Adventures around Mt Cook

Huh, time slips by quickly. I have been back in the US for over two weeks and have still not written about the end of my New Zealand trip. But do not be afraid! Here it comes...

In Wanaka from whence the flowing prose that last graced A Playful Search for Beauty last arose through daft key strokes on my keyboard, Orin and I secured provisions then drove north. The following day we arrived in the village of Mt Cook. Mt Cook itself is clearly visible from the village, rising over 3000 meters above the village. We had plotted to attempt the North ridge of Mt Sefton, a rock ridge that rises for 2000 meters of technical terrain. However, the weather report for Wednesday was poor, so we abandoned the plan. Then I had a crazy idea: the weather was supposed to be poor for Wednesday only. So if we hiked into the base of Mt Cook on tuesday and huddled in the tent all day Wednesday, we would be in a perfect position to climb Mt Cook itself on Thursday!

With this itinerary in mind, Orin and I climbed at the Sebastapool Bluffs on Monday. It was enjoyable cragging, on less than vertical rock with blocky crimps reminiscent of Devil's Lake in WI. We climbed a few sport and gear pitches, then simul-climbed a five-pitch 5.8 in about 15 minutes. We spend the night below the village in a medow by the Tazman river. The sunset was striking! It was disconcertingly windy all day, and we read that the winds up high were around 60 km / h.

Tuesday we arose early, filled out the intention form at the visiter's office - this is the form that tells the park where you are going, so if you don't return they can send out a rescue - and started hiking shortly after 8am. A quick 8.5 km hike up a grassy lateral moraine brought us to the point where we were forced to drop onto the glacier. The glacier has receded significantly in recent years, and the moraine wall is steep, loose, and around 50 meters high. We dropped to the glacier at this point. This part of the lower glacier is completely covered by dirt, gravel and rocks and you wouldn't even know you were walking on ice. We trudged up the valley for several hours over the glacier, navigating a few exciting stream crossings on the surface of the glacier. At 2pm we arrived at the base of the Hass ridge which we intended to take up to the Grand Plateau and our staging area for Mt Cook. The Hass ridge is a 1500 scramble of loose moraine, very steep grass, and loose rock. Despite the fact that it is the easiest approach to the easiest route on Mt Cook, there was very little sign of trails at all. I am still a bit confused why there was so little trail, though I know that this is in a large part due to the fact that virtually all clients who hire a guide to take them up Mt Cook fly in and are dropped off on the Grande Plateau.

The climb was brutal with full packs. Steep moraine walls are always horrendous, however even after we had finished the moraine I still used my hands constantly to pull on grass or rocks. There were sharp plants similar to yukka to watch out for and the grass under-foot was very slick. After much struggling, we arrived at the Hass hut near the top of the ridge at around 6pm. The wind was fairly fierce, and we took a break in the hut. I was waiting to see if Orin would suggest just stopping there for the night, and I think he may have been waiting for the same thing, but neither of us actually suggested it so we kept going with the goal of reaching the Grand Plateau by night. We donned our crampons and slogged up a steep snow slope. Hoping to cut directly across to the Plateau Hut instead of gaining the extra 200 m to go over the dome at the top of the ridge, I traversed around to the right to a small saddle in the ridge. The Plateau Hut was directly across from me, but separated by a steep slope capped by a threatening serac and guarded on the bottom by a large bergshrund. Orin arrived and we decided that we were too tired to continue to the Plateau that evening, especially because it would require traversing back around to the right and climbing a loose 4th class gully of rock.

In the growing wind we kicked out a platform for the tent on the edge of the snow and set it up off of stakes and trekking poles buried dead-man style, a cam, and a baby-andle piton driven into the rock. After a delicious pasta meal, we went to bed quickly. The wind blew hard all night, shaking the tent loudly. Despite by fatigue, it took some time to fall asleep because of the shaking of the tent. I rolled over many times, especially when the tent was blowing so hard that the side was almost laying on my face.

None the less, I woke up the next morning feeling rested. The storm hadn't blown in yet, though the wind gusts continued to intensify gradually. We could see clouds building over the ridge, but they did not seem to be approaching quickly. We decided to leave our camp where it was and climb up to the Grand Plateau to have a look around. The usual climb was barred by a large bergshrund, so we traversed around to a steep, loose rock gully which lead quickly to the Grand Plateau. We descended to the Plateau Hut to get a better look at Mt Cook. The wind on the Grand Plateau was fierce, pelting us with snow bullets that stung even through a Gortex shell. We could see some of the Linde Glacier route - our intended decent - and it was VERY cut up by crevasses. In the Plateau Hut, the log book spoke of successful ascents in late January and a few in early February. The last successful ascent, by a team from eastern europe, had taken place a bit under a week earlier and talked of endless traversing to avoid crevasses. We called down to the main DOC office to get a weather report. In abbreviated form it went something like this. "Today, the storm will continue to build. Heavy rain and winds up to 90 Km / h expected at 3000 meters. Tomorrow, rain passes by early morning, but winds remain high." Orin hugh up the phone, we looked at each other and pointed down. There would be no climbing Mt Cook this trip.

We decided to try to hike most of the way out that same day. Returning to camp, we packed up and headed back down the ridge. Instead of taking the grass down as far as possible, we quickly dropped into a moraine gully. The wind was now flinging rain drops around. Often it would blow directly up the gully, sand-blasting our faces with dust. Several times I had to sit down because I could not see anything. Despite the wind, the gully was efficient and we arrived at the glacier in 1 hour. During the slog back across the glacier the rain started in earnest.

We came to the old site of the Ball shelter at 6pm soaked to the bone. I mean, completely soaked through. Oh man, budget soup never tasted so good! There's nothing that says, "honey, I love you" like budget soup... After a delicious meal I drifted off to sleep in my damp down bag and clothing.

The next morning was beautiful. We had a leisure hike out to the car while the wind continued to whistle through the high peaks. All in all, it was an intense experience but enjoyable in that removed, retrospective sense. I certainly have a good idea what it would take to climb Mt Cook now, and am looking forward to a return trip - earlier in the season when the crevasses are covered.

Fiordland

Oh man, what a beautiful day. When I woke this morning, the first thing I saw was pink clouds reflecting the first rays of sun over the tops of the grass stocks just beyond by bivy sack. We had camped in a gravel pull-off on the way back to Wanaka, where I am now. I am typing in the Info center, in front of a full window looking out over the beautiful blue Lake Wanaka, with the high peaks around Mt Aspiring in the background. It is warm, sunny, and beautiful.

The wireless here does not seem to want to load my pictures, so you will have to see those later. Sorry!

We are back here after spending a few days in the Milford Sound area. What a dramatic landscape! We drove down there 4 days ago. The valley on the east side leading up to the crest is a long flat glacier valley with steep peaks and temerate rainforest on both sides. We stopped and picked up a german hitch hiker in the last major town of Tau Ana. Dan is in his early 20's, and his stated plan for time being is, "I'll be traveling for the next 10 years. India, China, South America, we'll see!" He has already been on the road for over a year, in Australia primarily.

We spend the night at a primitive camp site (picknick table, toilet, and a pullout). The next day we drove to the Milford Tunnel, which burrows through the continental divide. Milford Sound is in the heart of Fiordland, the drastic south-west coast of New Zealand. This rugged area is a glacier-carved territory that gets a large amount of rain year around and hence is a temperate rain forest. The very steep and deep valleys are filled with lush vegetation, and are surrounded by tall granite walls covered with more moss and vegetation. Above that are the peaks, which top out at around 2000 m and have granite summit caps above glacial hanging valleys. It turned out to be a beautiful day, but we found this out too late to climb anything big. After dropping off Dan at the tunnel, we ended up scrambling Moir's Mate (4th and easy 5th class). We were hoping to climb the North ridge of Moir, but the 5th class downclimbing would have turned dangerous if it rained and we did not have a rope, so we descended prematurely. We still gained over 1000 meters in a few hours.

The next day we drove to Milford sound early, arriving by just before 8am. This place is very busy, with lots of tour busses, boats, planes and helicopters. However by arriving early we missed many of the crowds. The morning was very pretty, with some clouds and mist and some blue sky.

That afternoon we went to one of the sport crags on steep granite that are in the area. The crag we were at was called the Chasm. The climbing was fantastic, with highly featured steep granite sport climbing. We first climbed a 3 pitch mixed gear and bolt route with short 5.10 then 5.11 trad pitches. The third pitch was a fantastic steep black dike with sandstone-esque pockeds that went at 5.12c. This pitch was called "But 't Milford." If only I had endurance I could have onsighted it...

Then down and over to another 2 pitch sport route. I wound have onsighted the 11d second pittch, but there were two exits and I chose the left hand one which turned out to be quite a bit harder than 11d. Then we went over to an excellent 2 pitch route that was the first route on the cliff, called "High Ideals and Big Ambitions." My lead on the second pitch was mostly on gear, with the 11a crux protected by 2 bolts. At the end of the day I tried to top rope one more pitch of 12a that was directly under the rappel, and made it after several hangs, content to call it a day.

Today we are on our way to the Mt Cook area. We are still undecided as to what to do, because we have 5 days left and the 3rd day is supposed to have bad weather. The big objectives that we want to do (Mt Sefton, Mt Cook) would be best in 5 days, meaning climbing on the 3rd day. So we will probably do two 2-day trips and develop plans for future years. That is about it! I'm excited for the last week here, and excited to get back to life in Chicago. It is good to be excited about what you are doing!

Mt Aspiring

Yes, New Zealand is pretty awesome. At least the mountains are! As most of you know, Orin and I made it back to New Zealand and off of Antarctica one week ago, on February 11. We spend a night at the hotel, then picked up our rental car early the next morning. The most valuable piece of advice about New Zealand driving that I got was from the man at the rental company, "Stay left, stay left, stay left!" Indeed, they drive on the left side of the road here! That also means that in our manual shift car the stick goes in your left hand instead of your right. As long as you pay attention, it is not too bad. No problems so far!

We picked up the car, mailed off Orin's extra stuff, checked out a few outdoor shops, then drove out 40 min to my new friend Kate's house. Kate has been extremely friendly and gracious in helping us get oriented and on our way for the trip. Kate is a friend of a friend from Cornell, and had agreed to let Orin and I sleep on her floor for the night. She has a very cute house with an amazing view of the bay. We slept well with bellies full of curry rice.

The next day we drove back to Christchurch and picked up guide books and groceries, then cruised down south to Wanaka, a 6 hour drive. We gave a ride to hitch hikers on two different occasions. We arrived too late to stop by the Department of Conservation (DOC), so we drove up a valley and slept in a field for the night. Why pay for a $15 campsite when you can camp for free?

The next day we were at the DOC by 8:30am to get some information about Mt Aspiring and sign in. You can sign in with trip forms, and then if you don't come back out they will go look for you. Much more formal than anything I have ever worked with. We told them we would be out a full day later than we expected, because we were not planning on needing a rescue!

A beautiful drive up a narrow canyon brought us to the trailhead, and we started hiking by shortly after noon. It drizzeled all day. The lower part of the valley is effectively a temperate rain forest and was filled with thick, lush vegetation. Following the advice of the guide book and the fact that I had a bivy sack but Orin did not, we left the trail and bushwacked through the sopping underbrush for 40 minutes to find Oat's Rock bivy. This was worth it, as we spent the night under the protection of a small rock overhang. I was soaked to the core, but it was warm so I was reasonably comfortable and my pack stayed dry enough.

We woke to a brilliant, sunny day. After a late start we hiked up to the head of the valley then started the scramble towards Bevan Col. It was solidly 4th class up the initial gorge with heavy packs, but we made good progress. After that it backed off to 3rd class scrambling and we climbed to the col by 4:30pm. The climb was about 1300 m of elevation gain, with the col at 1851m. After scouting the approach to Aspiring and eating dinner, we slept.

Up at 3:30am, the stars were amazing! A quick cold breakfast of granola and we were off. We quickly gained the glacier and crossed the Bevan Glacier. There were quite a few clavasses, but we stayed where they were small and easy to cross. We arrived at the base of the South West ridge and left the glacier at 7am. What a fantastic route! We scrambled up some 4th and easy 5th class rock to gain the snow arete. This sharp snow ridge separates the West and steep South faces of the mountain, and rises continuously at 45 to 55 deg for around 400 m. We arrived at the crux of the climb shortly after 10am, placed a solid 2-screw anchor and roped up. The gully which is often filed with ice and snow was dry, so Orin lead a mixed pitch with several fixed pitons for protection. The climbing was not too hard but engaging with plenty of exposure. The climbing was probably 5.6, but in gloves and crampons. I followed the 30m pitch, and we put the rope back in the pack. One more hour of steep snow, and we were on top by 12:30!

Orin on the SW Ridge, in the middle of the snow arete.

Orin above the crux, nearing the summit.

What a spectacular summit! At 3033 m, it is the highest peak in the immediate region. The summit is a sharp snow cone that drops steeply off in all directions. We could see all the way out to the ocean to the West, down to more high peaks to the south, up to Mt Cooke to the North, and out to the planes to the East. Totally spectacular day.

After 1/2 an hour, we began the descent down the North West ridge. This took longer than expected, 3 hours. It was full on very exposed 4th class scrambling with one rappel. By the time we reached the hut at the base of the NW ridge, we were very tired indeed! But not done yet...

Back across the glacier to the Bevan col and our packs we went, arriving at 6pm. We ate some soup and packed up, then headed back down towards the West Matukituki valley. We bivied just above the 4th class gorge in growing clouds and wind.

The next morning we woke up late and it still hadn't rained, much to our glee. After breakfast we downclimbed the gorge, and hiked out, a 7 hour day. I was really tired by the time we arrived at the car! Much more than usual.

Today it is raining a bit and we are resting in Wanaka, re-stocking on groceries, and planning for what is next. We will probably go down to Milford Sound and the Darrens, where there are long rock routes. We probably won't climb any of them though, because the weather report for that part calls for rain for the foreseeable future. Then I would like to head back up north to the Mt Cooke region and try to climb the North Ridge of Mt Sefton, but we'll see what time and the weather have in store for us! 10 more days is NZ...

Keep living your dream!

parting thoughts

Well, it is my last day at the Pole. The plane from McMurdo will arrive here at 11:30am. I will hop, skip and jump onto the plane and fly to McMurdo. After a transfer I will then fly on to Chrishchurch and the land of days and nights.

But first, Bubah is back! I don't know how we got him back, but if I find out more, I'll let you all know.

Second, a few parting pictures.

Above is a picture of Dan and a tech worker changing the gain on the optical pointing telescopes on the side of the SPT.

Above is a picture of the official South Pole Marker. Each winter the machinest makes a pole marker for the new year. This years was a miniature bronze model of SPT. It is about 3 inches high. The inset in the flat plate is cut out in the shape on Antarctica.

Curiously, it doesn't really feel like I am leaving. More so today than yesterday, nonetheless it still feels like another day at the pole when I wake up, eat, and sit down at my computer to work. Work is going great, as usual. I am continuing to work or the C analysis pipeline, which I assume that I will be working on for some time now. I am currently completely re-writing the function that reads data out of fits files and into a C struct which we can then easily manipulate. The previous function is something like 12000 lines long for a SINGLE FUNCTION, hence the reason for re-writing it. It is really fun working with smart people - in this case I am referring to Erik Leitch - who know a lot about a subject. After talking to him I have figured out a much cleaner way of re-writing the function which is actually pretty elegant. It involves writing a nested set of arrays of structures which contain function and memory pointers. Then all I have to do is loop through this pre-defined array and call one general read function for each column of data. Still haven't compiled it yet, but I am working and testing in small steps. It should be awesome! But I digress.

Yesterday I didn't feel like I was leaving at all, and just worked the whole day through on the above programs. Now it is finally settling in that I am indeed leaving in a few hours. So what are my last thoughts while here? Well, I am very glad to have had the opportunity to come here. First and foremost it is incredible to finally be down here and see the telescope that I will eventually be writing a thesis on. I have learned much more about the project than I would have in the equivalent amount of time in Chicago. This is the best part of the trip. I also feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to be somewhere that a small fraction of the population will ever be able to go to. Antarctica is an incredible continent. I have been living on kilometers of ice in all directions, including down. It is like being in the middle of the ocean.

I am nevertheless excited to leave and get back to my life in the "outside world." It is fun to visit here, but it puts the rest of your life on hold for that time. I am quite glad not to be staying for winter for that reason. I am sure that mentally I would be able to handle it and would have a productive and eventful year, but right now I am not willing to miss a year of my life in the outside world.

An interesting observation that one of the people on the Ice Cube neutrino detector project made last night in the sauna is that the South Pole is like living in a nice youth hostel. There are many people in their 20's and early 30's. You can hang out with other young people every evening, get to play sports and watch movies, and have parties and dancing every weekend. The only difference is that you get your own room, the food is much better, and you are surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of ice.

The one thing that I am not sure about the whole endeavor is the consumptive nature of this entire enterprise. Everything we do here relies completely on being flown in on an airplane. All of the energy we use comes from gas that was flown in. As far as I can tell the station does a reasonable job of being frugal with their energy uses - buildings seem well designed, and there aren't too many energy-consumptive extra luxuries (the sauna is an exception). However, thinking about just the flights makes me cringe a bit. There are 4 or 5 flights from McMurdo to Pole and back six days a week, weather depending, all summer. Keeping a population of around 250 people for the summer and 40 people for the winter takes a lot of food and gas.

The only two justifications that I can see are as follows. Geo-politically, the united states would have a station at the pole regardless of the science. I am certainly not convinced that this is a good reason, but right now it is a political reality. The second reason is why I am here, namely that the South Pole is very nearly the best place on earth for doing CMB science. Between the 6 month winter, the extremely cold and stable atmosphere, and the rotation pattern of the earth below the sky, this is pretty much as good as it gets without going to space. And if we are thinking about expense, a satellite is usually at least 100 times as expensive as a ground-based experiment. The science we are going after is as big as it gets - the nature of the universe as a whole. And mark my words, right now we are in a golden age for experimental cosmology. This field will open up our understanding of the universe immensely in the next 10-20 years. I hope that it will eventually lead to ways of testing and finally understanding gravity, which will probably lead to a complete revision of our understanding of the fabric of space-time itself. So is this worth the expense and the consumption that maintaining a science-support station at the south pole entails? Well my feet are saying "yes" by working on this project. I am unambiguously in support of spending lots of money on science, so why not just chalk up the expense to the name of science? I do believe that the pursuit of knowledge is an endeavor worth sacrificing for. It is what I am dedicating my life to. So is it worth it? No answers today. To my readers, think about it. One of the greatest capacities we as humans have is the ability to think. Use it!

Bubah update - pure apathy

Hello All,

In the pursuit of getting Bubah back, the SPT team appears to be bogged down in pure apathy. Since I am leaving the South Pole in 3 days, I am following our fearless leader Dan's lead. And his lead has been the stance, "We don't deal with terrorists." After a complete lack of response from us to the first email, they sent a second email saying that there was a note in "Catcher in the Rye" across the hall in the library with further instructions. Our plan is to go over there and take a photograph of the note, then put the note back in the book so they think that we never even looked at it.

It is amusing that the Ice Cube team seems more interested in the Bubah case than we do; they bring it up at meals, and sometimes come over to our side of the Science room to talk about it. I was even accused by one member of running an inside job! Suspicious? Perhaps...

Bubah's place in our shrine has been replaced. "What could possibly replace Bubah in the shrine," you might ask? None other than a can of Kraft Easy Cheese. Well, we weren't actually going to eat it!

As a random inserted side note, as usual there was a party last night (Saturday night). It is very amusing watching the social dynamic at a dance party when there are 40 guys and 5 girls.

Bubah taken hostage!

Breaking news! Bubah has been taken hostage! Bubah is our mascot, a small purple stuffed alien who talks when you bob it on the head. It has three phrases, which we have interpreted as "yes," "no," and "I'm not answering." As you can see, Bubah in crucial to our decision making process as a collaboration! He is also the only creature to actually ride on the boom of the telescope while taking observations, and this has critical insight that no one else on this planet of beyond possesses!

He went missing last night. This morning in the place where Bubah usually sits in the Justin Beeber shrine, there was just a laser-printout of a picture of Bubah with a blind-fold on, and a cryptic message saying Bubah had been taken hostage and we needed to check our email.

Dan checked his email, and there was a message from a fabricated account, something like "doyouwantBubahback@gmail.com" that contained a picture of Bubah under a snow-roller (think steam-roller for snow) with the message, "If you ever want to see Bubah again, acquire 2 unmarked 6-packs of beer. We will contact you with further instructions." We are formulating a plan as we speak to rescue Bubah and I will keep you updated. For now, keep your eyes peeled!

Pub Trivia

Welcome to Pub Trivia! The SPT team hosted Pub Trivia this past wednesday, and I was given complete control over one of four rounds. After sitting through numerous rounds of lame questions about movies and pop music in past weeks, what category did I pick? Mountains! 2 teams clearly had climbers, and 2 teams clearly did not. Out of 21 points, the team scores were 2, 3, 9 and 11.

Here are the questions, see what you would have scored (that means no looking up questions until after you have finished...) If you want, you can email me your guesses and I will email back answers. Or you could just look the answers up, for which Wikipedia is amazing!

Mountains.

1) [2pt] What is the highest peak in the contiguous united states, and what is its height to within 100 feet?

2) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain face in the world? 2 pts, mountain and name of the face.

3) [1pt] This country has produced well knows climbers such as Chris Bonnington and Mick Fowler. It's strict anti-bolt ethics brought about the climbing style "head-pointing" on its famous grit-stone. Name this country.

4) [2pts] What is the second highest peak in Antarctica, and when was it first climbed? Year +- 5. 2 pts.

5) [1pt] What peak has the greatest continuous rise from base to summit in the world?

6) [1pt] How many 14000 ft peaks are there in CO? Must be within +- 5

Extra spontaneous bonus point: Who skiied all of these peaks within one year?

7) [1pt] This asthetic mountain lies in either Angentina or Chile, depenting who you ask. It has been described as "The hardest mountain in the world." It's easiest route is the controversial "Compressor Route," put up by Cesare Maestri in 1970. What is the name of this mountain?

8) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain in Montana? 2 pts, name of the mountain, height to within 500 ft.

9) [1pt] What is the death rate on Annapurna, the deadliest 8000 meter peak? This is defined as the ratio of the number of people who die on Annapurna to the number of people who try to climb it? Statistics are as of January, 2007.

10) [1pt] Mt Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. What is its Nepalese name?

11) [3pts] What is the tallest mountain on the Oceania continent? For an extra point, what country is it in? For a third point, what man-made environmental disaster lies at the foot of the mountain

12) [3pts] Name the 6 Great North Faces of the Alps. 1pt for 1, 2pts for 3, 3 pts for all 6. See pictures below: - - The internet connection is too slow to upload these pictures right now. So you are going to just have to guess off the top of your heads. If you are concerned, please write a letter to your senator or representative asking them to support more satellite coverage for scientists at the south pole.

Fire Alarms and Saunas

Well, yes, both fire alarms and saunas, fortunately not at the same time! But first for a work update, which I know is why all of you read this blog. The past few days have been good, and I am starting to realize that I have less than a week left at the pole! We ran the schedule that I wrote for the telescope earlier this week, and after fixing one typo it seems to be working as advertised. That means that we will be running this schedule on three patches of sky between RA=0 to RA=5 hours and scanning over and over theses patches all winter. Cool! Now I am spending time learning how we actually process our data, and trying to understand an analysis pipeline in C, which is an alternate to the standard pipeline in IDL.

Here is a picture of the 150 GHz map. It doesn't look like much yet, but this is only 3 scans of 2.5 hours each. The patch is 17 deg across and 10 deg high. If you click on the picture and look in the bottom right corner, you can see a small white spot which is "point source," which is probably a star:


Ok, I realize that we need fire alarms, sure. And I also realize that in order for fire alarms to work reliably, the system needs to be tested. But do you really need to test them every other day for a month?! A fire here would be a very, very bad thing - we can't exactly just go to another building if the main station burned down. There is a dedicated fire crew of 4 people here to ensure our safety. They have automatic announcements which I can recite to you by memory: "BBBEeeeeepppp!!!!! BBBEEeeeeepppp!!!!! May I please have your attention. May I please have your attention. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. Disregard, disregard, disregard." Well, the disregard part is not part of the alarm, but it might as well be, because in the approximately 50 times that I have heard that alarm, I think every one without exception has been followed by a "disregard." Today after dinner we were working, and at 7pm the fire alarm went off as part of a test. It continued to go off for 18 minutes without stopping, complete with flashing blue lights. It was loud enough that I went and got ear plugs!

As advertised in my blog title, we do indeed have a sauna at the station! Apparently they even had one in the old Dome before the new station was build. It is a small sauna, but if you have ever seen how many people you can pack into a phone booth... well you get the point. Sunday night we packed 7 people in there and cranked the heat. There is something called the "300 club," which is where people in the winter get the sauna up to 200 deg F, then run outside when it is -100 F. I am now a proud member of the "267 club." We got the sauna up to 240 deg F. This required some trickery because there is a safety switch on the bottom of the heater in the sauna that pops out and disables the heater if it gets too hot. Apparently they are worried about baking people alive or something... In any case, if you reach down there and pop it back in periodically, you can manually override the temperature control and keep the thing cranking! 240 is really hot - remember that water boils at 210 F. Then we ran outside and around the geographic south pole in the -27 F weather. Wearing shoes of course. The people who wore only sandals suffered, but I was great! Well, my hands got a little cold. Ok, fine by the time we went back in I was pretty cold... Oh yeah maybe rolling in the snow wasn't such a good idea either... The think that is super cool is that any exposed hair on your body almost instantly freezes and turns frosty white. We won't mention that my legs looked like an open meadow after a heavy frost. Needless to say, I slept very well that night!

Oh yeah, and on sunday Bob and Fred might have shown up again for a repeat attempt at the tow-in paragliding adventure with a stronger rope, accompanied by a dedicated photographer Joe on a second snow-mobile. Let's just imagine that everything worked really well this time, and Fred got up the full extent of the rope, probably 150 feet off the ground. But I'll leave it up to your imaginations - bug me when I get back to Chicago.

Here I am out in the open:

First light for BICEP2

Hello y'all. My apologies for not writing in a week. Let me catch you up. This past week Ross the winter-over from last year came in for a two week stint to catch up this year's winter-overs Dan and Dana on all of the things that they did last winter. Ross is british and very good with computers. Last winter he wrote a very good collection of programs that deal with automatically processing the data from SPT. For those of you who are interested in that kind of thing, I'll describe it briefly. The crontab job calls several bash scripts every couple of hours. The first bash script updates a Mysql database which keeps track of numerous meta-data things including which fields and sources in the sky have been observed at what times, and what of that data has been processed. The other bash scripts collect the appropriate arguments then call python scripts to process the data. These python scripts are really just wrappers over underlying IDL procedures, and they interface with the Mysql database to figure out what needs to be processed and collect arguments. The IDL jobs are then collected and sumbitted to a Sun Grid Engine, which handles queueing jobs, making sure the processors do not get overloaded, and collecting the output. Once data is processed, the output is written and the Mysql database is updated. It is pretty cool and works well, and it all makes sense once you wrap your head around it all. Ross is coming back to Chicago after being at pole to work as a post-doc for Carlstrom and the SPT group.



In terms of work for myself this past week, I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Ross' autoprocessing procedure to understand how it all fits together. One hinderance is that I have not worked with Mysql at all before, and have only written one program in Python 5 years ago. So I am learning those languages as I go. But as my uncle says, once you know a programming language well - which for me is C++ - you can pick up enough to understand programs in other languages pretty quickly.

Besides that, most of my time has been spent writing the new scan and schedule files for the next year's CMB observations. These are the files that tell the telescope where to point and how to move. The files are pretty high-level, meaning that there are already a bunch of functions that take care of the details and I just invoke commands like "acquire($source)" which tells the telescope to track a given source that is defined in a configuration file elsewhere. We will test out my programs at the beginning of this week.

Beyond my immediate work, the most interesting thing that happened this week was the BICEP science lecture last monday. As most of you know, I worked on BICEP2 last year, and they have been deploying the new instrument this season. Things are going well for them, and at the lecture on Monday they presented their first CMB field maps. It is pretty incredible to see how everything comes together to produce maps in the end. I think back to one year ago when I was still struggling to understand the gcp (Generic Control Program) so I could get it to talk to the detector-readout electronics. I remember how incredulous and excited I was the first time I saw data from the detectors actually propagate all the way up through the gcp and show up in plots in the Viewer in March of last year. Then I remember fighting data-frame packing last summer, which is required to match weather and position information from the Antenna side with data from the detector side. To see it all come together is pretty fantastic, even though I haven't worked on the project since September. It was especially cool to see the first BICEP2 CMB field showing temperature anisotropies that had been measured in 20 hours of observation side-by-side with the same patch of sky as measured by WMAP over 5 years - they looked virtually identical. Now this is not a fair comparison because WMAP had been measuring the entire sky in those 5 years where BICEP had spent 20 hours on that small patch, but it was still cool. The talk was dedicated to Andrew Lange (see last post).



Finally, the week in recreation! Did I tell you all that there is a climbing gym here? Well, there is. It is a small bouldering cave, but it is enough to have fun and stay in shape. And there one guy, Orin, who is climbing stronger than I am and puts up problems that I can make progess on but have to work at a lot. That is totally awesome, having people around climbing harder than you, which makes it easier to push yourself. I put up an awesome problem last weekend, and was finally able to send it this Saturday. The crux went from this small crimp to a spok-grip on a sloper to a thin pocket... Hmm, I need to include a beta video on this blog! Also awesome, Orin has time off in NZ at the same time that I do, so we are planning on climbing together for two weeks there. Hopefully some long rock routes and maybe some mountaineering stuff!

I've also been playing a bunch of volleyball and some soccer. We played volley ball for almost 4 hours on Friday evening! Soccer is a killer on the lungs, so less people play. Last Wednesday there were only 4 of us, so we played 2 on 2. Brutal! At this altutude, we played for 10 "quarters" followed by breaks - that was all that we could handle.

Every Wednesday is Pub Trivia. There are usually 4 rounds, and the winners of each round get a 6-pack of beer. It works out well because I don't know hardly any of the questions, but I don't drink our team's beer when we win either! Lots of pop-culture questions about movies and popular music, with some random questions like the round on robots last time. This coming week the SPT team is hosting, and I am putting together a round on mountains. I'll post my questions here, and see how many you guys can guess!

Back to work on this cloudy Monday morning. I hope that all of you have a brilliant day!

Darkness and Light

This is not a light blog entry. Life is not always happy.

I will start with the light. It is unnerving how well our experiment is going this season. We have finished all major maintenance jobs, and are already back to observing clusters. Though the foreground contamination for CMB fields is much larger when the sun is up, we can still get useful data by looking at specific galaxy clusters that we already know are there. It is especially useful to get data with out 90 GHz detectors, because these were not operational during our first full season (2008) and there are numerous clusters that do not have good 90 GHz data. We observe in three frequency bands: 90, 150, and 220 GHz. The reason for this is that the SZ effect (see older posts for explanation) acts differently at these different frequencies. The Thermal SZ (tSZ) has a null at 220 GHz, meaning that there is no effect there. By using a linear combination of the data at 150 and 220 GHz, we are the first group ever to successfully separated out the tSz power specturm. By using 90 GHz, we expect to be able to also separate out the Kinetic SZ (kSZ) power spectrum. Briefly, the tSZ is caused by Compton scattering of CMB photons by hot plasma gravitationally bound to massive, collapsed objects such as galaxy clusters. The kSZ is caused by a Doppler Shift when ionized matter is moving with respect to the rest frame of the CMB.

Also exciting in the realm of science is I just read a paper forwarded by a friend about phenomenological quantum gravity and possibilities of experimental tests. Quantum gravity is probably the one thing that gets me the most excited in all of physics, and the number one problem with figuring out how it works is the current lack of experimental evidence. Apparently, if the theory of quantum gravity violates Parity or Charge-Parity or time reversal symmetry, there could be observable consequences in the CMB spectrum, specifically in correlations in the Temperature and parity odd polarization modes, or B-modes. BICEP2 and Keck, which I worked on up to this past September are specifically designed to look for B-modes. This could be very exciting!

Yesterday was Saturday, and after working all afternoon the evening was fun. There was a film festival of films made by people here at the Pole. Some were artsy, which didn't suit the drunken crowd. But there were two thoroughly entertaining ones. The first was "I'm at the Pole," a music video that was a parody on a rap song that I believe is called "I'm on the boat." Don't know who the original is by, but those who knew it said that the pole video was darn close to the original. It was hilarious! The last film was also quite good. It followed 2 convicts coming to the South Pole, which in the film had been turned from a science base into a prison. They meet a sympathetic prisoner and try to escape, to no avail. It was quite good.

And sure enough, Saturday night meant there was a dance party to do to thrown by Ice Cube, the neutrino detector project. The theme was trashy euro club music, and some of the music took me straight back to a disco club in Grenoble, France. I love dancing.

However, Saturday was not all happy. I woke up late, at 11:40am in time to go straight to lunch. The 4 of us on SPT were sitting in the lunch room eating when Phil from BICEP came in and sat down next to us. "Have you heard about Andrew Lange? He committed suicide this morning." I am still shocked. Andrew Lange was the Principle Investigator on the BICEP and Keck-Array projects and the chair of the physics and astronomy department at Caltech. He was a close colleague of almost all of us, and Justus' graduate adviser. I have met him on several occasions during my trips to Caltech. Lunch was very quiet for the BICEP - SPT group.

I will never know the reasons behind Dr Lange's action. It has caused me some serious reflection for the past two days. Dr Lange was a career role-model for many of us. He has had a wildly successful academic career. So what went wrong? How can we learn from this? The first thought I have is about the necessity of a balanced life. Work is great. There is no substitute for hard work. But life is about balance. Being able to balance your work and your play. The world of academics does poorly at emphasizing the need for this balance. It always pushes for you to work harder, longer, more efficiently, better. I strive for the ever-illusive and undefined goal of perfection, and hence I thrive in this atmosphere where I can push myself to always improve. However, there is a limit that academia does not respect. There is a necessity for other things in life beyond the ivory tower of knowledge. There is a need for spiritual qualities - love, joy, peace. A need for personal time alone with your thoughts. In my current thinking, this is one thing that recreation and things outside of work, outside of science achieve.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is how much our lives are inter-twined with those of other people. Dr Lange's death has caused ripples to flow through our community here at the South Pole, and I am sure that I am seeing only the tip of the iceberg as to what effect this tragedy will have on the people that intersected with Andrew's life. I don't know what will happen to the BICEP and Keck-Array grants, thought presumably the other scientists on the project will take this over. Justus will have to get another adviser. Caltech loses a valuable faculty member. And this is all professional - I don't know anything about Dr Lange's family and personal relations.

This loss is such a waste. In the rest of Dr. Lange's life, what other good might he have brought about, how many students could he have inspired, what knowledge might he have unearthed for humanity? The Dalai Lama says that life is about helping other people, and the best way to do this consistently is to develop a global consciousness, and awareness of how your actions affect everyone and everything around you. By removing yourself from this life, you can no longer benefit others. So what do I take away related to this? I need to strive always harder to be aware of how my actions affect others, and modify those actions to benefit others rather than only serving my own self-interest. I don't mean to sound callous, I'm just thinking aloud.

How should we deal with tragedy like this? The response of the people here at Pole was to go back to work. In one sense this is just ignoring the situation, a form of denial. One of us lamented how working too hard may have been the cause of problems that lead to Dr. Lange's actions, yet when this happened we all just went back to work. Alternately, I similarly just went back to work, which for me was the best way to deal with it. This is because life moves on. I think that it is necessary to learn from what happened, but you must get up and keep on trudging. One thing in particular I have been thinking about is when/if I become a professor, how can I effectively advise those under me to take care of themselves and keep from backing themselves into a corner that they feel they have no escape from? I will always stress the importance of hard work, but I also want to impress upon those around me and myself the need to maintain balance, and the need to take care of oneself both physically and mentally.

Life is sacred. We tend to forget how fragile our grip on this experience is until that grip is broken in an instant. Please take care of yourselves, and do what you can to take care of those around you. May peace be with you.

Random snippets in the life of a Polie.

I sleep like a rock star. Well, minus the excess of loose women and the drug-induced haze. Ok, maybe I don't steep anything like a rock star. But I sleep like a rock. Apparently the altitude affects many people's sleep here at Pole - remember the effective altitude is usually above 10,000 feet. Many people complain, "man, I'm tired. I didn't sleep well last night - kept waking up every 3 hours." I always say, "I was sleeping like a champion until my alarm went off."

However, monday morning I slept like a champion even while my alarm was going off. I wanted to get up at 7:30, because I had a snow mobile test at 8:30. I have no sense of time in my room, because there are no windows (this is a good thing) and it is always dark when the lights are off. At some point during Sunday night I woke up enough to think, "I should look at the time." My watch read 10:30. Wait, 10:30pm? I went to bed after midnight! My mental gears strained to clear the fog in my head, following the light of my wrist watch in the distance. It gradually drew closer, and I could just make out the digits "10:31 am" AM!!!!!! What!? The fog lifted very quickly as I realized that I had slept through my alarm by 3 hours, and missed the snowmobile test. Well, that was dumb. From now on I will take my watch off of my wrist and put in on the desk where I will be able to hear it. None the less, 10 hours of sleep felt good! And I got my snowmobile training in Tuesday. It consisted of talking about what to check on the snowmobile before you take it out, how to operate it, and stating the 10mph speed limit. No driving, just talking. The driving part is easy.

So I have been working on the autoprocessing software, as I explained before. Yesterday I finally worked through the interconnected software web, and it seems to be working. All in all, it uses 5 programming languages (I am counting bash scripting as a language, which is debatable). First there is a crontab which automatically calls a bash script every 2 hours. The bash script employs perl and magic to write IDL commands to a file, then runs that file in IDL. IDL then processes a bunch of config files, and calls a mixed C and C++ program from the bowels of the GCP (generic control program - what I did last year for BICEP) to read in the archived data, which is then processed in IDL. Is it needlessly complicated? Well, you could probably write all of this with bash and one more language, but this collection of code uses each language where it functions best. So I am content with it.

People can mail stuff to you at the pole, and apparently people like mailing stuff to Liz. Liz is a grad student at Berkeley who appears to be crazy, but I have only met her once so I can't really say. But the people who like mailing stuff to Liz apparently think that she REALLY likes tea. There was a shelf full of tea that she left which I sorted yesterday while taking a break from looking at code. There were no fewer than 37 boxes of tea! The two winterovers had better drink tea 4 times a day all winter, or they will never get through it all.

I am going to leave you with a collection of quotes from our winterover Dan. Dan is Australian, and is doing well an maintaining my impression that all Aussies are crazy. In a good way, but crazy none the less. Here is a collection of quotes over one single evening, and he wasn't even drunk. Just talking. Try reading these out-loud in an Aussi accent.

- "I can't belive that you call a scone a buiscit. You are so barbaric!"

- "When I hear, 'biscuits and gravy' I think of something with chocolate and gravy. Hmm. I guess you could just wing that."

- "Dark matter sucks and Dark Energy blows"

- "I just inhailed some green tea. And it hurts. But I don't care."

- "Imagine if you were launched across the Grand Canyon. Like Evil Kanival. It would be kind of cool. With a cape!"

- "I got mugged by a gang of teenagers. They are getting bigger these days. They took my $20 mp3 player."

- "The context that I heard of Clifford Algebra was when the most beautiful woman I had ever met was explaining it to me. And I was drunk. It didn't make any sense."

- "She is one of those people who the world bends around. And she isn't very big!"

- "Dear Mom. I'm really dirty. Please send soap."

What I may or may not have done on Sunday afternoon

The post about Friday became long, so I have started a new post for Saturday and Sunday. I know how short an attention span you TV-loving Americans have... (for Tom: that was a joke) Man, have you all watched normal TV recently? I can barely even watch it - they jump around to the point of distraction and I'm always waiting, and waiting, and waiting for them to get to a deeper punch-line when the program ends. Screw that, I'll go back to books!

Saturday saw me turning off my alarm, rolling over, and sleeping for 2 more hours. Oops. Oh well. I worked all afternoon trying to get some matlab functions to run, which analyze optical pointing data. We want to use several small optical telescopes mounted on the telescope to look at prominent stars to see where our telescope is actually pointing. Our final maps are accurate to around 5 arc-seconds. This means the following: The sky at the horizon can be divided up into 360 degrees around, each degree is divided up into 60 arc-minutes, and each arc-minute is divided up into 60 arc-seconds. As you increase the elevation the az measurement gets scaled by a cos(theta)... Why couldn't they have picked a coordinate system that was base 10? That would have been too easy. Just like switching to the metric system would be too easy in the long run... Moral of the story, we need to know where we are looking very exactly. And the optical pointing telescopes should help us do that, if they work properly.

After dinner, the whole group of us went on a tour of the berms given by John Carlstrom. The purpose of the tour was to look for large bolts that we needed for the telescope but were missing. We walked around for a while and looked through several tractor-trailer sized metal crates but didn't find the bolts. Then some people lured us into a building with the promise, "come on! We have beer!" It was the smoker's lounge. As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I like hanging out with smokers. They are the most un-pretentious people, and are usually just having a good time. That place certainly had character. Writing all over the walls, people playing Wi-golf, blasting music, good times.

After the others finished their beers, we left and headed over to the next party. This outdoor-indoor party had it all. The first thing to notice was the BBQ grille, where they had previously cooked braughtworsts and some beef-steak thing. Then there was the whiskey-shot bong. Someone had taken a cylindrical piece of ice 2 ft in diameter and 1 ft tall and hollowed out a 1-revolutoin spiral tube through the middle of the block. A plastic tube was attached to the exit, making for beer-bong style ice-cooled whiskey shots.

Pretty soon, out came a lady with a pinata designed like the old dome that had just been taken down, complete with rivets from the dome. It was attached to a rope that a guy could use to pull it up and down, and blind-foulded participants took turns whacking at it with an axe handle. It finally broke and candy was distributed. After a bit I went inside, and they had started playing music. A few people were dancing, and I can't not dance if there is a dance floor! So we busted some moves for the next several hours. Oh man was I over dressed!! Wearing expedition-weight long johns, insulated carhardt overalls and a long-john shirt made me one sweaty dancing fool. Fortunately the air is so dry that sweat evaporates almost instantly. It is hilarious watching people dance in the huge insulated boots. They just sort of clump around. I was wearing hiking boots, so things were better for me. I turned in at 11:30 - no worries about getting lost walking back in the dark!

This brings me to what I may or may not have done on Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning was brunch and more work and more work on the optical pointing software, which is working now. Sunday afternoon I was going to play ultimate frisbee, when two people who may or may not work on BICEP2 walked into the science lab with large packs. After a one sentence explanation, my frisbee plans were dropped in favor of a new project. I got fully dressed, and Bob and Fred (aliased names, of course) checked out a snow mobile. Fred drove with Bob on the back, and me in the sled being towed. We drove out to the BICEP - SPT building and found a spool of that cheep yellow nylon rope.

After we left the building, the OFFICIAL record gets a bit hazy. We might have driven grid-north out of the station approximately 2 miles, until we could only see the top of SPT and the steam from the main station. I might have taken over driving, though we can't really say because I haven't taken my snowmobile training (that will be tomorrow morning). It is possible that Fred had a paragliding setup in the enormous pack. Some have guessed that he put on a full-body harness and clipped on the ropes to the paragliding kite. I could have tied the yellow rope into the front of his harness with a Munter hitch on a bight so it could be released by just pulling the lose end, and Bob might have put the spool in the back of the snowmobile and tied another Munter hitch to a beefy quick-link on the back of the snowmobile. One could then imagine me inching the snowmobile out until the rope was tight, at which point Fred could have started running and lifted his parachute. If we got going fast enough, Fred could have started flying up as we towed him from the snowmobile, in which case Bob could have slowly let out rope so Fred could get higher and higher. If this were the case, then the Munter hitch would actually be too much friction, melting the rope, causing it to stick then break. The remedy for this would be to switch to simply two wraps around the quick-link. In such a scenario a party like this would make about 15 attempts, breaking the rope 4 times, and Fred would have made it up to 50 or 60 feet above the ground. This group would have decided to call it quits when Fred got too far to the side and almost tipped the snowmobile over sideways. Fortunately in this case a practical driver like myself would have let off the accelerator and Fred might gracefully glide down to the snow. We are not really sure what happened, but I came back to the BICEP building with Fred and Bob several hours after leaving, toes frozen cold, and a coil of broken yellow rope.

Good times man, good times.

Just greasin' the gears

It is Sunday, January 17, 9:41pm. I was trying to work, but Ken is moving the data around because he is messing with the raid arrays, and my programs can't find anything that they need. I give up. But fortunately for you, my dear reader, this gives me time to write a blog posting, which will go up tomorrow when the internet comes back.

Speaking of internet, on the information screens in the dining hall there is a daily quote posted. The other day the quote said something like, "The saddest thing I can think of is getting accustomed to luxury" - Charlie Chaplain. Well, apparently I had grown accustomed to the luxury of internet whenever I wanted it, served up on the silver platter of high bandwidth. Here at pole, on a good day we get internet in two 4 hour chunks during the day, which corresponds to when two satellites go overhead. Sometimes the blocks are broken up with small breaks in service. One satellite is slow, the other is glacial. Gmail works, but barely. Uploading pictures to this blog is VERY slow. And whenever the internet is up, I feel obligated to do work that requires the internet, so I don't take much recreational internet time.

Friday saw me climbing up onto the telescope deck to grease the elevation gears, the ones that lets the telescope look up and down. After the azimuth bearing started vomiting small pieces of metal last summer, we switched from azimuth scans to elevation scans. By "elevation scans" I mean that the telescope stays at a constant azimuth (points at the same place on the horizon) and scans up and down in elevation until the patch of sky that we are interested in rotates out of view due to earth's rotation. The reason for scanning back and forth is that we want to look at the same patch of sky for a very long time and it should always look the same, while the atmosphere and other foregrounds should change. This way we can get rid of foregrounds, leaving only the signal we are interested in - the CMB.

Greasing the elevation gears required two steps. First we had to scrape off most of the old grease with paint spatulas. The grease is very heavy, cold temperature grease. It is apparently really expensive, and it gets everywhere! It was very cold up on the deck scraping grease in the wind, and we had to go back into the observing cabin every 10 min or so to thaw our hands. We would scrape the visible gears, then rotate the telescope and scrape more gears that had become reachable. After the gears were mostly clear, we painted more grease right back on, using paint brushes. Man, that job is going to suck in the winter when it is -80 C!

We rushed back to the station to catch dinner, then headed out to take a picture with everyone at the station of the old dome. The new station that I have been staying in was completed in 2007 (CHECK). Before that, there was a large metal dome that had smaller heated sections inside of it, which served as the main station. By the time I got here, there were only a few pieces of the dome left. Now the dome is completely gone, and some people are sad. The new station is certainly much plusher than the old dome.

There are a number of people who come here to work every summer season. I get the impression that it is similar to seasonal workers for the Forest Service in MT. This leads to an interesting mixing of cultures: seasonal blue-collar workers and scientists. At the pole, these cultures seem to mix nicely without much conflict. I got the sense that at McMurdo it is not always as congenial, but that was just an impression. Some people have been coming here for years and years. I cleaned the bathroom with a guy who was not in that category - he looked like he had stepped straight out of Sturgis to the South Pole and was wearing a Harley Davidson tee-shirt, jeans, sunglasses (inside - we were cleaning the bathroom) and a black leather du-rag to compliment his grey hair and beard. He said, "Some people come down here because they just like it. Other people come here for reasons you will find out. I don't want to get caught up in all of that. It is nice to have a woman back home, you know?" He was a heavy machinery contractor from Colorado, around Durango. But indeed some people just like it. Dana is one of our two winter-overs, and this will be his fifth season. He said, "I like the dark. When the sun starts to come back up in early October, I say, 'Oh man!' " Stephan is the winter-over for BICEP2, and I know he wintered last year - he may have wintered over even before that. John Carlstrom is on his 15th season this year, and John Kovac, the de-facto lead on BICEP2, said that this is his 18th season.

Do you know what friday night at the pole is? Volleyball night! At 7:30pm after the picture, a crowd gathered in the gymnasium, and we put up the net. The gymnasium is almost exactly the size of a volleyball court. The games were mostly 6 on 6, with some subs at the beginning. It is a very congenial atmosphere, where you play hard without being too competitive. I was amused by a big german? guy who works on Ice Cube, the neutrino detector. He is a classic alpha-male character type - he liked to hit the ball really hard and always kept score, but wasn't actually very good. Fortunately kept himself under control and it was all just fun and games. After each game, we would say, "one more?" and ended up playing until after 10pm.

Ice cream!

Here is an email that I got from one of the logistics coordinators, and I had to share!

Hello South Pole,

As many of you will soon know, ice cream arrived this afternoon and will be available tomorrow for your consumption. First, let me share some information with you about this ice cream. It is from NZ and in limited quantity. You may ask "why is it in limited quantity?" excellent question; here comes the answer.

I purchased the ice cream bars, sorbet and popsicles one month ago because frosty boy was having serious issues and I wanted to give you something delicious while we waiting for the vessel to arrive with 660/3 gallon containers. (11 different flavors)

Remember one thing..the faster you eat the ice cream currently on station, the faster all 5,100 pieces will be gone. If everyone on station has two per day, we will be out in less than two weeks.

The key is to enjoy slowly so we can enjoy it longer,

[Name removed to protect the innocent]

Soccer and Pub Trivia

Ahhh, I am now settling back into my chair in my room, listening to "The Odessy" by Symphony X and writing of my first three full days at the bottom of the world. Let's get a few things straight right off the bat. A devorak keyboard setup rocks and you should all swithch over. Milk on tap is the most awesome thing ever. The Pope is Catholic. And the South Pole is cold. It has apparently been "very warm" according to the locals, with temperatures around -25 C. But it really doesn't feel that cold, first because you put on half a department store's worth of clothing, and second because it is so darn dry. If I don't cover my face with goggles and a neck gator it gets cold very quickly, but if I try to wear my full down coat on the walk to the telescope, I roast. Also, all of the scientists here works very hard. You pretty much eat, sleep, and work. As expected. And there are no penguines at the South Pole.

Ok, now that we have cleared some things up, I'll discuss my work a bit for those of you who are interested, then get on to the stories later. I am mostly here to get a feel for the telescope, see everything first hand, and maybe even be helpful sometimes. I am working on setting up the automatic processing software, which - you guessed it - automatically processes data from the telescope to make it easy to look and see if everything is working properly during the observation season. It should work immediately because it was used 2 years ago, but nothing works the first time so my employment is still ensured for the time being. Another major project that has occupied most of Carlstrom's time in the past few days is looking at fixing the azimuth bearing. This is the bearing that the entire telescope rotates on in a circle parallel to the ground - i.e. if you stay pointing at the horizon and turn in a circle, you would be turning in azimuth. This bearing started spitting out metal pieces a few months ago, which is VERY BAD. We have hired a company to design a way to jack up the entire telescope, remove the old bearing, and put in a new one. This will happen next year. But to get a sense of the magnitude of this project, the telescope above the bearing weighs 700,000 pounds. Yes, Seven Hundred Thousand pounds. Taking out the bearing will probably require cutting out the side of the building. The two guys who came down to look at the telescope and start making plans didn't seem phased, so that at least is good. I got to crawl around under the telescope on Tuesday looking at the foundation where they will jack from.

Yesterday I did software all day. Kind of a shame sitting inside all day in a location like this, but that was the work I needed to do. But there were guys working on the roof of the main station where I was working - not sure what they were doing exactly, but apparently it required a lot of violent banging. Whenever it became particularly ferocious, white crap from the ceiling would start raining down like snow, and we would all close our computers and go for a cookie break.

Today we needed to change some fans and change a hard-drive on the telescope. We docked the telescope to get access to the receiver. This is a pretty cool design; the telescope rotates down so the receiver sits ontop of the roof of the control building. Then all we have to do is open up doors in the roof and we can crawl directly into the receiver cavity, which is pre-heated by the warm air in the control building. I got to crawl around in there a bit and cause trouble.

Ok, STORY time. Tuesday after working all day in front of a computer and eating a steak dinner (the food is indeed pretty good), I felt the need for exercise. Remember that the South Pole is just over 9000 ft above sea level. And because we are so far south, the effective altitude is closer to 11000 ft. In the briefing sessions in McMurdo, they give you a scare talk to drink lots of water and recommend taking diamox, an altitude medicine. Anyway, there was a soccer game in the gym on the rec schedule, so I went. 3 on 3 indoor soccer. I launched into that game, and almost died in the first 3 minutes! Wow, I never realized how hard running at 11000 ft is! I guess that is because every other time I have been at altitude I have been in the mountains where you don't really run. I could start off sprinting, and after running the length of the court I would start seeing spots. I quickly learned to run sparingly. It was a fun game because we were all of a close ability, and the walls were in, so it became a lot like hockey. But oh man, by the time we had played for an hour, I was finished!

Soccer dovetailed nicely with the Pub Trivia event. There were 6 teams, and 4 rounds. In each round, the hosts would ask a series of questions and we would attempt to write down the answers on a piece of paper. Then we would switch papers with a nearby team, and correct them. The winning team of each round would get a 6-pack of beer. The event was $1 to enter, so all proceeds went to beer for the next trivia night. The first round was on money - curriency of India, how many dollar bills weighs a pound, how many dollars is an ounce of gold, etc. - and on names on NPR hosts. Unfortunately I could't remember anyone's name. Round 2 was on deserts. Oldest desert, percent of landmass covered by desert, the names of the planet and main characters in the movie Dune, etc. Thanks to Jared knowing the name of the co-star in Dune, we won that round! Given that there were only 4 people on our team, one was on dish duty and couldn't drink, and I don't drink beer, a 6-pack was pretty good for Jared and Dan! The third round was a series of 25 pictures. Each picture was from a movie, and you had to guess the movie. The catch was that in each picture, they had digitally removed everyone's faces - the clothes were "empty." Oh man, I was hopeless!! Jared did well, but was basically working by himself on that one. The last round was a set of 20 pop songs where you had to guess the artist and the name of the song. Again a trick - clips of the songs were all played backwards! I got Hotel California and The Distance by Cake, my proud contribution to the team. We ended up 3rd over all - not bad for the smallest team! Then back to work for a bit before bed.

The South Pole is probably one of the only places in the world where you can still stamp your own passport! I did exactly that, setting the date as my arrival date.

Today, after closing the telescope we made it back to dinner with 1 minute to spare. After dinner there was a lecture by Charles Bentley about when he came to Antarctica in 1957-1959 to do some climate science and mostly explore. They had to come in by boat because no airplanes had the range to make it. But the boats could only come in at the end of the season because of ice. So wintering over was mandatory. They spent the winter in these box-like buildings, then went out to explore the next summer. They actually found a mountain range that nobody knew existed before - the interior of Antarctica was simply largly unknown. Pretty interesting.

Thanks for your comments, and stay warm!

Arrival at the South Pole

Holy crap!!!! I am at the south pole!!! Holy crap!!! How can I convey to you, my dear reader, my excitement when I stepped off the plane and there was the South Pole Telescope, just a kilometer away? Well, hopefully you all know me well enough to how excited I get about the science I do. I have been working on projects at the South Pole for a year and a half, and have seen hundreds of pictures of the SPT, and then all of a sudden, THERE IT IS!!! I couldn't stop smiling and almost started jumping up and down right there on the snow runway.

But I am ahead of myself. This morning, we left McMurdo and boarded the airplane at 8am. The planes that they fly into the South Pole are military propeller planes with skis instead of wheels, C-130's. They hold around 30 people seated around the outside of the plane interior, and when we are dressed up in all of our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear, the quarters are quite tight. The ECW consists of the following: white Mickey Mouse boots, insulated Carhart overalls, massive down coats with huge, fir-lined hoods, gloves, hats, and goggles. In anything above 15 deg F you start sweating in a hurry just standing there! The flight took about 3 hours. There were some breath-taking views of the Antarctic interior. Just incredible vast expanses of snow and rock. The sky blends with the ground in a seamless cocoon of white and blue.

At the South Pole station I was met with many familiar faces - colleagues I have worked with on the BICEP2 experiment (which I worked on for my first year of graduate school) and my current coworkers on SPT. It is a funny feeling to step off of a plane in one of the most remote places in the world, and be immediately surrounded by people you know and buildings and structures you have dreamed of. My friend Justus who works on BICEP 2 and has taken me climbing in CA during my visits to Caltech to work on that project met me when I got off the plane. The first thing he said was, "did you bring your ice axes? Because there is a 20 ft ice face that we could climb if we had gear!" All my climbing stuff is in Christchurch, so I will try to get Chris Sheehy to bring it in when he comes in later in January. The landscape is completely flat snow in all directions. The sun circles around the sky, but always at virtually the same elevation in its slow regress towards the horizon where it will eventually set after this six month day.

After eating lunch, we immediately headed out to the telescope. The first thing I did when I got there was charge the outhouse because I had to go to the bathroom so bad I couldn't think. But then ... WOW! WOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!! They weren't kidding when they said that the primary mirror is 10 meters in diameter! The telescope is huge. The first time I was standing on top of the observation building watching the telescope turn and nod, I just started laughing hysterically with glee! The entire telescope can rotate at several degrees per second and can almost look like it is dancing. It is indescribable, just amazing. I still can't believe that I am here.

In addition to scientists, there were several media people and "Distinguished Guests" (DV's). The media people include Dan, a meteorologist for a tv station in Alabama that partners with CBS, Ann, a science writer for the Washington Monthly, a camera man from CBS, a science writer from the Wall-street Journal, a reporter from NPR and another science magazine, and perhaps a few others. The DV's were top people from the NSF, which is the organization that funds the whole Antarctica program along with the military. It is very important that the DV's have a good trip and return with favorable impressions, and they have certainly been treated as first-class citizens during the entire trip. Both groups were given tours of the science experiments including SPT, BICEP, and Ice Cube. I listened to Carlstrom give the tour three times in all. Even though I know most of what he said, it is always incredible to listen to John talk about his science. He has a crystal clear grasp of what the science is and how our experiment is achieves these goals. He explains his work concisely, clearly, and passionately. Without exception everyone on each of the three tours were visibly excited by the time John finished talking about dark energy, structure formation, and finding new galaxy clusters. I got excited, and I was hearing the exact same thing three times in a row! I came away with the realization that the experiment I work on, SPT, is the best instrument of its kind at virtually the best location on earth directed by one of the best scientists in the field right now. I know I have told many of you this, and I will say it again; there is nowhere I would rather be, nothing I would rather be doing right now than working as a graduate student on the SPT under John Carlstrom. If I were independently wealthy, I would be doing exactly what I am doing now - ok I might have a car to go climbing but ... I love it. I absolutely love it!

May you all be living out your dreams.

The Southern-Most Rugby Game in the World

[Written Sunday Jan 10]

The posters were everywhere - Mt Terror v.s. Scott's Base. Wait, rugby in Antarctica? Snow for a playing field? Team uniforms? Actual rugby goal posts? No problem mate - let's play!

But first, more penguins! This morning, there was a "penguin tour" Unfortunately by the time that I went to the board to sign up for it, the sign-up sheet was gone. So I just dressed anyway and went out to the meeting place just in case there was extra room. There was.

We drove back out on the road going to Pygasis airport about 20 min onto the ice shelf, and the 20 of us unloaded. A group of 4 emperor penguins was standing about 100 feet away. They were molting, and had apparently been there for 4 days without moving. What impressive animals - way out in the middle of the snow just standing. It was a stunning day with a blue sky and temperatures around -8 C.

After lunch, I piled into "Ivan the Terrabus" and drove out to the field. Sure enough, there was a full rugby field complete with goal posts and flags for the sidelines! Mt Terror was the US team and Scott's Base was the New Zealand team, and each had actual team uniforms - red, white and blue for the americans and black for the kiwis. The players all actually had cleats! The kiwi team looked just like the NZ national rugby team, the All Blacks, who are infamous in the world rugby circuit - apparently whenever they don't win it is a bit of an upset!

The fans lined up on both sides - many more American fans than kiwis, simply because the McMurdo (US) base is a lot larger than Scott's (NZ) base. there were large flat-bed trucks on each side to serve as bleachers, and a kiwi announcer talking through a speaker system. The national anthems were played, and and the teams lined up. But before the game began, the NZ team performed the Haka. The Haka is apparently a traditional Mauri dance, one form of which is performed to show that you have no fear going into battle. The All Blacks perform it to intimidate the other team before the game begins. And yes, it is terrifying! Go look for it on youtube.

Then the game began. It was a fun game and they all played pretty seriously. There were a few girls on each team, who whenever they got the ball or went for a tackle the crowd went wild. The first quarter went scoreless, then things went down hill for the good-ol' USA. We ended up losing 18 - 0. Ouch. But what a random, crazy experience! Pictures to follow.

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McMurdo is a funny community. There are several hundred people living here, and many come back year after year. I was talking to a couple of women who are on their 12th season. It is a very community based atmosphere - much more than in the states. I guess this is because people need each other and if you seclude yourself you will probably go crazy. The age demographic is dominated by people in their late 20's or early 30's. There are significantly more blue-collar type workers than scientists at McMurdo; I will be curious to see if that changes at the pole. There are a surprisingly large number of recreational options - cross country skiing, easy snowboarding, hiking, a gym, yoga, a big screen (~100 inch) TV, and ... wait for it ... drum roll ... a climbing wall!! Unfortunately you have to get certified to use it or go with a group and talked to the guy who is in charge of it on the phone then emailed him later and he hasn't gotten back to me about times to go :(

The dining hall seems surreal - it feels just like a dining hall on a college campus. Various different food options and the ever-present cereal bar, and ENDLESS SUPPLY OF MILK, an ice cream machine. The food is quite good. My one complaint is not enough vegetables. Then again, I am in Antarctica, and veggies are expensive to ship here.

Antarctic landing

[Written regarding Friday, Jan 9]

Here is a photo taken from the airplane window of mountains in Antarctica on the way to McMurdo.

After three days of delays in NZ, we finally made it to Antarctica on Friday. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was out partying with kiwis and only got 3 hours of sleep, so the plan ride went fast because I was spacing out staring at the back of my eye-lids. As we got close, you could see vast expanses of snowy mountains poking above the all-encompasing ice. Just amazing!

We landed on the Ross Ice-shelf, and stepped out into Antarctica. Cold? No, not really; it was actually only -5 deg C and relatively calm. All of us were then loaded up into these bus things that are jacked way up to accommodate massive snow tires. It is called "Ivan."

McMurdo Station is what I imagine a mining town looking like. There are no plants growing at all and all of the buildings are mostly colorless. McMurdo is on the flank of an active volcano called Mt Erebus (~12448 ft), and the ground is all black or dark-brown volcanic rock. I hiked up Observation Point, a 500 ft hill on the edge of the town, and got a great view of McMurdo and the surrounding bay. The most noticeable thing the vast-ness; open expanses of white in all directions with some mountains.

Our flight to the South Pole was supposed to take off Saturday morning, however it was cancelled because a plane on the Wais Divide had run into mechanical issues and our plane was needed to fly in mechanics to fix that plane. I hiked Observation Point again with three other guys, and spent the afternoon catching up on email, creating this blog, and reading an SPT paper. I ate dinner with John Carlstrom (my adviser), went out to Scott's hut with him, then had a few glasses of wine before going to bed. Tom Crawford, a senior scientist on SPT back in Chicago had told me that the best way to get time to talk to John was to be in Antarctica with him. So true! I spent over 5 hours with him yesterday, and in Chicago I have to fight tooth-and-nail to get 15 minutes!

And the moment you have all been waiting for - PENGUINES! At Scott's hut there was a group of 7 or 8 penguins pretty close out on the ice. They were mostly just laying on their stomachs not moving much, but still very cool. I got a few pictures, but I need a zoom lens to get good photos. There was a seal swimming around there too, but apparently not the kind of seal that eats penguins. I'll post some photos when I can download them to my computer.