While we have a weather station that records variables including temperature, wind speed, wind direction, visibility, and the height of the ceiling, we often have back-ups and different methodologies for crosschecking the output of the weather station. The video in this post summarizes one such check.

Often measuring the height of the ceiling, or clouds, can be difficult and the instrumentation can record improper information if snow is blowing or if there are high winds. Since the height of the ceiling is vital information for pilots, we often check our weather station readings against that of a weather balloon. Enjoy this video of me launching one of these balloons that we used to measure the height of the ceiling! I am now an honorary weatherwoman at WAIS Divide.

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!

An ice core.

We work in shifts for the packaging because it is easy to get tired and cold in our working environment. Part of ensuring the ice cores do not get damaged, and that they maintain their utility for different chemical and physical analyses, is making sure that the ice cores get no warmer than -20°C. So, the building where the cores are stored and packaged is cooled to -25 °C! It is hard to believe but often the air temperature outside is around 10°C warmer than where we work!

The drilling and ice core handling facility at the start of the 2008/2009 field season.

As we learn the packing process (I will go into more detail in another blog), we are also learning all of the nuances of staying warm for extended periods of time at -25°C. My technique, that I learned from the veteran ice core handlers, is to keep the core of your body really warm and that way your fingers and toes get enough warm blood to not get too cold. On top I wear 2 wool tops, a wool sweater and two down jackets. On the bottom, I wear two pairs of wool longer underwear and insulated bib overalls. Thick socks and boot liners with my sturdy blue boots keep my toes warm. Surprisingly, with all of the layers keeping the core of my body warm, I can get by with some light gloves on my hands!

Heidi covered in frost after work in a -25ºC environment.

Another trick, and one that I like the best, is eating LOTS of food. Both the galley where we eat and the warming hut where we can take breaks are stocked with cookies, crackers, and candy bars! It is not uncommon to eat 3 candy bars a day! I rarely eat candy at home so it is quite a nice treat to eat so much candy and know that my body is using all of the calories just to stay warm!

I am off to work now but I hope to get more posted soon! There is so much to share! Stay tuned for how to sleep in a tent in Antarctica, the ins and outs of a hot shower at WAIS Divide and much, much more about ice cores and they story they can tell! I will do my best to get photos posted too but internet is a real luxury here and we only have 5 hours of satellite internet a day! Sending photos is against the rules but I will try to figure something out!

My bags are packed for the last time for a while (phew!) and I am certainly itching and ready to go. We had a great Thanksgiving here at McMurdo, with the highlight being the 5K Turkey Trot Race. I actually won the women’s division! The food tasted even better after the race! We had a wonderful spread of turkey, gravy, stuffing, crab legs, stuffed mushrooms, roasted vegetables, fresh rolls and tons of desserts (caramel apples, homemade chocolate truffles, pumpkin pie, ice cream, pudding and raspberry cheesecake!) There were even fresh strawberries and cherries! I certainly got my fill. Despite really missing my family, it was a great holiday! I am looking forward to Christmas and New Years out on the ice!

It was great to be here in McMurdo hiking and meeting people who work here and getting closer to those who will be my peers and colleagues out on the ice. Now the real challenge begins. We all have to say goodbye to daily warm showers, heated buildings, great internet connectivity and warm beds. At WAIS, life will be a challenge as we will be working non-stop, sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and have minimal heated structures to retreat to when it gets really cold! Thankfully we have all had lots of training now and were issued lots of gear so we will have the skills to survive and stay warm!
I can’t wait to send my next post from WAIS! I hope everyone had a very Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully you’ll hear from me soon!

Here are some photos of the McMurdo area. I won’t be seeing any mountains or sea ice for a while. White will certainly become my favorite color quickly!

McMurdo Station is surrounded by beautiful mountains.

We camped out on the sea ice for survival training. Here is the area around the camp we set up.

Heidi holds up a block as she helps to build a snow wall that served as wind protection for the camp during an overnight survival training.

We took lots of hikes, including a walk over to Scott Base, the station for the Antarctica New Zealand program.

Heidi hiking around the mountains surrounding McMurdo Station.

Chief Scientist Ken Taylor and science tech Anais Orsi looking at layers in backlit snowpit.

A one-meter long piece of ice core illuminated with a light. The green netting on the core is used to help hold the ice together in case it spontaneously fractures.

The bubbles visible in this piece from an Antarctic ice core sample contain carbon dioxide and other gases that were trapped in the ice when formed thousands of years ago. Researchers carefully crush the piece and capture the gases that escape when the bubbles break. This allows them to better understand what carbon dioxide levels were over time.

Heidi Roop, a science technician, worked with more than 100 scientists to recover a 2-mile-long (3.5-km-long) ice core from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. Imagine, that’s a column of ice twice as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep! The properties of each layer of an ice core reveal a slice of climate history. The WAIS team estimates that this ice core will reveal climate changes that have happened as far back as 100,000 years, a time when woolly mammoths still walked the earth.

During the 2009–2010 season, Heidi helped the WAIS team uncover new chapters of the climate story by drilling deeper into the ice. The WAIS scientists were able to decipher the climate year by year back approximately 40,000 years and at decadal (10-year) resolution from 40,000 to 100,000 years, making it the most detailed ice core record ever collected in the Southern Hemisphere. With the ability to extract annual (1-year) to decadal climate information such as past greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate record developed from WAIS can be directly related to ice cores from Greenland. By comparing records from the Southern and Northern hemispheres, our understanding of global climate change will be more complete. The earth’s climate history will be known in more detail than ever before—and it’s bound to be an interesting story!

Click below to hear more about it.

Deverall Island, the southernmost island in the world. It is located at the western margin of the Transantarctic Mountains on the Ross Sea Ice Shelf.

The frame that holds all the electronics, weather stations, satellite modems to transfer data, and the solar panels and batteries used for powering the system continuously throughout the year.

The ski-equipped de Havilland Twin Otter aircraft that is used to transport science teams to field sites in Antarctica.

Down at the Antarctic clothing issue office, we had the usual fun of getting our cold weather gear in order (Lisa was playing with her ninja alter ego) and got some good news: we’re leaving tomorrow morning on a C-17 USAF plane rather than the slower, smaller C-130 which means about a four-hour flight rather than almost eight. That makes a difference because these military planes are not built for comfort: they have little insulation on their skins so they are loud and cold close to the bulkhead.

Lisa trying on clothes in her best Ninja pose at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center.)

The Clothing Distribution Center.

Lisa tests out her ‘bunny boots’.

After months of preparation filling out USAP (United States Antarctic Program) forms and travel requests, going to doctor and dentist appointments to become “physically qualified” for Antarctic travel, visiting Raytheon Polar Services in Denver to meet with support staff and plan our movements on the ice, and training Antarctic field correspondents, our time is finally at hand. In fact, I feel like we’ve already started our polar adventure; in addition to posting blogs from all of our Antarctic scientists, we’ve also been keeping up with Ice Stories correspondent Robin Bell’s Gambutserv Mountain (AGAP) project on her Twitter and the Xtreme South Facebook pages.

We’ve also met up on the plane to New Zealand and here in Christchurch a drilling engineer on his way down to the deep ice coring operation at WAIS-Divide. That’s one of those acronyms mysterious to an outsider but full of meaning for glaciologists and climate researchers. WAIS is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice divide, like a continental divide, refers to a region of the ice sheet where the snow falling on one side of the divide flows one way down to the ocean and snow on the other side flows in the opposite direction.

A map of the WAIS divide. Image courtesy of the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project.

The WAIS-Divide is an ideal place to drill ice cores because the movement of the ice there is downward rather than horizontal, leaving clear annual ice layers that can be counted to track the passage of time. Lots of snow falls in this region of the ice sheet, trapping gas bubbles between the snow grains that record the compositions of the atmosphere when the snow fell, preserving a climate record from 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. Lisa, Ron and I saw some ice cores when we visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver last spring, some of them dating back to the original International Geophysical Year in 1957-8.

Bubbles in an ice core. Photo by John Weller.

Ron and Lisa filming in the ice core storage room of the National Ice Core Laboratory. Photo by John Weller.

We won’t have a chance to go out to the WAIS-Divide ice drilling camp as it’s an additional plane flight from McMurdo and we already have a pretty full work and travel schedule once we do get to McMurdo. We hope to travel out by helicopter to some fields camps to see penguins, the communications station at Black Island, McMurdo Dry Valleys, and, the biggest prize of all: the South Pole.

In the meantime, the Ice Stories crew enjoys green New Zealand.