Other bonuses of being at CTAM were good access to ski touring terrain, paragliding terrain, an awesome party scene, and the chance to be in vast amounts of unbelievable terrain.

Jamie skiing up the local hill behind camp.


Moraine underneath Mt. Achernar. Scale is impossible to express. Its fair to say that Manhattan would fit there.


An unnamed paraglider cruises past in an unspecified location...


Jamie and I next to the Bell 212, which was the key to success for our transect.


Veteran Antarctic pilot Paul Murphy makes sure that the movie was correct: white men can't jump.


A rare species of Antarctic Gorilla showed up at our last party of the season. I think he ate acclaimed mountaineer Peter Braddock that night.


All good parties look like this in the beginning. John and Graham using their PhDs for the good of all.


And then we danced.


...and kept dancing


...until there was only a paleontologist and a geophysicist left standing at 3:55 A.M.


Jamie Pierce takes a load off on one of our many Twin Otter reconnaisance flights.


Our transect line worked through the mountains from top to bottom. As we head further south we end up on the Polar Plateau. Pictured here from 1,000 feet above ground is an area where the glacier is being pulled in multiple directions, causing this kind of crevassing to appear. Certainly we would not be able to land there.


John Stodt in the science tent. Graham, Jamie, and Kate in the background.


Back at camp one of our esteemed mechanics was coerced into having a fake tatoo of a rose placed on a freshly-shaven spot in his beard.


Marie having fun in the helicopter.


Skidooing out on the Wahl Glacier behind CTAM on the way to go skiing.


My ski tracks. It was unusual to leave any tracks at all. Normally the sastrugi snow is solid, but we had a dusting a few days previously.



Ted and Phil walking out on a rope team to the electrode end.


Mike Robert's and Kathy Licht's camp 12 miles from CTAM on the edge of Achernar's great moraine. For scale, the camp has 5 skidoos, a large cook tent, and multiple 4-season mountain tents.


Mt Achernar. Up there are petrified forests.


A view down our transect line. Each site is 10 km apart, so we can see 3 sites worth of distance, or roughly 20 miles for the metrically challenged.


P.I. (Principle Investigator) Dr. Phil Wannamaker contemplating.


Site CTA8, 120 feet above sea level. This is as far as we got on the Ross Ice Shelf. And this photo is a great representation of why Dr. Wannamaker dreamed up this project in the first place. The relief between where the photo is taken and the mountains is 9,000 feet. The higher peaks rise up to 15,000 feet. The project seeks to determine what is holding up these giants deep inside the Earth.


The team at site center with icefall in background.



Skiing off the Wahl Glacier


Me standing on a pedastal of rock on the edge of site CTA6. We were eagerly anticipating this site because we knew how dramatic the exposure would be. In the distance are the transantarctics, below which is a sea of clouds. That cloud layer was our nemesis later on in project, as it prevented us from getting onto the Ross Ice Shelf to extend the A sites.


Robbie the helotech on what must feel like the edge of the world. Transantarctics at left and the cloud-covered Ross Ice Shelf in the background.




Waiting in -30 for the rest of the team to be done.


Kate's legs from inside the igloo.


Bija and I up on "Compost Hill." The site 5 miles away from camp that had heaps of fossiliferous glossopteris leaves. So essentially an enormous old leaf pile. Coalsack Bluff, about ten miles from here, was the source site from where David Elliot of Ohio State in 1965 found the fossil that forced the world geology community to finally accept continental drift. The fossil he found then linked Australia to Antarctica and irrevokably proved that the two continents were once one.


Twin Otter out on the plateau


Jamie on an early morning ski mission. This day we destroyed one skidoo and also proved to ourselves that "snow" at 83 degrees south is more like ice. Still fun though.


Geophysicists defy gravity.


Yasuo looking dismayed that the helicopter isn't coming back for us tonight.


CTB4. One of the more scenic sites, butted right up against the mountains.


Karen and me


A little snowgolf anyone?




Heading north back to Christchurch. The view from the C-17 cockpit on the way north to Christchurch. Like an out of body experience, floating over these smooth, white peaks.


An amazing season and we accomplished a lot. I can't wait to go back again. Thanks for reading.