View of WAIS Divide



This is a very recent satellite photo of where I will shortly be working
(photo -  Brad Herried at the Polar Geospatial Center, www.waisdivide.unh.edu)

    WAIS stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet and is used to describe a glacier that is bordered by the Amundsen Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf. WAIS Divide is a drilling rig, airstrip, and field camp, that cores ice samples for the United States Antarctic Program. It is about five hours away from McMurdo Station on a C-130 Hercules. I think it houses between 20 to thirty full time staff and scientists. Within the last month temperatures were getting down to -50 F.
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    Those little dark spots are storage containers full of the tents and modular buildings that will make up the camp. They need to disassemble the camp every year for two reasons. The first is that permanent structures very quickly get buried under the snow during the winter. The second is that winter storms whip and tear at anything left outside. These containers that you see are stored above a tall berm of snow. This helps prevent them from being totally buried. The drilling "Arch", as they call it, is the only permanent building on the site, is thirty feet tall and was completed in 2007,  and as of last year it was already buried under another thirty feet of snow. The carps had to replace the floor last year because it was buckling from the pressure of the snow was pushing in on the sides of the building. Also the area inside the "arch" around the drilling arm has to be cleared and last year the carps spent many hours with a chain saw trimming the ice away from the mechanism.

    Our put-in crew is hoping to throw the camp together in as short as three weeks. Our travel plans, and the time required to put it together, are at the whim of the Antarctic weather. The WAIS Divide drill team hit the bottom of the glacier last year but will continue working this year by both drilling replicate samples at an angle from the main bore hole and lowering scientific equipment down the bore hole to take measurements at different elevations. This year the airstrip will also be working as a jumping point to the deepest field camp, PIG, that had remained inaccessible last year.

    There won't be too much science going on while I am there. Once the camp is done we will be high tailing it out of there and heading back to McMurdo. We will be sleeping in tents for our stay and facilities will be extremely limited. We have some very sturdy Sierra Nevada tents. I practiced putting my tent together last week after work. I am concerned if we land in bad weather that we may find ourselves throwing up our tents in low visibility and extreme wind.  Showers will be out of a bucket, or fresh wipes, but we expect to eat well. The field camp chefs have a reputation for putting together excellent meals.

  I have two sleeping bags, one mummy bag rated to -40 F, and an old fashioned large rectangle sleeping bag to go over it. Underneath me I will have two foam pads, a large silver air bubble pad that is an awful like the sun shade reflectors you put in your front window shield in the heat, and a thermarest blow up mattress. They recommend we fill up two bottles with hot water before going to bed and then stowing them away by your feet when you sleep.

    We will bring two boots, one set for after work stored by a heater in our Polar Haven break tent, and the other we will store at night in the break tent... warm and drying. Once we get the galley and other essential building put together we will have refuge from the cold during the day. We wont be able to sleep in the buildings as we build them because it is, from high up, important that the department maintain the reputation of being able to go anywhere, any time, and do any thing, in the Antarctic wilds without heated structures. The put in crew last year spent three days huddled in their tents waiting for a blizzard to pass over. Visibility was so poor they couldn't see four feet.

My crew is hoping to deploy on the 29th of this month.