Oh Yeah, the Science type stuff....

 

  Well, just in case I haven't told you yet ( which I may have but who can ever tell ) we are part of the Australian Antarctic Divisions' 77th ANARE. Now ANARE stands for Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition. Yes believe it or not the basic reason for our presence here in the white and grey wilderness of the far south is to maintain the functionality of Mawson Station in order that scientific research might be undertaken here. Which may come as a surprise to all of us here over winter because its easy for that fact to be lost in the day to day normality of life.. well normality now after nearly seven months here. 

    Our biggest excitements come from things like the darts competition against the other Australian Stations ( we came fourth by the way... yes yes ... out of four I know.. but we were the only ones to beat Casey Station who ended up winning the whole thing. How does that work.. I don't know). Other stuff like visiting penguin colonies, walks and drives on the sea ice, blizzards and auroras and shiny stars in dark skies is great.

Darts Comp.. played via remote video link with the opposing station who can be up to 5 hours in front of us time wise as we are basically situated underneath India if you were to draw a line straight to the north of us.

    Currently we are amusing ourselves by ... killing each other! Yes presently we are all attempting to assassinate each other in our game of Mawson Assassin!   Basically we are all given a butter knife with another expeditioners name on it, and amongst certain rules and parameters, which generally may or may not be ignored/protested/argued/dismissed etc try to stab ( well touch ) the victim with our knife whilst screaming "You're dead" or words to that effect. Once dead you have to give up your knife and the successful assassin goes off to find the next victim that you were once trying to kill. The dead expeditioner ghost gets to go back to normality and stop constantly looking over their shoulder whilst simultaneously trying to plan the death of their colleagues, which can be a relief!

    This stuff obviously results in people hiding in dark corners at all hours of the day and night, mad panics with running and yelling and screaming like we are all 14 years old again and means very little work of value gets done. We started at 1:30 pm yesterday with 19 of us. By 6pm tonight there are only 5 assassins left alive. I am not one of them. All this is for the glory of being the one to hold aloft the coveted Mawson Assassin Trophy, which sits glittering in the upstairs lounge waiting to be claimed. Its a little harder for the last few to get the job done as we all now know who is now trying to kill whom. So it will take treachery, skulduggery, cunning plans etc to get the job done from here.

    Not sure who made this impressive trophy but it's not a bad prize... which by the way you don't get to take home or have your name put on either. No point being an assassin if everyone knows who you are! So the glory is pretty much just to be tucked away in your memory. 

    There are a couple of other things here at Mawson Statin that make you wonder why they are there. Take for example the fact that on the walk between the Red Shed ( Accomodation building ) and the Ops building ( where my Comms workshop lives ) are some metal poles that hold up the Blizz Lines for us to follow when we can't see a metre in front of us due to .. blizzard conditions. On two of these poles you will find first a.. Barbie Doll dressed in all black. Then on the next pole you will of course find.. Ken .. doll... or whatever you call him.. of course looking relaxed in his shorts and trendy shirt. Who did this, when and of course the big question.. why?? We will probably never know. And that's probably just fine. Some mysteries are not meant to be solved in this world.

                Antarctic Ken and Barbie.. don't remember seeing them advertised on Telly...

With all of these things, wonders and mysteries,  the Science happening here fades a bit.. but it is here and so I thought I'd cover a couple of things that I have been involved with so far.

    First are a couple of things to do with our health down here. We are in a very unique situation. Thousands of kilometres from anywhere with only 20 of us to look at day after day for months on end we really are isolated. So isolated in fact that NASA is conducting some studies on our physical and mental health care to learn more about what is important and possible that may help astronauts on any upcoming missions to Mars! Those who go will also be isolated with a very small group of people and will also have to be self - contained as much as possible. We are having our diets and health monitored and also taking part in studies to see if we can do some basic medical procedures with little to no training. Our current task is to see if we can use a small ultrasound machine to help us get a needle into a pretend vein in a pretend arm. We will then graduate to conducting real ultrasound scans on each other... we will not be doing the needle bit though! At the end of it all hopefully we will be rewarded with a NASA tee shirt... if we are lucky.

    Another surprise was the fact the we need to take Vitamin D tablets weekly. With the distinct lack of sunlight due to it not being up much and also constantly being covered up due to the cold, we have to get our dose of sunshine from a pill!

Sunshine in a Pill.... its just Vitamin D.. really. The tiny little model Hagglunds tracked vehicle was 3D printed by our head sparky as one of the things to do that keeps him sane. It 

may be working but I'm not sure.

    One task I have every fortnight for a week is to collect and process air samples for ARPANSA.. the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority. Basically we have a big fan which sucks air through some filter paper at a rate of 900 cubic metres an hour. We then daily take the filter paper, squash it up under a hydraulic press and stick it in a Radioactive Nuclide detector. There are stations like this around the world and basically we are monitoring the air to see if some naughty nation has conducted an Atomic bomb test or there has been a radiation leak say from Japan or Russia or Ukraine.. not that this would ever happen of course.

1) Remove filter paper from over-sized vacuum cleaner. (Above)

2) Squash paper into a ball and then squash again with a hydraulic press. (Below)

                             

    3) Stick a date label on squashed paper.     3) Place it in the Detector 

  

4)  Wait for 24 hours for the machine that       5)   Check results, document and send to ARPANSA.

goes Ping to do its job.

    Another project I have is to set up and then collect data from a couple of sea ice monitoring units. Once the ice was thick enough we installed two of the below units to measure the air, snow, sea ice and sea temperature over a roughly four month period .. stopping before the ice melts enough for the gear to fall into the ocean.. or us for that matter. Its basically a big long thermometer with some electronics attached. The biggest trick is to bolt it down to the ice well enough so it doesn't blow away the next time we have 180 Km/h winds kick up. The sea ice near the station is about 1 1/2 meters thick presently so that is plenty thick enough for us to get around. Once it gets down to around 60-70 cms we will be packing up in a hurry! Apparently the other big trick will be to remove the long sensor chain from the hole in the ice where it goes down into the sea water. They can wobble around due to the currents and get stuck to the bottom of the ice sheet.. how you get it out from that spot I am yet to work out.

                  Ice Mass Balance Sensor unit . The scientific cane poles help us find it every month and also stop us from running over it when we are trying to find it.

    Other Science here includes Weather Observations daily, Seismic Sensors to detect Nuclear Explosions ( naughty naughty ) and earthquakes and studying the sea birds ( penguins, petrels , albatross etc and seals too ) once they come back again in about October. Presently the place seems devoid of life.. ice and rock and snow and very little else to cheer the soul. Its beautiful but at present its desolate. So we are all eagerly awaiting the return of our animal friends. The days are longer with sunrise now about 8am so that is very welcome! More sun means more happy!

The weather here is a tad tricky to predict so the Met Bureau people get a fair bit of ribbing from us on a daily basis. Its pretty much summed up by the sign above the weather notice board that says

 " Welcome to Antarctica.. where the forecasts are made up and the seasons don't matter"

    The above photos are of the crystal ball that the Met people use to forecast the weather.. this is a real instrument here at Mawson. Ok, it's not really a crystal ball but it's close. Its actually a sunlight recorder and every kids dream! Remember getting out the magnifying glass and burning stuff with focussed sunlight? This is exactly the same.. it focusses the sunlight onto a bit of scientific material ( Cardboard ) and then proceeds to burn a very scientific hole in the cardboard as the day progresses. Then they can tell how much daylight we have had by how much burnt cardboard they get! Awesome. 

     We have a few other interesting weather phenomenon here. Early in August our Met bureau Observer was exceedingly excited by what he called Polar stratospheric clouds. Basically these are quite rare and only form in the Stratosphere at certain cold temperatures ( below -78C ). they look quite bizarre.. like a photo of an oil slick that hasn't been focussed properly. We had beautiful clear, cold conditions for several days and they were best seen around twilight.

The other weather event we have noticed is weird wind directions.. as in two different ones happening at the same time not far apart. Wind at the station was a solid gale of 30-40 knots blowing from North to South. Yet about two kilometres away to the east we could see snow being blown off the ice plateau by an equally strong wind coming from South to North. How that happens I don't know either.

    So after all that Science stuff we did actually do some fun things this month.. including another trip out to the Auster Emperor Penguin Colony to see if the chicks had hatched. And they had! There were also a lot more birds there as some of the females had returned to help feed the chicks and let the males head off on a 60 km or so walk to the open water so they could have their first feed in months. You would be pretty happy to see the females arriving after that long without a feed!

        Peters' Penguin Advice Service.. form an orderly queue.. no pushing or shoving.

        Photo: Sophie Counsell

                                " Right... no more food for a month fatso"

    I also went on a little drive out to the west of station on the sea ice to see how far we could go before the ice became too thin. It was a beautiful day with little wind and very pleasant thank you very much. We came across some tide cracks ( places where the sea ice is thinner and the tides move the  ice apart until it re-freezes, causing the cracks to become wider as below. Seals will somehow find these cracks/thin ice sections and then chew a hole from below to make a breathing hole. We did see one seal nose poking up through the hole shown before it disappeared when we got closer.

                    One of our Station Plumbers inspecting the seal breathing hole to make sure it meets                                specifications.

    So with a new month upon us we are starting to think about the end of the year approaching. This will mean the arrival of the summer crew which will mean an additional 10 expeditioners invading us in early November. We have mixed feelings about this.. new people coming to steal our precious shower water, food and personal space.. it will increase our numbers by a whopping 50% and be just a lot busier than for the last ( by then ) 8 months. But it will also be new faces to see and people to talk to which , once the initial shock wears off,  might be nice. But then again they will bring the latest flus and coughs and colds with them which we have enjoyed having absolutely none of!

    It also means thinking about going home. The current plan has us leaving on February 1st and back to Hobart around the 19th .. just in time for my birthday. But that sort of thinking is a bit pre-mature and any plans made with dates attached we pretty much dismiss as a nasty joke. Still, it will arrive one day and we will seriously have to start thinking about thinking about making some plans for getting back!