We sleep in tents called Arctic Ovens. These tents are made in Alaska and could be considered Antarctic Ovens…especially in the morning! The tents are incredible at heating up with just the one’s body heat and the sun. In the morning, I have had temperatures as high as 65°F! That is roasting considering outside it is around 5°F (on a warm day)!

Our WAIS Divide Tent City. The tents are outside of “town” so that the noise of the generators and movement around camp doesn’t keep people awake.

The Arctic Ovens in Tent City.

Many of the people at camp sleep in a tent, but there are some communal heated sleeping areas. The tents are really one’s only private space so almost all of the members of the camp community have opted for a space in “tent city”. I have decorated my tent with photos of my family and friends and right now, I have a few holiday decorations up. I also have some rope strung around my tent for drying my socks and hats.

Even though the tents can get warm when you are in them, going to bed usually starts in a cold tent, which means you get into a COLD sleeping bag. One trick for getting the cold out of your sleeping bag is bringing a hot water bottle to bed. A hot water bottle is really helpful and can keep you warm throughout the night. I brought my sleeping bag from home in addition to the cold weather sleeping bag that was provided to us so I am staying plenty warm and comfortable. I sleep with the clothes I plan to wear the next day so I can get into warm clothes when I wake up. I am growing to love my little yellow tent and find that no matter what the temperature is I am always ready to go to sleep when I finally make it to my tent!

The entrance to the ARO (Atmospheric Research Observatory).

Those daily tasks that I mentioned mostly just involve going through all the equipment in the station and making sure that it is running correctly. Some instruments need daily adjusting to keep them acquiring good data. Others operate on their own pretty well (look for future posts to go more in depth on what exactly these instruments are and what they measure). Throw in setting up some new instruments, launching two ozonesondes (ozone measuring weather balloons) a week and flask sampling (capturing air to sample in flasks), it keeps one pretty busy especially when not really experienced with much of it.

Help has now arrived as Mark VanderRiet arrived last week and Lana Cohen has arrived today. With a couple of weeks under my belt, I am starting to feel much more comfortable on the day-to-day operations and things seem to be running smoothly for the most part. We’ve shipped most of the sampled air flasks that have accumulated over the winter back to their project locations (due to the fact that there are no flights to ship them during the winter season), and are getting ready to receive the shipment of new flasks and other supplies for the up coming year.

As for life on station, it is pretty incredible how we are living down here if you consider what a remote location this is. The room I was assigned is plenty big for my needs and is pretty comparable to the size of room that I had when I was on the NOAA Ship Fairweather. The recreation schedule here is full. Every night of the week there is something going on in the gym (volleyball seems to be the most popular), and there is a great selection of movies and TV shows in the store. The observatory is a great place to hang out in the evenings too if you want to relax and watch a movie. It also gives you a chance to shoot some evening Dobsons too (the Dobson is an ozone measuring instrument)! And by the way, winning bingo twice in one night is not a good way to make friends around here.

Once things settle down, I’m excited to show you all what kind of equipment we have at the Atmospheric Research Observatory, and what it measures. Hopefully I can get into some of the other projects that are going on down here at the Pole as well. I would think I’ll have time, I’m here for the long haul!

Because we are so far north, sunrise is already very late – occurring today at 1007am. Because we are so far west, almost to the international date line, sunset is also surprisingly late. I took this photo after 8pm. Daylight is visible through the porthole on a door, but the interior is already lit with overnight red lighting.

Unexpected aspects of life at home also come up. Tonight after dinner, I managed to watch some of the Minnesota Vikings – Green Bay Packers football game (I am from Minnesota). A satellite television signal is received on the ship with the Armed Forces Network, which shows some sports. The reception can be pretty sporadic however, and we lost signal in the 4th quarter. The Vikings were ahead…I hope they won.

I have begun to develop a mental image of the layout of the compartments of the ship (and, thankfully, I can finally find my room without the help of someone nice enough to stop and ask if I am lost). Everything is close here – the mess deck, our berths, our lab space – but connected by a maze of hallways and steep stairs. Walking around outside on the upper decks gives the impression of close-set apartment buildings in a city skyline.

The skyline, viewed standing on a weatherdeck near the bridge facing towards the back of the ship (aft).

Standing over the bridge and looking down on the bow of the ship as we slowly break ice in the evening. The red flag is flown in windy and icy conditions, to judge how the wind may affect the path of the ship and the movement of the ice.

We flew several days in the last week, locating bears for recapture. However most bears were traveling on thin, newly forming sea ice, which is unsafe for capture operations. We really need some colder weather to thicken the ice. Most days have been around 30 degrees (Fahrenheit), although the last two days have periodically dipped down to 21 degrees. Two days ago we finally had our first recapture. We relocated an adult female with her 10 month-old cub as they were traveling on good, thick ice. The capture went well, and we were able to repeat all of the sampling from her first capture, which occurred in May. It was excellent to see this bear again and collect samples that will tell us what she has been doing over the last 5 months. In overall appearance, she and her cub had good body condition. After breaking ice for several days to reach these bears, we will keep the ship in this general area hopefully as colder weather helps expand and solidify the ice pack.

We had a successful capture today as well. This female cub is only 10 months old but already weighs 211 pounds.

It is remarkable that the lack of good, thick ice has been such a problem for us. It was a problem that we considered before this trip but we did not think it would be so common. The ship has a chart of the Arctic that was printed in 1954, and it shows the average location of the ice edge in summer – several hundred miles south of our current position. Until recent years our current position would have been deep into the Arctic ice, rather than near the edge in patchy ice.