Leaving Pole

The ceremonial pole on a nice day.

The windchill is -52 F. I can see about 100 meters. I'm supposed to leave the South Pole today. Hmmm…

My trip to the bottom of the world is quickly wrapping up for this season. It is possible that my stay will be extended for a few more days, given that this weather is abysmal. If the visibility is too bad then the planes cannot land. So we are all crossing our fingers that we can get out today.

Reflections of Keith in the Ceremonial Pole.

In the mean-time, I'll give you an update on my last week at Pole. First, my paper is still not submitted. But it is very, very close. We are hoping that it gets submitted today. A great thing about having a large, active group is that you get lost of comments and critiques on the paper. A downside is that the comments don't stop. However, the result is a very good paper. I am extremely privileged to have the opportunity to work with this group of world-class scientists. We sent a draft to a few people on the Planck collaboration, given that we are following up clusters of galaxies that they discovered. They had a few comments, but nothing major. Unfortunately, because I have such limited internet access I won't get to submit the paper myself. None-the-less, my extremely competent colleagues in Chicago are submitting for me.

Enough about work, lets talk about the SPT party! We had the party saturday night out at the telescope, as I described in my previous blog post. The party went off well, though it was pretty casual. We arranged snowmobile shuttles to get people across the 1-km gap from the main station to the telescope, but that distance was still enough to deter many people. In the end about 30 people showed up. We had a good amount of wine, some beer, and plenty of cheesy music.

Getting ready to for the party.

I made a funny observation at this party. Guys are reluctant to dance if there are no girls. However, girls have no problem flooding the floor with estrogen. I'm not sure exactly what it is, whether all men are overly homophobic whereas women are not. Perhaps if we have nobody to impress, we don't feel like shaking it. In any case, we didn't get any ladies on the dance floor until the very end of the night, but we fit a bit of silly dancing in late in the evening.

The winterovers for SPT have arrived, as well as most of the winterovers for the station. There is a very different dynamic among the winterovers than among the summer workers. Many of them have wintered before and know exactly what they are getting into. They generally can't wait until all of the rest of us leave, so they can settle into their routine. Man, I am glad I am not staying for the winter! Time to go home! Or to New Zealand at least.

The classic South Pole shot. The marker to my left is the geographic south pole.

Tuesday night was the annual Super Bowl viewing. They have someone film it at McMurdo, then put on a big party here at Pole. They roasted a whole pig and cooked up quesadillas, mozzarella sticks and jalapeno poppers. Since it was recorded, we could skip all of the ads, so the viewing went much quicker than usual. Fine with me! I was rooting for the Broncos.

Well looks like they are going to try to land, but we will have to spend the night at McMurdo. I'm going to sign off - stay posted for updates from my travels in New Zealand!