Granite Harbor
I got back from the field trip yesterday. It was a wonderful week at a remote camp in Granite Harbor, Antarctica. I got dropped off after a one hour helicopter flight. The camp consisted of Scott Tents for sleeping (unheated), and two larger tents for science and dining that could just barely hold the 11 of us.
Each day we woke up and went out into the field to do the seismic survey. The survey consisted of drilling 411 holes in 2.2m sea ice, and then dropping an air gun through the hole and firing it, while a 1.5km long streamer of geophones trailing behind us recorded the returns. It was fairly simple hard physical labor: shoveling snow, placing the air gun in the hole, and winding up cables as the winch pulled the air gun out. We would get back in the evenings, eat dinner, and play cards and backgammon in the heated dining tent. We got bored one evening and made a Scrabble(TM)(R) game out of cardboard. It took a while to cut out 100 letter tiles. One night I presented An Inconvenient Truth to the rest of the camp.
At night we would sleep in unheated tents and the temperature would drop to around 0F. I was warm wearing a t-shirt, long underwear, sweater, fleece jacket, fleece sleeping bag liner, and then a high quality sleeping bag. And a hat (pulled over my eyes for some darkness) and lightweight gloves.
The weather was excellent… bright sun and blue skies and warm enough (almost 30F one day!) that I stripped to a t-shirt while shoveling. I have a sun-glass tan that I haven't had since I was very young and spent a summer skiing on a glacier.
There were dozens of seals lying all over the place, and an Adelie penguin wandered over to inspect us one day. On a field trip we came across an Emperor penguin. I spent about 3 hours standing just a few feet from it. We walked away and it dropped to its belly and followed us.
I took a bunch of photos and have uploaded them all here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mankoff/Gra … Antarctica
I'm back in the 'big city' of McMurdo now. It is nice to be back as there are showers here and larger quantities of food and electricity and email and all that stuff. And it is actually quieter because in the field we were constantly near multiple generators and engines and drills. Still, I would love to return to the field for some amount of time, and maybe someday in a way that is less power hungry and therefore quieter.
The most educational aspect of the trip was to actually see how much waste 11 people create and how much energy 11 people consume. In an apartment in New York City I am aware of the amount of trash I generate, but not my bodily wastes, and not my power consumption. We were lucky and the environmental survey said that there were strong currents in the area, so our bodily waste went into a hole in the sea ice rather than buckets and will be ocean-bound once the ice melts. But we still had to drill a couple of those holes. And the helicopters had to return a few times delivering fuel drums so we could power the vehicles and cook and heat.
This past week has motivated me to be even more energy conscious in the future.
