Hi Everyone, For those of you that are following Paul Smith's work in Antarctica, here is the latest letter I have received from him. I realize this is a long post, and appreciate not getting "flamed" for that. Please note that Paul's letters, and other information, are available by anonymous ftp on ftp.nevada.edu in the /pub/ccsd/ANTARCTICA directory. Hope you enjoy this letter.. Bruce Daley chipper@redrock.nevada.edu Received: from latrobe.edu.au by redrock.nevada.edu (5.65c/M1.4) with SMTP id ; Thu, 4 Feb 1993 07:29:25 -0800 Received: from latrobe.edu.au by latrobe.edu.au with SMTP id AA23570 (5.65+/IDA-1.3.5/LTU-1.0 for chipper@redrock.nevada.edu); Fri, 5 Feb 93 02:25:22 +1100 Received: from latrobe.edu.au by latrobe.edu.au (PMDF #2779 ) id <01GUCHA3OQRK8WWCCP@latrobe.edu.au>; Fri, 5 Feb 1993 02:25:19 +1000 Date: 05 Feb 1993 02:25:19 +1000 From: PRS - Melt Lake inspector and rad haircut wearer Subject: what i did on my summer holiday To: chipper Message-Id: <01GUCHA3P0EQ8WWCCP@lure.latrobe.edu.au> X-Envelope-To: chipper@redrock.nevada.edu X-Vms-To: @GENERAL Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT G'day everyone, I'm back again after being out of circulation temporarily. Here's another readers digest account of what's been happening in the deep south, a place which continually amazes me so here we go. From January 22nd until the 31st I was lucky to get a trip inland to a place called Law Dome. Now Law Dome is really just that, a dome of ice that flows out from the mainland as a glacier and breaks off into big chunks, icebergs, when it hits the sea. These glaciers form because of the amount of snow that falls in that area every year which gets pressed down as more layers of snow accumulate on top, eventually creating packed ice...but more on that later. Most people are fortunate if they can make a trip up there over the weekend as only about 5 at a time can travel in the Hagglunds (the red Swedish tanks) and the journey takes more than 6 hours travelling one way. I was a bit surprised then when I was asked if I wanted to go for over a week, but of course the catch was this wasn't going to be a lie in the sun holiday, they actually wanted me to do some work up there. You see at almost the top of the Dome there is a station DSS (Dome Summit Station, not at the summit either, but rather about ten metres lower that it) where a group of glaciologists from the Antarctic Division are drilling down through the ice and bringing back up the sections of ice for study. CSIRO is also drilling nearby at a site called DE08 (can't decipher that acronym). We set off early friday evening and made it to Griffo's Roadhouse at Blythe Junction in about 3 hours. Sounds almost like a normal place doesn't it? The "roadhouse" is a hut that sleeps 3 and it basically a cramped 1 room affair with a stove and sink and some food stocks (mars bars...yessssss!) Now the scenery is quite easy to describe...there isn't any. If you look out to the horizon, provided it's one of those nice days when you can actually see it, then all there is to see is a vast, white flatness. Believe me, it's totally white, completely flat, and the same in every direction. Just amazing. Now in a magnetically screwed up place like Antarctica, where magnetic north points to geographic west, you may ask how do navigate around someplace that has no obvious landmarks? Well each of the Hagglunds is equipped with a radar and at periodic spots along the route to various places there are metal drums, or canes with metal on them. On a clear day they are easily visible in the distance and in bad weather, especially white-out, the radar picks them up. But I digress... after departing Blythe Jctn, where we had and interesting night because we had one less sleeping bag than people with us, we headed on to a place called S2. Now S2 is a lot more interesting than the name implies. As I understand it, it is an old under-ground (underice?) base built by the Americans who were also into digging up ice in the 60's. At the surface there is just a hatch with a ladder going down into what looks like a bottomless pit. That's fixed by a fluro light and a generator at the top and down we went. The descent to the first level is about 15 meters then horizontal passages branch off in a few directions. The width and height of the passages is quite cramped because the ice is always moving and getting compressed by snow accumulation, so it's quite natural to feel as if a thousand ton of ice is coming down to crush you as you crawl along. I guess the bent and broken wall and roof struts don't help your self-confidence either, but I'm reliably told that ice is a very slow mover and will never collapse like a rock or earth tunnel could. Crawling along we saw the accomodation areas, a bit small unless you like your nose an inch from the ceiling, and there were still shelves with tinned food and various items stocked on them. The best part was the shaft where the digging had been. It was about 30m deep and we had to go by torch at that stage so it was mostly dark while climbing down the ladders. Once we were on the bottom we gave each other flash blindness and kodak poisoning as we took the obligatory "look at me at the bottom of the pit" photos. We them made good speed getting back out again since the torch was starting to fail. A few hours later we were at DSS and the others had to set up a tent to sleep the night in while I got a bed inside since I'd be staying the week. There are 9 people at DSS who operate and maintain the drill, do the ice core analysis, prepare samples and bag and store the cores. Each day one person has to be a slushie, which the a hated and dreaded time when somebody has to cook lunch and dinner and do the dishes and other kitchen duties in between. That saturday night, since there were guests, was an excuse to have a bit of a party and people played guitar and we all sang along, quite badly, but with a lot of enthusiasm. Next day, we said goodbye to the rest of the party that came up as they headed home and I began to get into life at DSS. First I'll get all the techo details out of the way. The main reason for going to all this trouble and distance to drill ice is because it gives a great picture of what's been going on in the past few thousand years in earth's climate and atmosphere. If a big volcano erupted at some stage then in a year or so the ash and acid from sulfur dioxide will eventually work it's way down to antarctica and come down with the snow falls. As I mentioned the layers of snow build up and get compressed into ice so things like air from that era get trapped in the ice too giving a vertical record of history. The depth of the ice at DSS is a bit over 1200 metres and whenI left they were at 980 metres with about 20-25 metres of ice core being brought up everyday. This means they are probably going to hit bedrock (the depth was found a few years earlier by using an ice radar) before the summer people have to go home, which is lucky cause this is the last year they can drill. The drill has a long, hollow chamber with cutting sections on the end and rotates when it's at the bottom of the hole so it mechanically bores its way down, enclosing a core of ice as it goes. The core length is about 2 metres when it's snapped off and brought to the surface. The time to send the drill down, get a core and bring it up, remove and clean the drill is about an hour, most of the time is spent sending the drill down and raising it. Once the core's out, it's left for a while to see how much it wants to self destruct before being bagged and labelled. Remember this ice has just come out from being under 70 atmospheres of pressure to 1 so it does expand a bit and sometimes can't hack the pressure. Dense ice in your drinks sounds great cause all those high pressure bubbles of gas crackle and pop away like a bowl of rice bubbles. Later on the cores are cut into 1 metre lengths and relabelled (are rather labour intensive job which is partly why they wanted me there). In analysis, a band saw is used to cut a lengthwise section off the core, then the core is smoothed and a conductivity test done along the length. The conductivity goes up during summer so the graph of conductivity vs. length gives a good method of yearly dating, you just count the peaks. The part of the core that was cut off goes for beryllium and oxygen-18 testing but I forgot to ask what they are supposed to show. That's the overall view anyway, most of the work is done at -10degC or lower so freezer suits are ideal to work in. To enjoy DSS you really have to enjoy drilling and playing with cores cause there's not a lot else to do. For a description of the landscape at DSS read the earlier one I gave. Not long after I arrived the wind and snow picked up and soon we were in a full on blizzard. Stepping outside meant you had to get into so much gear that it looked like you were going for a space walk. Goggles were necessary but they fogged up easily and that froze so it was impossible to see far with them and any exposed skin got frozen quite quickly in direct wind, as everyone discovers when they go outside. For safety, bliz lines are tied between buildings so you grab on to those for guidance. Visibility did get down to less than 5 metres and there were times we couldn't see the next van from the kitchen window (the window was also called the TV and "reception" ie. the view to the next van, varied depending on how much snow was in the picture). The people at DSS are great and the sense of humour is really good, which does play a vital part in how much you can enjoy yourself there. On Australia Day we had Decency Day, where no one was allowed to swear or make any discrimatory comments. All our names were up on the board and everytime someone slipped up a letter code was put under their name describing their crime, eg. VL=Vulgar Language, etc. Despite our best and non-existent efforts there was a pretty good collection of letters after most peoples' names at the end of the day. In desparation to get some people new catagories were invented like; NT=Naughty Thoughts, ARSE=Ambiguous Reply to Serious Enquiry, SER=Supercilious Eyebrow Raising, SUSL=Sucking Up to Section Leader...I think you get the picture. Just a couple of other insights before I finish...one was the way they play Trivial Pursuit. They don't use a board, they just pull out a card and see if the combined mental weight can answer correctly all six questions. You go until all that's done. There was endless quoting of Monty Python movies and sketches and one day we even had a head scratching contest to see who had the most dandruf (the very dry conditions here mean a lot of people get it). Weird, but that's DSS for you. That's it for now, keep any and all mail coming, I enjoy hearing from you and what's happening in the real world, Paul