Hello Everyone, Please find attached another letter from Paul Smith in Antarctica. Interesting enough, while I was sending him some e-mail, he used the n-talk function on his system, and we had the opportunity to have a nice long chat. I told him that everyone appreciated his letters. I asked him about the weather, and he said it was sunny and warm today, about 0 degrees celius. He said the weather can change very suddenly there, which can be a concern if you want to go somewhere. Hope you enjoy the letter. Bruce Daley chipper@redrock.nevada.edu Received: from latrobe.edu.au by redrock.nevada.edu (5.65c/M1.4) with SMTP id ; Sat, 2 Jan 1993 20:41:54 -0800 Received: from latrobe.edu.au by latrobe.edu.au with SMTP id AA05410 (5.65+/IDA-1.3.5/LTU-1.0 for chipper@redrock.nevada.edu); Sun, 3 Jan 93 15:38:33 +1100 Received: from latrobe.edu.au by latrobe.edu.au (PMDF #2779 ) id <01GT35DEHTC090MX04@latrobe.edu.au>; Sun, 3 Jan 1993 15:38:39 +1000 Date: 03 Jan 1993 15:38:39 +1000 From: "Paul R Smith - Electronic Engineering, LaTrobe Uni" Subject: another day in paradise To: chipper Message-Id: <01GT35DEHTC290MX04@latrobe.edu.au> X-Envelope-To:chipper@redrock.nevada.edu, X-Vms-To: @MAIN:GENERAL Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Yo people! All the new arrivals from voyage 5 seem to be settling well into life at Casey. With the people who were just down for a round trip sailing back to Oz and another group off to drill in the ice for 6 weeks there is a bit more room now so we have more permanent places to sleep. The "red shed", which is the main accomodation building can hold 38 people but since there are more than 70 of us they have the rest of us stashed out the back in what is appropriately called the caravan park. These are portable sleeping huts, pretty much converted shipping containers (or at least that gives you an idea of what they look like), which contain bunks and shelves and, of course, are heated. Normally they sleep four but I have one to myself except for the next few days while a couple of Canadian pilots crash there (sorry, no pun intended). This brings me to the latest happenings, something which I never expected to encounter down here, just when I thought I'd safely got away from it all the ubiquitous (iniquitous?) prescence has followed us to the ends of the earth and reared it's camera toting head. I am of course talking about....tourists. The first invasion was small, a twin otter with 4 filmmakers (I think that's what they are) and flown by aforementioned Canadians arrived yesterday (saturday). They circled the station a couple of times, no doubt taking pictures of us as we were taking pictures of them, then landed on a strip up on one of the nearby plateaus. Of course they were armed to the teeth with photographic equipment and are a very friendly lot. The second wave of tourists arrived today by Russian icebreaker, mostly Americans and Australians. The price of a ticket is apparently around $16,000. So much for being in one of the more remote places on the globe. The larcies (they drive the amphibious vehicles that came down on voyage 5) are even selling t-shirts, badges and port in the red shed!! Ah, now a group has just wandered into the science building (where I am now) and Ray who's in charge of the Auroral Space Physics (ASP) group, who I'm working with, is giving them a spiel. The work done by ASP is quite impressive. The have magnetometers at various sites to measure the earth's magnetic field (it's declination is around 66 degrees at these latitudes) and micropulsations in the field. There is a riometer which listens to one radio frequency (33.1 MHz I think) and measures the amount of radio noise coming from space and it's absorbtion in the atmosphere. Then there's a couple of satellite experiments to measure total electron concentration between them and us. Finally there's the ionosonde which is what I'm helping out with. At the moment we're in the process of putting the antennas up which is quite a big job. It's not just stringing a bit of wire out the window, the transmit antenna needs a central 45 meter tower with four 24m towers around it so there's quite a lot of work to make sure it is tied down to withstand 200knot winds. There are also 4 receiving antennas but they're only a couple of meters high. Still, everything has to be set in concrete so I don't know how much physics we'll be doing just yet. This weekend we are having a break and sometime next week I think I go out on field training so if I get lost in a blizzard at some stage they can at least say they tried. We had a great time on New Years eve and a very quiet New Years day . The food then, as always, was excellent and they encourage you to eat lots of it. Yeah, it's a tough life down here but somebody's got to face it, in the name of science :) It's amazing that there are about 3 physicists, and engineer and 2 biologists and that's the complete scientific community out of 70. There are some navy guys making depth maps of the bay and surrounds, but most of the rest are builders, tradesmen and mechanics. And since so many people are curious to know, there are only 2 women staying here (a chef and a biologist). From what I have heard about complements at the other stations this seems to be an unusually small number so don't take it as the norm. I think over winter there will only be 19 people staying here. Ok, I've tied up this terminal long enough for now, I'm borrowing one on the AntDiv computer to telnet to Latrobe but they should have a telnet server in soon so I can do it directly. I hope you all enjoyed seeing the New Year in and best wishes to to you, Paul