Drill Site Visit, Part 2

Last night we went out to the drill site for a tour of the drill rig. There were only 4 of us on the trip so we got to skip the Pisten Bully and got to drive in style:

This badboy is a Ford pickup that's been outfitted with tracks. It's a faster and much smoother ride than the Pisten Bully. The only downside is that you can't turn the tracks when it is not moving, so backing up can be a tricky, especially in a tight space.

The drive out to the site was pretty uneventful. There was a bit of blowing snow and drifting, which kept things interesting. The transmission was also running a bit hot so I had to call into Mac Ops Out at the camp, everything is pretty exposed so the wind was quite nasty.


Alissa gave us a nice tour of the drill rig and camp. Even though I made a bunch of trips out to the drill site last year, this was the first time I got to go inside the rig. It was pretty interesting, though a little anticlimactic since all you can see is a dirty hole in the ice with a pipe sticking out of it.

It's not all computers

I spend the vast majority of my day in front of a computer doing various things, but I also like to pitch in and lend a hand, especially for the curators who work their tails off. Here's a shot of me and Phill bringing down some core for the sedimentologists to describe:


As you can see I'm keeping up shaving. My boyish good looks drive the ladies down here crazy. Ok, so I made that last bit up.

In Frosty Boy news, I almost broke down and had some the other night. It was Chris's 50th birthday party so Leslie baked a decadent chocolate cake. It was just begging to be topped with a dollop of Frosty Boy. However, I held strong and settled for a glass of milk.

Condition 2 Blues

We had a storm blow in Sunday night that made things nasty to be outside on Monday. McMurdo was in condition 2 and everywhere else was in condition 1 for most of the day. The drill site reported it was like living in a marshmallow--they couldn't even see the rig from camp. The storm kept the grounded the helos, so the core was backed up at the drill site until this morning when they were finally able to fly. They brought back over 60 meters of core. From this you can probably guess that the drilling is progressing well. The core has also been pretty interesting to my untrained eye. There's been a fair amount of variability in the lithologies and it seems like every night yields some thing new and exciting. I need to head back to it. Cheers.

Still fighting the good fight

I'm still fighting the good fight against Frosty Boy. I wavered, just for a moment, when Kurt brought a brownie topped with Frosty Boy and slathered in hot fudge. But I held strong and skipped dessert altogether.

The weather has been pretty variable. We'll have a couple of nice days (>0F temps with not much wind), strung together and then followed by some downright nasty days. It's never so much the temperature as it is the wind. Today we had 30mph sustained winds which plunged the temperature to well below zero.

I think I'm fully adjusted to the night shift. I've been less and less tired in the mornings. I've even made it to the gym almost every day this week, which is no small feat because I've been working some long, 16 hour shifts. Some of this is due to an increasing amount of core coming in and some due to some work back home. Hopefully in a week or so things will settle down into a steady routine.

I've been working on some new Corelyzer plugins which I hope to be able to roll out soon for people to check out. Corelyzer is a visualization system that we use to look at our high-resolution core imagery. Last year we were able to pull up the core images and some line graphs. This year we've improved things by bringing in the lithology strip from PSICAT. I'm working on visualizing other core data and imagery we are capturing.

Anyhow, I need to head to bed. I've been up since 8PM last night (it's 2PM now) and I need to get up again in another couple of hours. Cheers.

150,000 in ODM

Well, in some non-Antarctica-related news, I got an email from my good friend Bill Ryan today. He sent me a note to let me know that the ODM software him and I wrote when I did an internship at the Mayo Clinic just surpassed 150,000 CDs. The purpose of the software was to incorporate outside digital media, such as digital x-rays, MRIs, etc., from other hospitals into the Mayo system. So if a patient had some exams done elsewhere and the results were available in digital form, he wouldn't need to have the same exam re-done when he was referred to Mayo.

The actual ODM software isn't all that sophisticated--suck in the contents of a CD, make a digital archive copy, fire off the images to be processed by the imaging services. All of the magic is done behind the scenes by the imaging services Bill wrote. Nevertheless, it was a great experience to be able to work in a diverse team and I learned a lot. And we must have done something right--they are rolling out the ODM software to Mayo's other two locations in Jacksonville and Scottsdale.

On the Antarctic front, things are starting to ramp up. The core recovery has been steadily increasing. Last night we had ~15m with 97% recovery. The sedimentologists have been able to stay on top of the incoming core, and haven't run into too many problems, so I've been able to focus on getting a bunch of other stuff, like sample requests from the drill site, sorted out. I'm looking forward to it slowing down some. I'm averaging about 16-18 hours of work. Sprinkle some gym time most days on top of that and you can quickly run yourself down. And that's the last thing you want to do with all the bugs going around. They've taken to quarantining people to their rooms to stop the spread of the flu. So far I've been lucky.

Anyhow, I had better grab some shut eye.

Pastels over Black Island

Here's a shot of the sunrise over Black Island:

Switched Shifts

Well, I survived the shift switching process. Yesterday was difficult. I ended up doing a 30 hour stretch awake. By the end I was exhausted. Last night was easier because I had started adjusting and there were more people around. It turned into sort of a long day, though. We had some last minute problems that kept me in the lab for an extra 4 hours. So now I'm ready to collapse. Tonight I'm going to try and catch a few pictures of the moon and the sunrise. This morning there was a particularly beautiful sunrise but I couldn't be bothered to go out and take a few pictures of it.