KenMankoff

Me imitating Penguin

From Antarctica

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica, Personal

South Pole (No!)

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to go to the South Pole, but the flight was delayed due to weather. It is now 5PM and I just got word that it is not delayed but canceled.

There are no flights until Monday, and I was supposed to give a talk on Sunday and fly back Monday and north on Tuesday. So, no South Pole for me.

I'm sad :(.

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

Water water everywhere…

Do they ever melt snow or ice for water? Then, they wouldn't need to desalinate it. Any idea how the energy required to melt ice compares with the energy needed to desalinate it?

All McMurdo water is from the sound, not from the local snow/ice. The energy for desalination v. melting is left as an exercise to the reader, but I expect a quick internet search would provide some rough numbers.

Complicating collection from local ice/snow would be the following: McMurdo does get fairly muddy and snow/ice free in the late summer. The ice runway is being moved this weekend from right in front of town to Pegasus Field, an airport a few miles farther away where the 'permanent' ice shelf is located. In a month McMurdo will be a sea port with boats docked at the edge of town. So the snow/ice would have to be transported, which cannot be done as efficiently as water transport, unless the melting plant was located out of town.

Field camps melt snow. When I was out in the field, we had to take the snow mobile a few km away to a glacier, where we would shovel snow into garbage bags and cans, drive it back to the camp, and melt it. We could not melt the ice under us because it was sea ice and tasted salty. Even the snow on the ice tasted salty. So ice melted near McMurdo (near the sea) might need to be desalinated anyway.

South Pole? They melt it all. I'm going there tomorrow (weather permitting) and here is the relevant passage from the South Pole Station Guide:

Energy requirements for heating snow and the water storage capacity at the South Pole make water a precious resource here. We are limited to TWO showers per week and TWO minutes of running water per shower. The easiest way to do this is to turn the water off while you’re soaping/shampooing, then turn the water on again to rinse.

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

More Videos

There are two new videos that will explain the science and engineering in the drill site selection process and the science involved in dating the core. I was involved in both these tasks: I spent a week in Granite Harbor helping a seismic survey for a future drilling project, and my first month in McMurdo was working with smear slides for the diatom team to help date various depths of the core.

They aren’t on YouTube yet so I cannot embed them in this page, but you can view them on the ANDRILL site.

Video #4: Selecting Where to Drill

How are scientists able to decide where to drill? Why is ANDRILL drilling again? Will there be future drilling projects? Why? What do seismic surveys look like? What can they tell us? What are gravity surveys? What do they tell us?

Video #5: Telling Time

How do scientists know which are the oldest rocks? How can they interpret the age of the rocks? How specific are these dates? Which techniques are the most effective? How have these interpretation processes changed over time?

Videos here: http://andrill.org/iceberg/videos/2007/index.html

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

South Pole

I just found out I have been invited to the South Pole to present a customized live oral version of An Inconvenient Truth.

I met Al Gore almost one year ago, in January 2007, when I was trained by him to present his movie. He gave me all of the slides from the movie, several hundred more, and instructed me to help him educate people, change their behaviors, and help reduce the impacts and effects we are creating on our planet.

That meeting has led to an incredible and diverse set of circumstances. I have spoken in the U.N. General Assembly Room (twice) and to heads of international banks, spent an evening with Gwenyth Paltrow and Jade Jagger, made some new and unique friendships, and was invited to Egypt, New Zealand, Thailand, and Lincoln, Nebraska, among many other places*. My work with The Climate Project helped get me to Antarctica with ANDRILL ARISE, and now I’ve been invited to the South Pole.

I’m really excited to go to the Pole because it is the edge of the map. Being a computer scientist we are trained to look at “edge cases” as that is where the bugs most often occur. All sorts of strange things can happen when you approach an edge. For example, I can stand in all the different time zones at the same time. I can walk “around the Earth” so to speak too. Anyone can do that anywhere, but usually it’ll take a few years and a few pairs of shoes. I can also walk North for 10m, East for 10m, South for 10m, and end up right where I started! In EdGCM the two poles require a lot of special code and cases for the software to simulate climate physics in and across those grid boxes. I can do a hand-stand, have someone take a picture, rotate the picture 180 degrees, and it’ll look like I’m hanging off the bottom of the planet. Oh the possibilities! They are limitless.

* I’ve turned down many travel requests and instead recommended local speakers in order to reduce my travel carbon footprint (and due to time constraints and scheduling conflicts).

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica, TCP

What a waste…

Yesterday I got a tour of the water treatment plant and the counterpart waste treatment plant.

All the water we need is sucked in from the nearby McMurdo Sound and desalinated, cleaned, filtered, and then used. All the water we use is flushed down a drain somewhere, sent to the water treatment plant, cleaned, filtered, radiated, and sent back out into the sound. The wastewater outlet pipe is 1/4th of a mile from the water intake pipe, so it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of the liquid makes the trip two or more times.

What surprises me about this base is how good it is at recycling and the tiny amount of solid waste produced by 1000+ people. We fill a 4x4x4 foot box every three to four days. That is all. Left alone for a few days, tomato and other plants would start growing. Instead it is shipped back to the U.S. where it is burned or buried. It is not used as fertilizer because it has seeds from NZ in it since people fly through NZ to get here.

Until a few years ago there was no waste treatment plant, and the raw sewage was dumped into the sound. This evening I attended a science lecture on the environmental monitoring that is done around McMurdo. At this point our footprint is growing very very slowly. There is a large footprint due to behaviors between 1950 and 1975 when the base was built and grew, but there is not much increase any more.

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

Werner Herzog in Antarctica

Yesterdays Sunday Night Science Lecture was a screening of the Werner Herzog film Encounters at the End of the World. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a well made movie is worth a thousand pictures. If you have enjoyed reading anything on this site I urge you to see this movie when it is released.

I'll hold a screening in my apartment in NYC for anyone who wants to attend.

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

Bananas

A plane arrived yesterday with bananas. I guess there were people and important scientific equipment and all sorts of other things on the plane too, but more importantly, bananas.

So, today for lunch we had a bowl of bananas to pick from, in addition to the regular fare. They cut them in half to ration them, as I guess some of the other objects on the plane were deemed more important than everyone on base having a whole banana.

Last week I got one large juicy chunk of melon (the orange kind, not the pale green kind (I always mix up the names)). I had a physical reaction to it. Censored for this blog I could say I had a religious experience, although those weren't the words I used at the time.

There are situations uniquely Antarctican, like when you see a group of people listening raptly to the description of a peach, or bargaining over an avocado. People flying down on these flights later in the season know to bring “freshies” as they are a currency here worth they weight in gold.

I long for greens.

I'd like the salad appetizer, a plate of spinach and broccoli, and a side of spinach, please.

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

Flight Home (Home is McMurdo)

The flight back from Granite Harbor to McMurdo was quite nice. I saw big tabular icebergs

From Granite Harbor

And the ANDRILL drill rig from really really far away (zoom in to see it, or look at the post below for a close-up)

From Granite Harbor

And the ice breaker channel from last year. It is hard to see, white-on-white, but it is there. McMurdo has been blocked in by multi-year ice for a few years due to B-15, but a channel gets opened by the ice breaker each year. The ice runway is built on last years re-frozen ice breaker channel because the single year ice is smoother than multi-year ice.

From Granite Harbor

And finally, just before the helo touches down, a nice view of McMurdo itself.

From Granite Harbor

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica

1 km

We've just crossed 1000m below sea floor drilling depth. This was the proposed target depth for the project. Our target region of interest, the middle Miocene, was at about 800m, so we can consider the drilling a success.

The drillers will be pulling up the core today and sending down some science instruments to learn more about this hole, and then drill some more, time and ice permitting.

From Antarctica

Tags: ANDRILL, Antarctica