Take Over Function (= big party!)

The day before yesterday it was finally time for the occasion everyone has been waiting for: The Take Over Function, when the old year team hands over the responsibility of the base to the new year team. It’s a truly official event with documents being signed, and of course a fancy dinner in the evening with excellent food, good wine and many speeches, followed by a big party! This is also the day when all the finals and cups in the take over games are played, starting during the day with a tournament in ‘pumpkin-boot soccer’, followed by a boot-throwing competition and tug of war. The soccer was quite a challenge as we kept sliding around on the ice and stumbling over our own feet, and if we ever had any soccer skills it was completely wasted as you set out in one direction and your feet took you in another! It was lots of fun though, and our team (the scientists) got all the way to the final (where we lost against the big guys in the SANAE 49 year team).. we were very proud!


Soccer tournament on the field outside the base. Pictures of the streaker that showed up half way through the tournament will be shown privately later, on demand.. =)

Dinner time! From left to right: Chigo, SJ, Johan, Marlie, Sherry and Tobbe.

After supper it was time for the finals in the indoor games. Tobbe and me made it to semifinals in fussball, but lost against Jo and Keith, who won the whole fussball tournament, so we were quite pleased with our result anyway. Around midnight it was finally time for the big final in table tennis! Tobbe and SJ were up against the Titan team consisting of Braam and Karel and it turned into a quite exciting match with lots of nice screws and tricky balls, but in the end experience took overhand and Tobbe and SJ could proudly take home the first prize: Two bottles of wine and their names forever inscripted on the plaque that will be placed in the ‘museum’ at the base. (Marlie and me were quite content with the fact that the team that kicked us out of the table tennis tournament to start with actually became the winning team).
Full action during the final match! The guys were even wearing stylish ties for the grand occasion.

The winners take it all! And get to put their names on the plaque, next to the table tennis ball.

But, we have not only been partying around here lately.. The day before the take over party we were busy the whole day calibrating the DVRAS-antenna (the one we changed the loops on previously). The routines consisted of running around outside, trying twist the calibration loop with a long stick and to spot the reflection of yourself or a source of light in a tiny mirror placed on the top of the antenna, from different designated positions. Then report back to the base where the indoor team is sending different signals to the antenna by using a signal generator. Well, to make a long story short you can see the whole proceedure below..

Tobbe being busy shining a light onto the mirror on the pole, and waiting for SJ to turn the coil with a long stick so that Tobbe can see the reflection of the light in the turning mirror.

Marlie and Daleen in the control room... look how fun calibration is!

You might also wonder how it’s going for all the other projects down here. Most groups are starting to get finished with their projects, and that includes the ‘windpomp’-guys from Stellenbosch. Four engineers: Adriaan, Johan, Ivan and Johannes came down here to install a wind turbine. It can get extremely windy at the base so it really is the perfect place for such a thing. They had some problems drilling the holes to hold the construction, as it got filled with water and froze, but now the windpomp is up and running! In the photo below you can see it, where it’s placed not far from the diesel bunkers (in the background). You can also see Johan running his bike next to it! You would think that skis, snowboards and crampons + ice axes is what most people would bring to Antarctica, but some South Africans prefer to bring their bikes! :) And actually it works quite well, the ice is so hard that it’s not a problem to bike on it.. although Johan got a flat tire just a few minutes after this picture was taken.

Let the games begin!

Tonight was the kick-off of the Take Over Games of the year, meaning tournaments in table tennis, pool, fussball, darts as well as boot throwing, soccer (with pumkin-boots) and tug of war! Everyone was very excited! Me and Marlie had our first game of table tennis doubles, against Tobbe and SJ.. Although we put on our prettiest faces, nice pink tops and looots of pink lipstick, the guys seemed completely unaffected by our distracting efforts. We put up (what we think) a good resistance but in the end really had to let them win, since they have both been playing table tennis for years and it just wouldn't be fair to let them loose against two unexperienced girls. Tomorrow the games continue, for me and Tobbe that means pool and fussball.

SJ and Morgan playing fussball against Keith and Jo in the bar. Although quite an exciting game it was easy to see from the play which team had just spent a whole year at the base (although so has Morgan, but that was in the days before the fussball table was there!)

The games room

Earlier today we finally got hold of the crane, and could finish the work on replacing the stay ropes on the 'DVRAS' VLF antenna. The weather was perfect, we've had almost a week now of undisrupted sunshine (the sun doesn't set at night still, so really, it's shining on us all the time!), about -5 degC and not much wind... it's been lovely!

The VLF antenna and SJ at the top in the crane-'box', replacing stay ropes to keep the mast in place during antarctic winter storms.

I'm posting a photo of our lab too, for those of you who are curious what it looks like where we are, when we are not outside playing (ehrm, I mean working) in the snow..

Tobbe working in the top physics lab

Field trip!

The last few weeks we've been trying everything within our power to make this VLF receiving system work the way it's supposed to, but nothing seems to work out. We've been moving the antenna back and forth, shielding cables, turning every possible source of interference on and off but nothing seems to work. So, a couple of days ago we decided to build our own portable system and leave the base and it's noise behind. We left in the early morning (around 9-ish, but that's regarded as pretty early among scientists..) and set off on our ski-doos on the demarcated safe route leading to Penguin Bukta (one of the very few routes that we're allowed to use. Everything else is off-limits unfortunately). The reason for the trip was to search for a few of our missing frequencies (these are sent out by military transmitters around the world, mostly for submarine communications, which we're spying on in the sake of science). The setup, shown below was nothing more advanced than a laptop (middle), a pair of coaxial cables in a plastic tube (right) and a human operator (left).



While we were busy working (read: collecting data), we also had to keep the support team in a good mood, so we distracted them with an igloo-building project. Our company on the trip were (left to right): Ski-doos 33,51 & 53, Marlie (scientific support), SJ (sherpa), Daleen (boss & chef) and Rory (field guide). Hanna did also blend in in the picture (second on the right). When we finally were done, the measurements had actually turned out really well: 7 of the missing frequencies actually decided to show up! Success!



On our way back, we celebrated with a visit to crystal palace. An enormous ice-wall finely sculptured by the wind. The sun was shining in from above, making the entire wall sparkle. We also intended to go up towards an ice lake not far from there, but the snow melting had unfortunately made this path impassible.

Helicopter flight

Since Tobbe has made good friends with the pilots here (read: nagged them every time he got a chance) the two of us got the unique opportunity to come along on one of their flights today, wohoo! Braam and Rod (the Titan pilots) were going to drop the geomorphologist Ian and the biologist Jen at Flarjuven, which is a mountain to the South of here, where they were going to do some field work for the day. We got to come along for the flight, with the strict rules that we were not to leave the helicopter under any circumstances.. which was a bit of a shame since we had the idea to test our home-built portable antenna out there, but oh well, we'll just have to go on a field trip ourselves and do that later!
In any case, it was absolutely stunning, to fly low over the mountains and see all the wind scoops around them, crevasses and even icy lakes in the wind scoops! Sometimes there are only small peaks poking up above the ice surface, and you can really imagine the big mountains underneath, that are just covered in a thick thick layer of ice and snow, filling up the space between them so only the peaks are visible. And the mountains are really light blue, even up close!

Tomorrow we're planning to go out on our antenna-field trip, so we'll post more photos and news from that tomorrow evening!

Lorenzen piggen, a mountain with many interesting nick-names, due to it's spectacular shape..

A huge wind scoop, with a whole ice-covered lake down it! I so wished I had my ice skates with me!

Home, sweet home! SANAE IV on Vesleskarvet

Wildlife

After having mentioned snow petrels in our last post, we recieved an informal request on more details on the wildlife in general, and the snow petrel in particular, I guess it's about time we provided a couple of more photos from our journey so far..


The first one out is a close-up of a couple of Emperor penguins. We saw plenty of penguins on the way down, and especially when we were stuck in the ice, but always only Emperor or Adelie penguins. The Adelies are smaller, but more fun to watch as they are incredibly curious, whereas the Emperors mostly just stand around.




One reason for the delays in getting here where the two huge icebergs B15F and B15K. Here's a picture of the latter one as we slowly passed by just next to it. The water just incredibly still, apart from the ripples following the ship.



Birds were constantly following us, playing around in the updraft that surrounded the ship. Pure white snow petrels, storm petrels and a few different types of albatrosses. At one stage we were visited by a great albatross almost as big as a seal. Here's a very beautiful shot of one of the petrels (I think it might be a storm petrel, but it needs to be verified with a decent bird-book or a more reliable internet connection..).



And as a last image, we've got one of a white (leucistic) crabeater seal. According to our geomorphology specialist here, they are supposed to be fairly rare and each sighting of them are of interest to (quote) "mammal guys in Pretoria", so these photos are being forwarded there right now..




Cheers,
Torbjörn

Delayed return

Today has been a very quiet day at the base, really, you would not believe that these three connected blocks host more than 80 people... the reason? Oh, it was a Thursday yesterday! Of some odd reason, Thursday is the night to party in Antarctica, which was a surprise to us but apparently also to most South Africans as well.. Tobbes theory is that people can't really wait for the weekend, by Thursday everyone's had enough! And anyway, we work weekends as well as workdays, so a big party on a Thursday is as good as any other day!
Well, we tried to be useful anyway and spent the day moving the VLF antenna off the roof down to the snow, to see if that would help getting rid of all the noise. It didn't really, so tomorrow we'll try to move it even further away from the base.
We also learned today that because of the delay of the offloading of the ship, they are going to stay a couple of days extra, so that projects will get enough time to be finished while we're down here. The new plan is to return to Cape Town on 23 February... and we have our flight booked for 22nd! So we've tried to rearrange our tickets today, sofar without any confirmation but we will probably get back to Stockholm at the very end of February or beginning of March. We'll let you know once we know.

Last night Tobbe and I were asked if we wanted to participate in a radio interview for a programme called 'Science matters' on one of the South African radio stations! We were going to get our five minutes of fame each, in a one hour long programme, but just as we were about to start the whole thing, we were told that we're shoved down to next weeks programme instead.. Oh bummer! Oh well, one more week to try to get the instruments working before having to talk about them to a whole nation I guess..

A few days ago a group of us went down to the 'wind scoop', which is the area below Vesleskarvet (the mountain) where the wind has carved out a huge part of the ice, which makes it excellent for playing around! Without too much detail I can inform you that the maximum speed of a female scientist on a low-friction flat rectangular item is 86.8 km/h... as Marlie would have said: Whoopiieee! We had lots of fun down there! The photo below is taken from the wind scoop, on the way up to the top (featuring in the photo is Lowellen, our doc). It was absolutely beautiful there, I can't describe what it's like to just look out over vast vast landscape with just ice everywhere! It's quite flat too, no mountains really to catch our eyes (except for when looking south), which makes it look even more isolated and enormous I think. On the ski-doos on the way back we saw a whole group of white snow petrels, flying south in a formation high above our heads. I wonder where they were heading? Perhaps taking a shortcut over the pole, or maybe just sight-seeing.

Project process (pictures!)

We are having a brilliant time down here and making process on all our projects.. apart from the fact that the antenna that is our main mission to fix is still not working... but we have a few more ideas of things to test, so we're still hopeful.

This time I think I'll describe what's happening around here with some pictures. Below is a picture of the VLF antenna 'DVRAS' that we spent a day on replacing, by putting up new black diamond-shaped cables that you see in the picture. It was a nice job on a nice day, no wind and lots of sunshine, even with lots of sunblock we all came in with red cheeks and white goggle-marks around our eyes afterwards! Our group consists of Daleen (our teamleader and engineer), Marlie (a master student at Hermanus), and us, and then S.J. (another master student) is helping us out whenever we need more hands or some laughs.

Marlie (left) and Daleen at the DVRAS antenna

We've also been busy cleaning out hatches for a pulsating magnetometer. The hatches are wooden boxes containing the coils and electronics, buried in snow, and with the inside covered with ice. This was not the original idea, so our job was to use ice axes to clean out the ice.

Tobbe going down a hatch with an ice axe for some cleaning, and SJ ready with the silicon gun in the front (as well as some refreshments put on cooling).

On Saturday the sun was shining and it was a beautiful evening, which meant it was time for a braai (= South African version of a bbq, or, what they would say, the only way to bbq)!! The braai took place on one of the balconies of the building (in the gym) and it was a big event! Imagine a bbq for 80 people! Tobbe tried to bargain for the braai secret from Ryno with promises of glögg (glühwine) secrets in return, but was fairly unsuccessful. We made careful observations and will have to try to braai when we get home as well. We did notice that the main secrets seem to be to put huge, rolled up sausages on the grill while having another beer and just enjoying the present!

Tobbe explaining the secrets in making the perfect glögg, in hope for some inside braai tips from Ryno.

I'm putting out a photo of Tobbe at the Astrid dome as well, because it's such a cool thing. You can hardly see it because of the low contrast, but it's the white dome behind him. And then a photo of some of the mountains in the surrounding, taken at midnight. It's so wonderful to experience the midnight sun, at the same time as there's winter all around!

Tobbe at the Astrid dome

View from the base, taken at midnight

That's all for now, we're just about to go out and test our broken antenna once more, so more later!

-Hanna

Getting started

Most of the effort on the base so far has been focused on unpacking.. Every once in a while we form up long human conveyor belts, sending box after box from our orange containers into the base storage areas. Fortunately we've managed to spend quite some time getting started with the scientific work today though.. one of our tasks so far was to do an inventory of the dome for the Swedish Astrid-2 satellite down link station that was used about a decade ago. Apparently they do one every year even though it's no longer in use, and as we surprisingly enough managed to find an additional modem this time that wasn't there last year, I guess it might actually be called for.. We certainly did have a nice time doing it, it's almost a religious feeling to get to see and touch all that equipment that helps to bring us back data and it makes everything seem so much more real in a way.

Offloading activities

The weather around here changes frequently from nice to awful, or from awful to nice. We were about to go on a shorter walk after dinner to check out the "Smelly" (the snow smelter). In the 5 minutes it took for us get properly dressed, the weather turned from fairly clear to whiteout conditions! A good lesson to make you realize how important it is to always bring the proper clothes and preferably also a radio when going out. When the weather clears though it's amazingly beautiful, a completely white landscape interrupted by the occasional mountain peak. It really gives me a feeling of being above the clouds (or inside the clouds in the event of a proper storm). I'm sure we'll put up tons of pictures of the surroundings later on, but I thought I'd be nice to start with an image from above, taken as we flew in on the helicopter two days ago. The base can be seen as three connected building blocks, located on the nunatak (rocky outcrop) on the right hand side.

SANAE IV at Vesleskarvet

Regards,
/Torbjörn

Arrival at SANAE!

Finally! After 28 days on the ship the weather finally cleared and the helicopters could take off to bring us to SANAE and the Antarctic mainland! It was almost a religious feeling to have solid ground under our feet again and to see something else than the walls of the ship. Letting all the locked-up scientists out to play in the snow was scarily similar to the behavior of happy cows that are let out after a long winter in the stable… There were snow ball fights and riding on sleds and scooters (or ski-doos as the south Africans call them). The base is great, it’s really huge and we’re accommodated into rooms with 4 people in each, but it’s much more spacious than on the ship and there’s a library, a game room, two TV lounges, a bar and a gym… but we’re limited to one shower every 4 days due to diesel shortage (so not enough water can be melted for the water system) so it’s most people’s wish that the gym is not too frequently used. Anyway, we will spend most of the days working outside now, and today we got our daily muscle training when helping out bringing all the food inside the base. There is a lot of food to bring to a base that will feed 80 people for 1½ months and another 10 people for 12 months more. It is great to finally have internet again too, we can’t believe we survived 4 weeks without browsing the world wide web, and it wasn’t as terrifying as we had both imagined actually! Tomorrow the real work starts, and we’re quite eager to get familiar with what we’ve come all this way to do. We’ll keep you posted!
-Hanna

The southern end of the SANAE base, with ski-doos parked outside.

Going south.. and further south..

Flashback: Saturday 26 Dec 2009

Day 17 on the ship. I can't believe that we've been on the ship for 2½ weeks already! The last week was really interesting, ever since we reached the ice, seals and penguins turned into a common part of our days! We're spending a lot of time outside, up front on the ship, just looking at enormous icebergs passing or the ship crashing through huge ice blocks, at the same time as there are penguins walking around on the ice or seals playing in the water. The penguins are very curious and come up close to the ship to have a better look. On Christmas eve we got stuck in the ice for about a day, then the captain decided to turn around to go a different way, which meant passing by a huge piece of ice that has come loose from the contintental ice. It stretches a distance of 60 x 5 km, and above the surface it's about 40 metres tall (and since an iceberg has about 10% of its volume over the surface you can imagine that we didn't want to get too close to it, to avoid a Titanic-experience). But we had to get quite close to it since that's where the open water was, and passing just next to it was amazing!

Very curious Adele-penguins (we soon learned that they are all very curious...)

The huge iceberg we passed on the way, and a penguin watching it too.

Christmas was very different, but really nice! Of course we missed being with our families, but we had a good time here celebrating the South African way. We had decorated the lounge on the ship so it was all nice and christmasy.. and then there was a crazy Christmas party on Christmas eve, the celebrations reminded us more of new year than anything else (I think it's the first time I've had champagne on Christmas eve, but on the other hand, cheese burger for lunch on this day was quite unusual to us too)... we had a great time!
We should reach the Akta bukta today or tomorrow, or in a week depending on how much more we'll get stuck in the ice, and that's where the work with offloading the ship starts! We will be busy working on the ice during a couple of days then, to get all containers off the ship and onto the caterpillars and bandwagons that will take all the stuff to the base, at the same time as we're then being flown there by helicopter. So we still don't know when to get there, but hopes are that we will reach the base before New Year. We'll just have to wait and see.

-Hanna

The Boring Forties

Flashback: Wednesday, 16 Dec.

We've been on the ship for about a week. The journey hasn't been too bad so far, we've both managed to avoid any serious sea sickness, but we're both starting to feel bored and restless.. We had nice weather for the first part of trip, during the roaring 40'ies (i.e. the ocean situated at between 40-50 deg. south, approximately the first 5 days of the journey), or the boring 40'ies as we called them here.. The winds and waves have definately picked up now as we've entered the furious 50'ies though. We've had around 10 meter waves for the last couple of days. Occasionally, light objects tends to fly through the air from one side of the room to the other, and walking around is a completely different sport now..

Our daily routines so far have been:
7.25: A quick stop aoutside for fresh air and some daylight.
7:30: Breakfast
Morning: Trying to work, Hanna goes ot the gym.
11.30 Lunch. Today we had the classical "Oxtail". They really stuff us full off all sorts of food.
Afternoon: Trying to do some more work, and I go to the gym. Maybe a nap or two as well, and a visit up on the "monkey deck" or the bridge to watch the waves.
19.00 Supper
20-22 Bar open. A glass of red wine together with some socializing.

Working on the ship is really really difficult. Even though we're not feeling too sick (although a constant headache seems to be present), it's just soo hard to focus. We don't have any windows in our room, which is not ideal, and if you sit in the salon which is more pleasurable,
you do have to make an effort to socialize a bit with the other passengers as well. And as the brain never seems to work for longer than 10 minutes, the extra company is often appreciated. Even though I haven't been taking sea sickness pills apart from at a few occasions, you still get very drowsy and the day just passes by without you noticing really..

Cheers,
Torbjörn