Carafe for the French press. Is that a Nalgene bottle? Why yes it is! Spout and all.

When the cable for the drill broke, Svein immediately started making a hook to retrieve the drill…that worked!

The ingenious hook Svein made to recover the drill

Svein has stayed busy making our lives just that much more comfortable…fixing the floor heating system when it’s broken, making a step for the “littlest module,” the outhouse we are toting along, saving me from having to jump the 3 ft to the ground.

The sky light above the table dripped constantly due to condensation (warm in the kitchen module, cold outside), which is a big bummer if you are eating dinner underneath. Svein stopped the dripping once and for all with this handy gadget.

The glycol system for the floor heaters would leak, causing the whole system to shut down and our heat to turn off…not good when it’s -20 deg C outside.

The step for the littlest module

And maybe nearly as important, Svein has made all of our lives a little bit better by being always ready with a joke, a laugh, or even just a good tackle to the snowy ground when we start taking things a little too seriously. At the end of the traverse, I asked Svein a little bit about his take on the trip (filmed at Troll Station, Antarctica).

RECOVERY LAKES, ANTARCTICA– Leaving site 5!

Today we are finally on the move again, after a prolonged stay at our science stop at site 5 in the middle of the Recovery Lakes area. We were delayed after our ice core drill was stuck 90m down in the hole Lou was drilling.

Drills do get stuck– every once and a while the chips, or the small pieces of ice that are generated as the drill spins around, get packed and the drill can become wedged in the ice. Sometimes the anti-torques, the metal fins that keep the drill from spinning in the hole as the inner barrel turns, get stuck. It happens. By pouring alcohol or glycol in the hole, drillers can sometimes turn enough of the ice around the drill into slush to pull the drill out again.

Drills have been successfully recovered that way. In our case, however, the cable had snapped, at the top of the pulley that lowers the drill into the hole, while the drill was at the bottom—exactly 92m below the surface. With the cable snapped and the drill that far down, we were in a bad position. Drills stuck closer to the surface have to be dug out by sheer manual labor, but 92m is too deep to dig, even for our team.

I was out at the drill site when it happened, picking up a couple of things for my own shallow, hand coring operation. I heard an ominous snap, and turned around to see the snarled end of the cable up near the pulley, with no drill in site, and the rest of the cable gone. “Oh @#!&!” was the only cohesive thought I had.

Sometimes when things like this happen (and they happen all the time out here), you think to yourself, “Oh, we can fix that, it will be ok.” But in this case, I knew right away that this was really, really bad, and that we probably wouldn’t be able to fix it. No drill meant that we would be essentially done with most of the science part of the trip, with the exception of the radar surveys that were being done as we drove. Lou was understandably upset, and we all started right away figuring out what we could do.

Lou knew that there was another similar drill that had been at South Pole being used in a separate project. We had no flights from the US Antarctic Program budgeted for our project after leaving South Pole, but this was an exceptional situation. Lou and Tom started working on figuring out where the second drill was (unfortunately already back in McMurdo, and not in the best of shape!) and if we might possibly get a flight, while Svein, our super mechanic, started on his own project, building a hook that might be able to catch the cable.

Our secret weapon in our quest to extract to the drill was the Borehole Optical Stratigraphy System (BOSS) that we had brought along. The BOSS is a borehole camera that I had been using to log the holes we had been drilling along the traverse. It was designed by Dr. Bob Hawley, currently a professor at Dartmouth College, who uses the reflectance from the borehole wall recorded by the images in the camera to map the varying layers in the hole. The variations in reflectance down the hole are due to variation in grain size and density of the different layers in the snow and ice. It’s a really neat piece of science equipment that was about to come in very handy as we tried to retrieve the drill.

We sent Bob’s camera down the hole to see where the end of the cable was, and what it looked like. 60m down in the hole, we found the end of the cable, a twisted mess of the metal strands, and could see a few meters down further that it continued to twist on it’s way down. The force of the break had twisted the cable, and it lay snarled in the last 30 m of hole down to the drill.

The image from the borehole camera, showing the broken end of the cable stuck in the hole 60 meters below the surface.

Not pretty, but perfect for the hook that Svein was working on, as the tangled cable provided places to hook onto. Svien’s hook consisted of four barbs, each with a sharp edge on the inside of the hook. Have I mentioned Svein is an avid fisherman back in Norway? Knowing now the exact depth of the cable end, and how it was lying in the hole, we went about fishing. At this point, no one, except for maybe Svein, thought that this was going to really work, but we were basically stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with months already invested in this part of the project, years invested in the traverse, with nothing else to do without the drill. So fishing we went, including a ceremonial spit on the hook which is apparently what you do for good luck in Norway. Lou lowered the hook down into the hole most of the way with the mechanical winch, and Svein and Ole lowered the last meter to the end of the cable by hand, with Svein, gloveless in the -26 deg C weather, seeing if he could feel the extra weight of the hooked cable. This was a bit tricky as 60 m of cable, plus the hook, is heavy enough as it is.

Lou started to pull up the winch, not sure if we had anything. There is a load cell on the top of the pulley for the cable which tells her if she has ice in the barrel or not, and we all watched to see if the load on the hook was increasing. A few meters from our fishing attempt, the load started to increase steadily– amazingly. It kept increasing as Lou slowly pulled the hook up with the winch, and we all watched, hardly being able to contain our excitement. Was this really working after all? Then, 11 meters from the surface, the load on the pulley suddenly decreased — we had lost the cable.

So, we went down the hole with the camera again. This time the cable was 5m lower than it had been. Svein went fishing again, and again the load started increasing as we pulled up the tangled cable wound at the bottom of the hole. A couple of times, the pulley snapped up and down and the load increased a great deal, only to release. We were pulling up and straightening bits of cable that had been tangled and stuck into the walls of the borehole. The snaps brought gasps from the field team gathered anxiously around Lou– all of us afraid that the cable would snap, and we would loose our drill for good.

Lou managed to pull the cable up to 7m from the surface next time before we lost it once again. Down went the camera once more, to find the end of the cable closer to the surface, meaning we had untangled more cable. Again Svein did the fishing, and Lou pulled the cable up 6m from the surface before we again lost the cable. Once more we lowered the camera, and saw that the end of the cable was now even more snarled and twisted from all the pulling– a perfect knot had formed that Svein might be able to catch, and Lou might be able to pull all the way to the surface. This was going to be the best shot we had at getting the cable back up to the surface, then hopefully being able to pull the drill up with it.

We had perfected finding the cable with the BOSS, fishing for the end, grabbing it, and getting it agonizingly close to the surface. Svein had been wanting to send the camera down with the hook so that he could see what he was doing, and I had been reluctant to do so with Bob’s camera. As a general rule, it’s not a good idea to send two things down a borehole—it you have two separate cables, as we did with the camera and drill, they can wrap around each other, and you can end up with one or both things down the hole. None of us wanted to lost both the drill and Bob’s camera. We called Bob on the Iridium phone, and he very willingly told us to go ahead and give it a try, even risking his camera (which we offered to replace if we did).

Lou lowered the hook again, and then I lowered the camera. Five different people were shouting directions to me as I maneuvered the camera into place– watching carefully on the way down to make sure that the camera cable was not twisting around the winch cable– while everyone huddled around the small LCD screen that the camera projected on to. I got to the hook, and was reluctant to get too close to it for fear of getting stuck in the mess of the cable and the hook. But I was able to get the camera down to where we had a good view of the cable, and Svein watched on the screen as he told Lou where to lower the hook.

We watched the camera as Lou was able to grab onto the mess of the cable end. I pulled the camera up 8 m, and waited for Lou to pull the hook up to see if we had the cable, and if it was slipping. When Lou got the hook up to the camera, the cable was still there, stuck even more onto the hook from the weight below. I pulled the camera out of the hole, relieved to have that done with, and the camera safe and sound back in its box. Lou pulled up the cable, and again we watched the load on the pulley increase as she pulled it closer and closer to the surface. We lowered the camera down into the hole two more times to make sure we had the cable (each time as stressful as the first for me for fear of losing Bob’s camera) then we got 7m, then 6m, then 5m, 4m and 3m from the surface, with more load on the pulley than we had seen before.

Another picture from the borehole camera, showing the hook that our mechanic Svein made snagging the broken end of the cable.

Here Lou stopped– we had come so close to getting it up before only to lose the cable in the end, and 3 m wasn’t all that far to dig. So we dug. The entire field team pitched in to dig a huge 3m deep trench while Lou kept the hole covered so that we wouldn’t knock snow down over the hook. When she cut away the last block covering the hole, there was the hook, with the cable attached. Svein and Andreas secured the bottom cable with clamps to prevent losing it again, and Lou pulled it the rest of the way up.

We all gathered around the hook with the broken end attached, amazed that it had worked, and happy.

Svein’s hook. The drill cable snagged on the end is the piece he was able to catch.

This was just the beginning however.

Now we had to get the drill, still stuck 92m below the surface, up and out of the hole. And it was really stuck. Lou had already had some problems freeing the bottom of the cores she had drilled (the core break) so that she could pull them up. The ice was brittle and strange here, much harder than anything Lou had experienced before. The drill had also spent a couple of days down at the bottom of the hole by the time we got the cable up to the surface, allowing the chips to sinter (solidify) and the drill to get stuck fast.

Lou went about pulling the drill up with the winch. She had to apply a lot of force to the cable, and we all stood well back in case the cable should snap again. A few jerks managed some terrific pops as more of the tangled cable was pulled free from the bottom of the hole. At one point, Lou thought one of the tangles coming loose was the drill, and we all cheered triumphantly. We realized it wasn’t the drill after the load on the pulley decreased again however. The drill was stuck, extremely, extremely stuck.

We didn’t have any ethanol with us, but Lou really felt like if we had some, we could get the drill out. Meanwhile, the second drill was being put back into working order and shipped back to South Pole, in the case that we would get an unplanned flight after all. Flight requests were made, and after a couple of days of waiting anxiously, we heard that we would get the flight, with the ethanol and the second drill in case we didn’t get the stuck drill out.

Weather delayed the first scheduled flight, and we had to wait another day before we finally got the ethanol and could try again. The flight came just before midnight our time, and Lou, Svein, Andreas, Stein and Tom got to work on pouring the ethanol down the cable into the hole. Svein made a special “ethanol delivery system” consisting of a bottle, rope, and small covered hole that he could open right over the drill so that the ethanol was getting right to the drill and not sloshing all over the hole. The group worked through the early hours of the morning, pouring ethanol into the hole, waiting, and pulling on the cable, until 7 hours later, just after 7am, the drill started coming up, slushy and half frozen still, but up and out of the hole. To our amazement.

A picture I drew for Lou after we got the drill up.

This is the traverse that will not quit. Already, we are attempting one of the longest science traverses ever made in Antarctica, through some of the coldest, highest, most remote locations. Vehicle problems? No problem. Radar problems? No problem. And then this, the problem of all problems with the drill stuck 90m down and no cable to pull it up, seemingly impossible to solve, threatening to end our science. But together, even when not sure we will succeed, we set out, step by step, meter by meter, kilometer by kilometer, undaunted, until we get across this continent. Our motto: science happens, all the time.

It is mind-boggling, I know, that there is unfrozen water that far below us, and under all that ice. The lakes are formed from heat from the earth being trapped and insulated by the several kilometers of ice and occur at the outflow of the Recovery Ice Stream, a large region of fast flowing ice.

One defining surface characteristic of the lakes is that they are flat, flat, flat, flat. There are no sastrugi [sharp frozen ridges and mounds in the snow], which we have become used to, or topography to speak of (not there was much before).

But while the landscape here is a bit monotonous, the snow here is really weird. Really weird. The top bit of snow is pretty new–some wind blown and some freshly fallen. It’s been snowing off and on while we were at camp, which is actually really rare for East Antarctica– we are in a polar desert after all. But the combined action of the wind packing the snow and changes induced by the ever-present cold temperatures and sun during the summer months have made for some of the hardest layers in the near surface I have ever encountered.

One layer, which Tom and I have been calling the MOAHL (or Mother of All Hard Layers), 1.2m deep in my pit, actually hurt my hands, shoulders and arms as I tried to dig into it with my shovel. It felt like I was trying to dig into pavement. Below the MOAHL, the snow is sugary and coarse and won’t stay together. This snow has frustrated nearly all our attempts to drill cores in it. We drill down, only to have the sugary stuff fall apart in the barrel. It’s been very exasperating– we’ve started and abandoned 10 different holes trying to get a core. I’ve started calling it Devil Snow.

Devil Snow crystals. Pretty to look at, but their rounded shapes make them not bond well to neighboring crystals, and hard to work with.

The Devil Snow is also hard to dig, falling apart on the shovel, raining down on your face and into your jacket—leaving you spitting out the coarse, sharp crystals and trying to scrape them out from your collar. It makes it hard to cut blocks out of it for the water melters, which we use for our drinking water as well. Devil Snow.

Despite the Devil Snow, we have managed to make some progress. I have dug another three pits, we have collected some shallow cores, and Lou collected one 90 m core and another 20 m core. We’ve installed a string of several temperature sensors for Ted Scambos’s graduate student Atsu in the deep hole. The temperature data is being sent via satellite to Atsu in Boulder at the University of Colorado, where he can monitor the data for changes. We already heard from him that he is receiving the data!

Lou with a monster piece of core from the Devil Snow area. The cores should be 1 m long to fit in the insulated core boxes we have, but Lou had problems getting the core out of the hole since the ice and snow is so soft. She had to keep drilling further to try to get something that she could grab onto.

Ted Scambos’s temperature string, powered with solar panels, beaming data back to Boulder.

Ted also installed a GPS station on the last of the lakes in order to track any changes in the level of the lake. This particular spot seemed to move up and down vertically in the last five years, as if there was a lake draining and refilling. Devil Snow or no Devil Snow, we are getting science done.

Speaking of Devil Snow, we’ve decided to start a heavy metal band called Monster Sastrugi, with the first single called Sastrugi Tongue. The other tracks on our album would be:
- Hot Raro (Raro is the New Zealand drink we have at every meal; it’s like Tang)
- Hand Core to the Transition Zone (this was Tom’s song from graduate school)
- Barrel Full of Chips (Ted thinks this song is too country-western)
- Do You Really Want to Drill Here?
- Devil Snow
- Little Cold Metal Parts
- Lost my Sprocket Wheel (luckily just once on this trip)
- Planetary Gears Rock
- Hot Differentials
- UFO Hunting in Antarctica

Of course we have, collectively, no musical talents, so there is no need to worry about the band ever producing any music– you can breathe a sigh of relief.

This brings me to another list we have been working on, the top 10 signs you’ve been on the Antarctic Plateau too long:
10. You are no longer fit for polite society.
9. Coffee consumption passes 5 cups for breakfast.
8. You expect things to go wrong.
7. -20 deg C is a “hot day.”
6. 3 meters doesn’t seem that far to dig.
5. Raro starts to taste good, and the colors are pretty.
4. When someone says they saw dragon-shaped sastrugi, someone else asks if they were Asian or fairy tale-type dragons (the answer was both).
3. You think that the piece of lint drifting across the snow is an insect, and that it would make a good pet.
2. The thought of a fresh apple makes you salivate.

And the number one sign that you’ve been on the Antarctic Plateau too long:
1. Everything is funny.

I am always on the move or shoveling, it seems. So far I have dug six 2 meter snow pits at various stops on the traverse. I dig the pits in order to get a close look at the surface snow and the layering caused by different weather and snow deposition events, and because these top 2 meters are fragile enough that the don’t always survive when shipped as cores back to the lab at home. The surface snow holds clues as to what is going on in the ice below. Some of the layering we see in surface pits is seen in deeper ice cores.

We can also get an idea of how much snow has fallen in a given area (thickness of the layers we see) and what processes (wind scours, snow fall) are going on at the surface. It’s a low-tech, labor-intensive way of getting a lot of information. Labor intensive because it involves digging a 2m deep by 1m wide by 2m long hole. I figure I’ve dug about 10 tons of snow so far, and made over 1000 different measurements of density, grain size, air permeability (ease of air flow in the snow), and thermal conductivity (ease of heat flow in the snow). These measurements give a physical basis for interpreting the climate record found in ice cores and the information that can be retrieved about the Antarctic plateau from radar and remote sensing signatures, which depend on, among other factors, grain size and density.

One of my snowpits.

So I’ve been doing a lot of digging on this trip. It is good because if anyone needs to find me I’m either in one of my pits or in the science tent, a nice Weatherhaven tent constructed on the back of one of the sleds that is a mobile snow laboratory, complete with light table for looking at the layering in cores, and all my other equipment, including speakers for my iPod. I hate to admit it, but it’s a nice, more comfortable set-up than the cold room (basically a walk-in freezer converted into a laboratory) I work in back at home. Most days, it is -15 deg C (5 deg F) to -20 deg C (-4 deg F) in the tent, which is unheated to preserve the snow samples I work on, and out of the wind and pretty nice.

In addition to the work I’ve done in the snow pits, I’ve been able to help out with some of the other projects going on around camp. I usually help Tom Neumann with the hand coring we have to do. At each site, we collect what we call Beta cores, which will be cut up, melted, and tested for beta radioactivity. The peak in radioactivity signals the height of atomic bomb testing in the 1960s. This radioactivity was transported through the atmosphere here to East Antarctica in 1963-1964 as snow fall. In this way, we can date the layers in the snow, since we know that the layer with the highest radioactivity is from that year. A bit unsettling perhaps, but very, very useful.

Some of my Arctic teammates hand coring in Greenland last season.

I also helped Dr. Ted Scambos from the National Ice and Snow Data set up a string of temperature sensors we dropped down the last 90m hole we drilled. The temperature at different depths gives an indication of past temperatures, and can be used to determine if this area of Antarctica is getting warmer or colder—this is important since there are no direct measurements of temperature over time here (since there is no one here to make the measurements!)

It’s fun to help out with the other projects, as it gives you a different perspective on what everyone is working on. I also have been logging the boreholes that Lou is drilling with a borehole optical stratigraphy (BOS) system, which is essentially a camera used to record the reflectance of the layers in the hole. I have also been driving the vehicles when we are on the move, usually Jack, which is pulling a load of food and the living module where we eat. This is usually a bit boring as our top speed these days is around 10 km/hr (6.2 mph), which allows for Kirsty to make good measurements using her deep radar system. Faster than that and she does not have as good of a signal. Other times though, like when we are going through a white out, where at times you lose all perspective of what is up or down or where you are, or when the sastrugi are large enough that they cause the whole train you are pulling behind you to lurch sickeningly behind you in the rear view mirrors, it’s a bit stressful. We drive in 6 hour shifts, which gets tiring as well.

The living module speeding along at 10 km/hr.

Jack is a bit difficult to drive. Kjetil, one of the mechanics who was at Camp Winter, where the vehicles were all fixed after last year’s problems, had explained to me that each vehicle is a bit different. The vehicles were all named after famous sled dogs, and the names seem to suit them, which is odd as well. I was skeptical until driving a couple different vehicles. I began by driving Chinook, which is relatively easy to drive. You want to drive in 5th gear, just speed up, put him in 5th, set the remote throttle knob on the dash so that you have about 1900 rpms, and down the ice cap you go.

Jack, on the other hand, is super touchy. It takes about 5-10 minutes of wrangling with the throttle knob to make him stay in 5th, sometimes even 4th. Moving the knob up or down even less than a millimeter sends him either bolting off at 13-15km/hr (way faster than we want to go), or zooming down through the lower gears if the rpms fall off. And then it takes even more finessing of the throttle knob to find Jack’s “sweet spot” where he’s keeping up with the others, but using as little gas a possible. This sweet spot of course is different from day to day as the surface conditions change, soft snow making it harder for him to pull his heavy load, and hard flat snow making him want to take off and pass everyone else. Even better, Jack changes speeds pretty drastically even with the remote throttle in the same position as the surface conditions change. As Svein says, “Jack is special.”

Svein has also encouraged me to try different things: monkeying with the throttle, driving in the tracks of vehicle in front of me, driving out of the tracks of the vehicles in front of me– which I guess makes the drive at least engaging if not relaxing at times. It’s a game to see which driver can get the lowest fuel consumption, as in, “I was getting 32 liters/hour, see if you can beat that.” Anything to make the time go by, I suppose. In a way, Jack reminds me of my dog at home, Baker. He’s stubborn, has a mind of his own, and is a bit crazy at times.

The driving-in-others’-tracks approach.

Besides driving and shoveling, the recreational activities I have managed are knitting (I knit Christmas ornaments for everyone on the traverse and yes, we had a tree—turkey, ham, gravy and stuffing too—we just celebrated on the 27th since that was a more convenient day for us) and skiing. A lot of the people on the traverse like to ski as recreation. It gives us some time to ourselves and away from camp where you can appreciate that you are in the middle of nowhere for a little bit, before scurrying back to the relative comforts of camp. I know that some have a goal of getting out to where they can’t see camp anymore, which no one has managed yet.

I had the full set of Arrested Development DVDs that I would watch at night in my bunk (not wanting to subject the rest of the group to American TV), but I’ve watched all the episodes now, and read the book I brought along, John Behrendt’s Innocents on the Ice, about his Antarctic traverse during the IGY in the 1960s.

It’s fun to think about the differences between our traverses. They definitely had a rougher set-up, while we ride in relative comfort. To be honest, we ride in relative comfort even in modern-day traverse standards, with a kitchen. They had a camping stove, shower (showers are pretty much unheard of in remote camps even today), a separate sleeping module (they slept in benches and sleeping bags in the vehicles) but got to see some fantastic, mountainous scenery, seeing some of the mountains for the first time. They were exploring totally unknown areas, with little warning if they were crossing crevassed areas unless they had a plane to do reconnaissance. We are covering places that haven’t been visited before, but have a pretty good idea of what we are getting into from satellite images, and have a great crevasse detector (Svein, our mountaineer, who operates a radar system that can detect them).

January 21, 2009
Weather: Partly cloudy, -25 C, wind 8 kts

RECOVERY LAKE ‘B’, ANTARCTICA– We are currently camped out in the Recovery Lakes region, and one of the main features of the snow surface is that it is flat, flat, flat. Hardly a sastrugi (wavelike ridge on the surface of hard snow) in sight larger than a few centimetres high. But there are still plenty of snow surface features to get excited about. Here at this camp spot, there are these neat patches of ripples dotting the landscape. Out on a ski this evening, I spotted multitudes of cups dug out of the snow surface as well. The features are created by the wind, which we’ve had plenty of the last couple of days, along with the return of colder temperatures. Summer is over on the Antarctic Plateau!

Ripples in the snow near our camp.

RECOVERY LAKE ‘B’, ANTARCTICA– It’s the snow, stupid! …that determines many factors for this traverse, that is.

For instance, the changing snow surface impacts our fuel consumption quite a bit. In softer snow, the four vehicles use much more fuel than when we are going over areas of hard snow. The characteristics of the snow determine how easily we are able to cut blocks out to put in our melters to make water. Sometimes, like in the last two camps, the snow is not very well sintered, or stuck together, and falls apart like shoveling sugar. Other times, we find thick, wind-packed snow that we can readily saw into nice blocks.

For the last few weeks, if anyone has wondered, “Where’s Zoe?,” the answer has been in one of my snow pits. I’m just finishing up my sixth 2-meter deep pit today. Each pit is about 1 m wide, 2 m long and 2 m deep. With an average density of about .38 grams per cubic centimeter, I’ve dug about 1520 kg worth of snow for every pit (that’s over 3000 pounds for the Yanks) – over 9 tons altogether. Not that I’m keeping track, but it is no wonder I’m so tired.

What’s neat is that each pit has its own surprise, and each has been different. It’s been fun seeing what sort of snow and layers I find in each of the pits. The layers help us determine what conditions have been like in the last few 10 to 20 years. Large grains usually mean low accumulation rates, as large grains grow over time as smaller grain sublimate and condense onto larger grains. Old sastrugi and wind crusts, as well as hoar (very large faceted grains from warm conditions and water vapor moving in the snow pack) are also buried. These all help us figure out the puzzle of the past climate in this region, which is tricky since unlike in areas where you get lots and lots of snow and can see the seasonal layering in pits, the area we are in gets very little snow, and any seasonal layering tends to get smeared out over time.

Layering in the top 80 cm of one of my pits, seen in a backlit pit, which is basically two pits with a 20 cm wall in between. The light from one pit left open shines into the second pit, which is covered. In this image, wind crusts (thin lines in the snow), old sastrugi (darker layers), and hoar crystals (very light layers) can be seen.