Halley tour III: The Drewry

Well, one week to go. It's been a short season - we got in late, and we're leaving early. And, as you may have read between the lines, it's been busy. I may have dropped the occasional hint to this effect, like entries titled "busy busy busy"!

And it's not letting up much yet. I'm giving a talk tonight, and have been busy packing and labelling equipment to go back to Cambridge. And there's still code to write. But the bulk of it is done, and if I was hit by lightening tonight, it would be a successful science season.

Actually, if I was struck by lightening at Halley in February, we'd have a hell of a good science paper to publish.

Anyway. I shall continue the Halley tour - started last year with the Simpson and the Laws - by introducing you to the Drewry, which is my current home. The Drewry is a building for summer staff only, and is decommissioned every winter.

The outside:


Note that the Drewry can actually be dragged around by a tractor. On the inside, the decor is a plywood motif, marked with plywood accents:


It's the only two-level building there (the garage, to be fair, is 1.5), with the bedrooms upstairs...

...and one big main room downstairs:

One can eat breakfast here, or watch a movie at night. The social dynamic of the Drewry is interesting. One can choose to socialize here, or back over at the Laws. Everyone who lives in the Drewry does a bit of both, but some people lean towards one or the other. Myself, I spend most evenings at the Simpson, wander through the Laws for a Guinness, keep going to the Drewry, and poke my head in this room for a second before wandering off to bed.

And that's the tour. Again on a different note - this week's chuckle (more of a smirk, really) was at a phishing e-mail I received on my BAS account. Here it is:

Kjære uio.no konto Bruker,

Det vil være en generell oppgradering i systemet mellom Februray 2 til 20
2009.På grunn av anonym registrering av uio.no kontoer og antall
av sovende kontoer, vil vi kjøre denne oppgraderingen for å fastslå
nøyaktige antallet abonnenter vi har i dag.

Du blir bedt om å logge deg inn på uio.no og bekrefte hvis
Kontoen er fortsatt gyldig og sender umiddelbart den folowing:

Brukernavn: :................................( Obligatorisk)
Passord :...................................( Obligatorisk)
Fødselsdato :..............................( Valgfritt)

You don't necessarily need my rusty Scandiwegian language skills to pick up that this is a password-phishing scam to users of the University of Oslo. Sent to my British Antarctic Survey account. Replying to this e-mail sends your info to a Lithuanian address.

Now, as a fellow Baltic citizen (or, at least, passport-holder) I'd like to offer some advice to these aspiring Lithuanian identity thieves about phishing.

The idea of phishing - and any e-mail scam - is to send out mail to a large number of people, and hope that some of the recipients are naive enough to send their personal information back via e-mail to the wrong address. This is best done by impersonating a large public institution - like a bank - where a significant chunk of the general populace has a reasonable chance of being a member.

Sending out a e-mail from the University of Oslo in Norwegian to British e-mail addresses is not a good example of this strategy. And even if it was, a university-enrolled expat from Norway - arguably one of the most computer-literate nations in the world - should not be your target demographic.

Get your feet wet first with some good-old "male-enhancement" e-mails. Then maybe move up to stock pump-and-dumps. Then, once you've got a bit more experience, maybe you're ready to tap that lucrative Norwegian university student segment of the population.

Mast raising. And economists.

On one of my recent trips, we brought the new Halley doctor, Susanna. The Halley base doctor gets some strange responsibilities...like, fueling the plane. She fuels the plane for most trips, because she has to be at the skiway anyway, in order to revive our burned carcasses in the event of a fiery inferno upon takeoff or landing. So she has to sit and watch us go off on adventures, day after day. Until this day, when Mark the pilot said "Get in the plane, you're coming with us." She proved to be a helpful companion on this trip, to a place called HH00.

HH00 is my furthest site from base that has daily radio modem communication. 40km away. Accordingly, I issued a challenge to Rich, my long-time field companion: let's build the tallest antenna we possibly can. Here's our team:


Me, Mark the pilot, Rich the field assistant (i.e. mountaineering/ice expert), and Susanna the doctor.

We began with a 14m antenna. It didn't work. Bent 90 degrees, actually. The pole is 1 inch and hollow, so it's pretty bendy. So, we tried again...


We removed the bent segment and went with a 12m mast. And it worked.


We were all pretty proud of it. Rich was our foreman...and he just came off a night shift, so he did it half-asleep. Not that we could tell. But the mast is transmitting back to base 40 km away at 115 kbps. I could get passable Internet over it if I so chose.

Anyway, that's that - I just got Susanna's pictures so I thought I'd share them (with her permission).

Something else I'd like to share, on a completely different note, is more copyrighted material that I've been chuckling at lately. I've never been a huge Terry Pratchett fan, but in the Halley library I picked up a book he published in 2007 called "Making Money". Very prophetic - it's about a crook who gets in charge of a central bank and switches it to a fiat currency.

The excerpt below is an exchange between the guy in charge, Moist, and the bank's economist, Hubert, who has a mechanical-hydraulic contraption that models the economy. I find it hard to believe that Pratchett wrote this before everything went down the toilet!

"Show me...show me what happens when people get fed up with banks," Moist said.

"Ah, yes, a familiar one! Igor, set up program five!' Hubert shouted to some figure in the forest of glassware. There was the sound of squeaky screws being turned and the glug of reservoirs being topped up.

"Igor?" said Moist. "You have an Igor?"

"Oh, yes," said Hubert, "But don't let that worry you. Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!"

"Ha ha," agreed Moist.

"Ha hah hah!" said Hubert. "Hahahahahaha!! Ahahahahahahahhhhh!!!!!!-"

Moist slapped him on the back. Hubert coughed. "Sorry about that, it's the air down here."

Fly like an ... Antarctic petrel

And today concludes the Halley airplane field season. Whew. My last flight was today. I thought that that would end my busy period, but now the station science season is in full force. As the interim science coordinator, I now have to pay attention to science activities on base that I had previously ignored, or at least evaded.

But back to the field work. This is the Twin Otter, Victor-Papa-Foxtrot-Bravo-Bravo, that takes me hither and thither:


...and this is my airport. Security is a breeze, but the Star Alliance lounge is somewhat limited.

I've done five or six flights, I think. Most of them are flights to places like this:


This is one of my GPS devices that I installed. As you read this, just think: there is a metal box buried in the snow on a lonely ice shelf, hundreds of miles from anywhere, with a little light flashing in it, right now. And it beeps every once in a while. In May, it will weaken and die, and flash no more.

And then it will wait, in silence and darkness.

And then in September it shall be reborn, flashing and beeping merrily until I come to collect it next season. At least that's the hope.

I think the work is starting to warp my reality. I've always personalized these things I install - when my job is to monitor devices that sleep, wake up, and talk to base, it's hard not to - but there is a whole range of inanimate objects that I am starting to personalize. For instance, take battery boxes:

I loathe them. They are intransigent, lazy, fat objects weighing 100kg and refusing to move when you ask them. They are very hard on the back, especially when dragging onto a sled or a plane. Lift with your legs, you say? Not easy when you are knee-deep in snow.

Ah, but then there are my antennas. Always ready to cheerfully talk, further and farther than I ever dreamed possible. Lightweight. Durable. Colour-coded. Haven't let me down yet.

Antennas are decent people.

And man, I need a break.

...and still busy

Unfortunately, I still remain too busy to give a thorough blog entry. I'm taking a few pictures, though, and I'll try to get them on this week. Sunday has traditionally been my blog entry day...but yesterday I was working until 11pm and ran out of time. Today has been busy as well.

I shall try to post some pics later this week. Apologies!

Busy busy busy

Well, I'm going to have to be brief on this one, because I'm exhausted. Today was my "day off" - Sunday - which meant I could sleep in until 8:45 before starting gash duties, cleaning the Drewry and then doing all the lunch dishes for 50 people, then visiting a site for a GPS upgrade, and then coming back just in time to do the dinner dishes for 50 people, then coming to the office to test my results, and then write the blog.

And the sad thing is that this has been my most relaxing day yet.

Last Sunday, I began a series of flights onto the Antarctic plateau. Real Antarctica. Specifically, to these sites:



Site F, the furthest one, is about 260 miles away from Halley ("H5"). At each site, I'm doing a series of field test for ozone monitors. These monitor ozone at the surface, not in the upper atmosphere. Upper atmosphere ozone is good for filtering UV rays - surface ozone, not so good. But it's part of a atmospheric balance of gases that the science community is presumably interested in.

Site F is 8000ft over sea level. Antarctica is a very high continent, once you take the ice sheet in consideration. And essentially it's a big dome - the further in you go, the higher you go. And colder, of course. At each site, we need to manhandle two 100-kg battery boxes onto the plane, which involved a lot of panting at Site F.

Site C, on the other hand, was near some big crevasses. Standard procedure for a field landing is to pseudo-land once, never really slowing down, in case a crevasse opens up under you. Then we take off, circle around, and land again - properly this time - on our makeshift vetted skiway.

A couple times on these flights, our pilot has said "Here, Ryan, take over. I've got paperwork to do." And I would steer for an hour or so. Flying is surprisingly dull. I always thought it'd be something I'd like to do, but if I couldn't get interested in flying a Twin Otter over chasms in Antarctica, I guess it's not for me.

The plane is now off in the Pensacola mountains, a mountain range to the south of us, where my company has one of its various fuel stashes for flights to the pole and so on. They've been stuck there for a few days, which sucks - we have more ozone sites to do.

But as rushed as I am, I don't mind a break. I enjoyed my 8:45 lie-in this morning!

Relief!

And I'm back on base! Relief took five days in total.

In case anyone's picked this blog up less than a calendar year ago - relief is the brief, intense period where all of the supplies needed for the upcoming season are unloaded from the ship and taken to base. Once again, I was a sea ice driver's mate; that's the guy who accompanies a Snow Cat driver as he takes a load of cargo up from the ship side, on precarious sea ice, up to the stable ice shelf. And if he goes through the ice, I throw him a rope and pull him out. Otherwise, I just mainly work with the banksman (Lenny the Singing Welshman; what he lacks in tone, he makes up for in volume) to get the cargo off the ship with the crane, and hitch/unhitch sledges of goods at the ice shelf end.

The distance this year was only a couple hundred metres. And so, the bulk of my time I spent looking at this view:


We did have a few animal guests; one young emporer in particular seems enthralled with the ship:


...but occasionally, he got tuckered out and would take brief naps between periods of ship-staring...

and staring competitions with the ship's crew:


One big upside: I got a ship room to myself for the duration. En suite, too! Not bad. I enjoyed my last long "hollywood" shower where I didn't have to think about water consumption.

But those days are over. I'm back on base, sitting in my office, and moved into my new room. This one is in the Drewry building, not the Laws where I was living last year. The Drewry is a summer-only building, whose interior is plywood-themed with stainless steel accents. Definitely has more of a bachelor-pad feel than last year on the Laws. Pictures to follow, to continue my building-by-building tour of Halley from last year.

The last leg of the southbound journey

Deja Vu. I'm at Creek 4, sitting on the ship, writing a blog. I just finished a 12 hour shift unloading frozen food, solar panels, and everything in between, from the ship onto a sledge, sitting on the sea ice with a Sno-cat.

I'm back in relief.

Okay - so when I last wrote my blog, we were in the land of icebergs. All was going quite well, and on the eve of the 30th, we were told to expect to hit Creek 4 - the place where we unload the ship near Halley - sometime around 8am on the 31st.

And then, at 4am, things took a turn for the worse. We got stuck. Proper stuck. When the ship goes silent, it's for one of two reasons. Either we're in smooooth waters, or we're not moving. And it was the latter situation that we woke up to find.

What do you do when you're stuck? Well, once you reverse and go forward a couple times, you swing the crane a bit to get some rocking action. Then, if that doesn't work, you pick up a large container and swing it around for the same purpose:


...and, when that doesn't work, you pick up another ship and start swinging it around:



Good thing we had another ship to swing around - would have been rude to just pick up a nearby ship to do this. (Ignoring the fact there are probably no ships within 1000km.) None of this worked, though, so we just waited and eventually broke out seven hours later through a combination of tricks that the Captain neglected to share with us.

One amusing point: as we sat outside watching, we saw a tiny black dot on the horizon. After a couple hours, the dot materialized into an Adelie penguin, running (with its arms out) towards us to see what was going on. These birds must be the most curious and patient animals in the entire animal kingdom - who else would say "Hm! There's something off at the horizon that looks interesting. I think I'll take a 3 hour walk to go see what it is!"

After departing and leaving behind our spectator, we had an eerie period. Absolutely no wind. The water was like a mirror:


...and when there was not much ice, it felt like we were sailing in a cloudy void.

But, eventually, Antarctica finally materialized in this void, and after following some ice cliffs for hours, we saw human civilization again in the form of four winterers and a skidoo. At Creek 4.

New Year's was spent here - a bit uneventful, as relief began the next morning. And now, a couple days into it, all has gone well. But I haven't left the ship yet. I'll expect to be at Halley when relief is over in the next few days. Quite looking forward to it - a nice change of scenery.