Drills, Spills, and Thrills

(Note: This is a little behind! It was a busy engineering week, in a good way!)

Deployment day!

We’ve been looking forward to this day with trepidation and excitement for months now, if not longer. It’s the day that Icefin gets lowered into the sub-freezing water for the first time, and hopefully gets under the ice. It’s the day we test our deployment procedures for the first time. It’s the first time half the team gets to see the small lab-on-skis we’ll be deploying from. And it’s the first time most of us will see Icefin disappear from view into the depths.

How terrifying.

Whatever happens, we’re proud of where we’re at, so with that feeling, we spend Tuesday evening of Happy Camper and Wednesday morning tidying up and packing everything. It’s a surprising amount of gear – other than the robot, we also have to take a ton of mechanical tools to put it together, the pressure relief system, our drop-ballast system, the sonar (it’s expensive, so we pack it separately), the fiber optic kit, two boxes for the top side computer, and some miscellaneous other stuff. All of this gets packed into the back of our Pisten Bully, along with Chad, for the ride out to the hut.

The morning though started with a bit of a bang. Britney, Justin, Jade, and myself went out with the Pisten Bully to use a device called a Hotsy to melt out the hole a little more. This generator-sized device heats glycol and runs it, un-pressurized, through a elongated coiled pipe about four feet long. This coil is lowered into a ice hole, heating the surrounding water enough to widen it. We also carried four generators – a 5kW, a 3.5kW, and two 1kW – and a number of jerry cans of various fuels. Fun fact: fueling things in Antarctica is basically the same as at home, but spilling even a drop is an issue. Which bring me to my lessons today: the Antarctic Treaty.

The Antarctic Treaty (and its wider, related group of treaties called the Antarctic Treaty System [ATS] ) is an agreement originally signed in 1959 by twelve countries that designates the Antarctic continent as one free of military activity and testing, used only for scientific investigation without any claims of sovereignty. It establishes a protocol for cooperation between the signatories, and allows for jurisdiction of the home countries over their various bases. There have been a number of follow up treaties and agreements made to augment the original; in particular, there are now protections for all life on the continent and under it (in the case of marine life), as well as stringent environmental controls and protections. These agreements have mostly manifested in positive progress in the scientific world, as well as limiting any military activity here. It’s good to note that the US military is a provider of government-supported travel to the continent – they operate the C-17s and C-130s that fly to and from the continent from Christchurch – but there is no activity to build a military force.

The environmental protocols are designed primarily to maintain the environmental status and freedom of the continent as much as possible, i.e. isolate the effects of human habitation from the habitat itself.  Human beings are an incredibly messy and disruptive bunch – our effects on the world’s climate are a prime example – with a tendency to colonize and produce vast amounts of waste wherever we end up, destroying local habitats and ecosystems. The ATS is designed to help mitigate these effects, and in McMurdo, this manifests in ways large and small. As much water as possible, for example, is recycled in the wastewater treatment plant (a tour of which we want to take before the end of the season), and leftover food in the kitchens in often re-purposed into various other dishes. The trash program is also very significant, with serious emphasis placed on the various categories of recycling and getting it right. (I was reprimanded once already for not putting a food wrapper waste, which I assumed would qualify as “Mixed Recycling”, into the “Food Waste” bin.) In the field, everything, and I mean everything, is collected and returned to station for removal from the continent. Thus, even a small spill is considered to be significant, and many steps are taken to prevent them, or mitigate them when they occur.

I didn’t spill any of the fuel thankfully, and we get out to the site without issue. Justin, Jade, and I setup a bit while while Britney goes for a CTD cast. This is a favorite oceanographic tool for surveying a single column of water (called an Eulerian measurement). The CTD instrument measures conductivity (or salinity), temperature, and depth, against time, which can be used to calculate and estimate numerous other properties of both this immediate column and the surrounding areas. Ours is about the size of a half baguette, or a carton of eggs, and can be easily deployed by an individual and a reel. Sadly, the Hotsy doesn’t seem to want to start, so we make plans to return it to base. This happens sometimes in McMurdo; cold temperatures and rough conditions can take their toll on equipment. The mechanics guys and gals on base are experts at their jobs though, and seem to be able to fix anything and everything.

A sad Hotsy.

After a bit, Britney and I head back to pack the gear that the other half has staged for us. I run to get some pizza for everyone while Britney goes to the Science Support Center with the non-operational Hotsy to drop it off. Loading goes well – Matt is a master PB-packer – and they head out while Britney trains Josh and I on the snow machines (which are known in the real world as snow mobiles). This is a fun time, something I’ve never done before, and we quickly head out on to the sea ice towards the hut, passing the PB on the way (it had to stop to pick up our fiber winch that holds 3.5 kilometers of fiber as our tether). It’s a beautiful day out, and we spend some time practicing turning and constant acceleration (it’s tough with a handlebar accelerator!) on the way. By the time we pull up, Justin and Jade have set up the interior, and when the PB is gets in a few minutes later, we drop off the winch outside, we all stuff ourselves into the hut to discuss how this will happen.

A well packed Pisten Bully. (Credit: Dan)

Pizza from MCM!

Ready for the snow mobile!

The first deployment is a slow process – everyone is learning where things are in the cases, in the fish hut, and in what order things are to be done – and a lot of time is spent discussing the next steps, particularly how to most efficiently assemble and position the vehicle, and how to run the fiber optic tether. Once we have settled on a direction, we head outside to pack, where a sudden surprise awaits us: penguins!

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Two Adelie’s have appeared near the fish up and we go nuts. They see us and come running up, presumably thinking we’re penguins, since they’re quite far from the edge of the ice. They pause about a dozen feet away, less sure of themselves, while we run inside for cameras. Inching closer, they get within five feet as we are losing it, taking dozens of pictures and videos, and generally appreciating the adorableness. They stand a few feet tall, flapping their wings, preening, and giving us the eye, for about five minute before running off between the snow machines out towards the Shelf. I try to sneak around them to get a few more images, which I do, but they aren’t keen on that and run further, so in order to not run afoul of the Treaty, I let them go. When we get back in the hut, they can be seen through the window, standing in a small flat of ice, preening and looking around at the expanse around them. I wonder if they’re wondering which way to go.

Running away

Goodbye

Pause to preen.

Penguins on the vast expanse of ice.

The unpacking and setup hit a few snags – for example, the fiber winch needs the 5kW motor, which we had to send back with the Hotsy, so Jade and Josh head back to grab a fresh one (on the way, they saw our Adelie friends going in the right direction!) – but things proceed, albeit slowly, until around seven, when the vehicle is finally fully assembled. We do a full integration test and everything is functioning as expected, so we roll out 100 meters of fiber into the hut. This is actually a critical part of the process; the fiber must be both out of the way so that nobody can accidentally damage the fragile cable, and easily accessible so that it can easily spool out behind the vehicle. This cable is a major headache for us, requiring extreme babying to keep it functioning properly. The core of it is a 50 micron thick glass tube, so it’s very easy to crack or break entirely. It can be cut and spliced, but it’s not something we want to do, if possible.

By around nine we’re discussing how to put it in the hole, which involves three people in harnesses around the hole and a sling for the vehicle, two managing the fiber, one at the dyneema (our extra strength backup tether), one at the computer, and one handling the vehicle stands. We lift and tilt the beast into the hole; the sling gets caught for a second until the dyneema takes the weight and it slides into the hole. We pause, until Chad confirms the comms are still online. Oddly, nobody celebrates; there’s still a very long way to go, so we check the buoyancy and confirm that the drop ballast requires fixing. Three hours of verifying basic functionality speeds by and around midnight we decide to wrap it up for the evening with a successful first dive under our belts, looking towards many more! (Sadly, this day was so involved that nobody took any photos, but there will be many more of Icefin going into the water in the future!)

“Sunset” at 0030 hours.

Fata Morgana mirage.

So this final image, what is it? A Fata Morgana is a special type of mirage that appears frequency on the horizon at McMurdo, looking over the sea ice out towards Mt. Discovery (on the left in the image). It significantly distorts the object(s) on which they are based, so it’s hard to tell exactly *what* they are mirroring, but often it looks like things are suspended in midair and creates this really cool effect. It’s due to a combination of two weather phenomena: a thermal inversion, where warm air is above the cooler air (which is different from normal in the atmosphere, where cold air is above warm air), and an atmospheric duct, which, due to vertical refractive indicies of the two layers of air, bend waves such that they follow the curvature of the Earth. (This is different than normal, where they would just propagate out in all directions.) Both must be present, and the duct cannot form with an inversion (though an inversion can exist without a duct). When both of these are present across a wide, flat expanse, the duct creates a lens effect that refracts the light rays at different rates, leading to these bizarre mirages. In the image above, you can see some out-of-place dark regions in the middle region; these are the mirages.