Heatwave at -17 and some stuff about Sea Ice and Early Explorers

Current Temp Ambient:  -17   Windchill:   -29
Windspeed (knots):   Light and variable
Sunrise:                     0704
Sunset:                      2029  (8:29 PM) 


Yes, -81 was brutal.  Yes, my room was freezing (the thermostat doesn't read below 50, I think it was probably around 40 in my room).  I had to shove my big orange duffle bags with all of my ECW (extreme cold weather) gear in the window sill as the wind was so severe it blew snow through the tiny little gaps.  Yes, I slept in long johns, fleece pants, fleece top and sweatshirt, two pairs of socks with hand warmers in the middle layer, a hat, and 2 down comforters.  BUT I was warm with all those layers.  It rarely gets that cold, and today, my room is about 78.

The next day, however, was absolutely beautiful, so I took a nice walk out to Hut Point.

Hut Point is this little peninsula right outside of McMurdo.  It's less than a mile from my dorm room.  It's right next to the Ice Pier, which is where the fuel tanker and cargo vessel dock when they bring us stuff at the end of the season.  You may recall we didn't have an ice breaker lined up, but now we do.  The ice breaker cuts a channel through the sea ice all the way to the Ice Pier.

Last season all of the sea ice blew out, meaning there was open water all around McMurdo Sound.  While it was great for penguin viewing (and I hope it happens again this year), it is a nightmare for building the Ice Pier and the Ice Runway.  Building the Ice Pier consists of heavy equipment operators freezing water (from the ocean), making it flat, drilling a hole for more water, letting it freeze, flattening it, and at some point they thread fat metal cables through the layers for extra reinforcement.  That is a super simplistic explanation, but it's a pretty big deal.  While I was walking Sunday they were working with a layer of water, so there was steam everywhere, it was pretty darn cool.  In the picture below, you can see the Hut (I'll get to that in a second) with the Ice Pier and steam in the background, and them McMurdo off to the right.  The 4 identical brown buildings are some of the dorms, the one I live in is 2nd from the right.  At the top of the picture you can see the three wind turbines that I blogged about a couple of weeks back after my Comms outing.

The early Antarctic explorers Shackleton and Scott brought and stayed in these huts.  Scott's Discovery Hut in the picture was the first one that was brought and built in around 1901.  There are three huts total on Ross Island, all were pre-fabbed Australian huts and the thinking was if they were insulated for the Australian outback, they could also work here.  What they didn't consider was the wind blowing snow between the cracks that eventually turned to thick, solid ice in places.  Scott's party first used this hut as a base on their expedition to get to the South Pole (which didn't happen until about a decade later, and though he made it to the Pole, he never did make it back, long story, there are many books on the subject.)  Future expeditions had to use the huts to winter over when their ships became engulfed by pack ice.  I've been fortunate to get into all 3 huts (Scott's Discovery Hut here, Scott's Hut at Cape Evans, and finally Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds) in past seasons and it's sort of unreal.  They left a lot of their stuff when they took off, so it's like being in a museum with no glass.  There is food, clothing, seal meat and just stuff all over, it's very depressing.  I can't imagine wintering in those huts.  But they are historically pretty important to anyone interested in Antarctica.

The picture below shows Ob Hill (short for Observation Hill) on the left.  The early explorers would climb Ob Hill several times a day to look for rescue ships.  It's about 800 vertical feet to the top and a nice hike on a warm day.  I'll send pics once it's nice enough for me to hike.  All of the flat white is Sea Ice, and the white land mass in the back of the picture is White Island, another island a midst the frozen ocean.

Finally, I included a photo of some cracks in the sea ice.  You do NOT want to fall into a crack in the sea ice.  Seals tend to hang out around cracks, but they must have all been at dinner in the galley when I was out there.  Soon I'll be posting seal pics I'm sure.