Tag Archive for: antarctica

First Light in a Dark Room

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  • Dominic and Paul inspect our first images
  • Photography with the CACOON camera is trial and error.
  • Washing our best images
  • Test #3 in the Fixing Bath
  • Paul retrieves our over-exposed first image from the Fixing Bath
  • Paul peers into the darkness of the first over-exposed image
  • Behold the CACOON camera
  • Our best image: 3 exposures, 5 minutes apart, with triple-folded tissue paper

The images above have been nine months in the making. That’s precisely the amount of time needed to:

  1. Talk to research scientist Paul about CACOON, permafrost and the Arctic
  2. Find a local artist, meet with them and explain the project
  3. Prototype a camera that we can use in schools workshop to model permafrost melt using ice
  4. Put the prototype back into the sink (it was made from a washing up bowl) and build the sleek, black camera in the gallery above
  5. Fire up the camera and take our first exposures!

The next step is a bit of process refinement: we need to make the camera usable in a school environment. We’ll be stress-testing the camera and the procedure over the coming months – come back for more information!

Kate in Antarctica: Life on Base

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Kate’s been stuck inside with bad weather – windy, with visibility down to less than a metre. Not good for science or filming… but great for writing blog posts! Here’s her latest, and for the full set (and some background) be sure to check out our page all about Kate in Antarctica.

Station life is comfortable and well-structured. Everyone sleeps in bunk beds in containers at the back of the station, or rooms which are tucked away in the main structure of the base. Rooms are wood-lined and warm, with windows for light and electricity to charge cameras and radios. The only noise comes from the wind, and sometimes from the sound it makes whipping through the station’s nine wind turbines. Once you emerge from a peaceful slumber you can shuffle your way to the kitchen in slippers if you have a station room, or don your woolly hat, cosy boots and sunglasses for the short commute. It’s always so bright outside – if you leave your sunglasses off for even a few minutes, your eyes start to hurt.

Breakfast is 7-8am Monday-Saturday. After self-serve toast, cereal, yoghurt, coffee and tea, everyone scatters to their place of work: the station office, kitchen, doctor’s surgery, garage, snow-melting room, the science container (where I charge and test all my equipment), the station lab, the airstrip, or the new hanger. Staff and researchers who work outside tend to fill a flask of tea and pop a bar of chocolate in their pocket before they pile on more layers of clothes that will keep them warm until lunchtime. The station is well insulated, maintaining a very comfortable temperature so those working inside tend to be happiest in jeans, a t-shirt and trainers.As James and I travel a little further to our place of work – the mountains – we prepare a packed lunch of soup and a sandwich, with a biscuit or bar of chocolate. We shove this in the top of our metal Zarges kit box (ed — we didn’t know what these were, but they turn out to be really cool metal boxes) which already contains a host of safety and science equipment. Then comes one of me favourite daily tasks: sled organisation and security! Making sure each piece of equipment is in the best place on the sled is like a game of Tetris. Big boxes go first to shelter smaller and more delicate equipment from the snow that’s kicked up by the 30 kph snowmobile. Once everything is in place the rope work can commence. We tie everything down to make sure it doesn’t jump around or fall off the sled on the bumpy journey to the mountains. We travel across wind-blown grooves and ridges in the snow called ’sastrugi’, and the sled must ride up or shovel through peaks and troughs of snow and ice as it’s dragged behind our snowmobiles.

Scott Webster, a field guide at the British Antarctic Survey taught me a few sled-securing techniques when I was researching the Ellsworth mountains in 2014, so I follow his guidance – looping ropes around straps, crossing the rope across the sled from one side to the other and back, before pulling the rope as taut as I can, then tying the whole thing off with a couple of tried and tested knots. The result is a beauty to behold, I assure you!

After a day’s work James and I return from the ‘field’ (geologist always describe their research site as ‘the field’ even if they’re not actually in a field!), usually by about 6pm. Then the sled unroping and unpacking begins! We have to slowly warm up electrical equipment, placing the Zarges boxes in the colder station entrance for an hour before we unpack them and place everything on charge. At this stage we start to back up the day’s data on laptops and hard drives. Whilst the station staff put away their tools, turn off their computers and take off extra layers of clothing, we try to take a quick look at the day’s data before dinner is served at 8pm.

Our chef Christine serves dinner onto plates piled high to feed the hungry workers. By 9pm everyone is full… and tired. We take it in turn to help clean the dishes and the kitchen, with those ‘off duty’ having some time to relax. This tends to involve chatting around the dining table, reading on the sofas, listening to music or replying to an email or two on one of the station’s two internet-connected laptops.

The 10-hour working day is labour-intensive and almost non-stop, so most people fall into bed exhausted between 10 and 11pm.

  • Bedroom
  • Living room
  • Kitchen
  • Dining room

Kate in Antarctica!

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Kate’s made it to the Princess Elisabeth Research Station, which (if you ask us) looks more like the villain’s lair in the next Bond film than anything so straightforward as a research base. Wait… are we sure Kate isn’t plotting world domination?

Here’s Kate’s update:

Merry Christmas from the Princess Elisabeth Research Station in East Antarctica!           

Did you have a white Christmas in the UK? At 71 degrees south, you always get a bright, white Christmas. The sun circles the sky during the Antarctic summer so it is always bright and sunny – which is strange when you wake up on Christmas morning! Today, we have really good weather, it is -8°C and the wind is blowing at 10 knots so it is not too cold. You can see the kind of weather that I am experiencing at this weather report site. 

As the weather is so good, and our time here is short, everyone on the base went to work today. The research station is expanding, so there are lots of people building new walls, putting in new electrics, maintaining the plumbing system and checking that the wind turbines (which produce most of the station’s electricity) are working. There are four scientists on the base at the moment – me, my field assistant James Linighan and two geologists from Turkey. One geologist wants to date the rocks on the mountains (using a technique called cosmogenic nuclide dating – you can google it if you want to know more!) to see if the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was thicker in the past, and the other geologist is searching for meterorites. Antarctica is a great place to find meteorites because their dark, shiny form stands out on the blue ice and white snow. There are more scientists working close to the coast, where they will camp on the ice for over a month. They are drilling through the ice, to collect ice cores to learn about the past climate.

James and I have been scanning the mountains that stick up above the ice (called nunataks) with a drone. When we come back next year, we will do the same tests, to see if the rocks on the mountain have moved over the space of a year. We expect the rocks to move downhill a little. Over many years, these rocks will roll and fall onto the ice, where glaciers (like big, frozen rivers) will transport them to the sea. We have already collected some rock samples from nearby mountains and from the ice sheet, so that we can see what’s inside the rocks (like minerals) when we get back to the laboratory at Northumbria University. That will tell us if these rocks can help to feed plankton in the Southern Ocean.

 

Kate in Cape Town

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Our intrepid geologist Kate has made it about as far South as is remotely reasonable to go, to Cape Town in South Africa. Of course, that’s not nearly remote enough for her, and is merely a staging point on her epic journey to Antarctica. Here’s her update:

My field assistant James Linighan (a Master of Science student at Newcastle University) and I checked in 6 bags at Newcastle Airport on Friday the 14th of December for our flight to Cape Town in South Africa. We arrived (thankfully with all our bags intact) and stepped out into the 25°C heat of the South African summer. It’s quite a shock after the cold we’ve been experiencing in Newcastle, but it will be even more of a shock when we arrive in Antarctica on the 18th of December.

While we wait for our flight we have time to sort out our equipment, listen to safety briefings and even lie by the pool at our hotel. Today, we took a cable car up Table Mountain. It’s very famous and the views were spectacular! Cape Town is a very large city with a population of 433,000. You can see most of the city in this photograph. We also collected some of our more extreme polar clothing at The International Polar Foundation’s clothing store. It’s a fabulous warehouse, where you can borrow anything and everything you need to keep you comfortable and warm in Antarctica. I picked up some winter boots, a down jacket, salopettes, goggles, mittens and some mid-layers to keep me all wrapped up and cosy.

Our Antarctic flight leaves tomorrow so as we are all packed and ready to go. I think I will just sit and relax by the hotel pool for a few more hours…

  • Clothes store
  • Checking in at Newcastle Airport
  • Kit store
  • Cape Town from Table Mountain
  • Boot Store
  • Bags… and bear!

By now Kate should have made it from Cape Town all the way to her destination, but we know she’s going to struggle for an internet connection. With luck she’ll be able to sneak out further updates and maybe even the odd picture or two. We’ll post updates whenever we can, and you can catch up on all things Kate at her page here.

Meanwhile: a very Merry Christmas from us all at NUSTEM. We’ll be back in the new year, rested and ready for another term of shenanigans.

Kate’s heading to Antarctica!

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Long-term NUSTEM partners will recognise Dr. Kate Winter’s name as our sometime admin assistant, and might even have wondered where she’s disappeared to in recent months. Well, we have news: we found her.

In Antarctica.

It’s a bit more planned than that. Kate’s returned to geology research, won herself a big support grant, and is heading out to Antarctica for two successive summers – which means, upside-down world and all, that she flies out any day now.

We’ve started a page of information about Kate’s trip and her research. Fingers crossed she’ll manage to get some updates to us while she’s living out on the ice, and maybe even a picture or two: we’ll post updates!