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The quality of light here is amazing. It never quits, never a cloud in the sky, and it reflects of every little ice crystal. Bewildering, waking up at 3 in the morning to full-on blazing solar fury. |
12/11/02
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The quality of light here is amazing. It never quits, never a cloud in the sky, and it reflects of every little ice crystal. Bewildering, waking up at 3 in the morning to full-on blazing solar fury. |
I saw a beautiful, beautiful thing today, something
I'd been waiting to see for more than 2 years, since I knew I'd
be coming here. But I was sad not to share it with my wife, Gabriella,
who appreciates the beauty in everything. But she wouldn't like
the cold: her idea of freezing is anything below 55 degrees.
The wind has been, well, non-existent, the last few days, and
I was walking back from the Clean Air Lab after lunch, and I noticed
the air was sparkling. It was not snowing, but ICING. It doesn't
exactly snow here, not the six-sided flakes that grow from tiny
water crystals that we're used to in more temperate regions. No.
What you get here in this perpetually very cold and dry and high
place, is the formation of tiny clear ice crystals.
The ice crystals yesterday were so small, such a high surface
area to mass ratio (remember our coffee filter lab, physics slackers?)
that they barely fell. They mostly just slowly drifted across
the air, from my left to right, jangling in the sunlight. And
if they were in the right position, they had color. Zillions of
little ice prisms! If you've ever noticed spiderwebs colored in
the sunlight, or even better, seen when the baby spiders leave
their "nest" and float across the field on little trailers
of silk, you might have some idea.
And looking up in the sky, the air was full
of ice and sunlight, and a big halo, the 22-degree halo, around
the sun. To the right and left of the sun, stuck to the halo,
"sundogs": rainbows created by the refraction of sunlight
through the ice. And a rainbow directly above me: the circumzenith
arc. And a huge white ring going all the way around the sky, as
big as the sky, level with the sun, connecting the sundogs.
Now, I've seen many pictures of these. And I can tell you that
no picture, no camera can capture what this looked like. Because
the air was full of ice and light, the spectral colors in the
sundogs and circumzenith arc came right to me. They seemed like
bright ROY G BIV wedges in the sky, stretching from my eyes to
an infinite distance away. And not solid, but composed of millions
of little spinning, drifting, sparkling ice wedges.
I tried my best to take some pictures and movies of what this
looked like, and if you look at one movie on the drachen site,
look at sundogs. But not every wonderful thing can be recorded
and digitized and stored.
And that's not a bad thing.
Well, more work on detectors, and planning for live streaming webcasts tomorrow, and tours of the Clean Air Lab and the AST/RO sub-millimeter band radio telescope, and plans to go along with a mini-expedition on Friday that will go overland 20 km away from the station to measure snow pack.
But it was all about the sundogs today.
Daddy misses his family and the nice dark nighttime that helps him to sleep!
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Bai told me (and he would know) that this Russian plane had mechanical trouble during its flight, and put down here at the Pole a couple of years ago. The Russians were flown out, then given a transportation bill for $ 10,000 apiece. They of course didn't pay, since they were already home, so their plane sits here as collateral. The Russians maintain a base on the highest part of the Antarctic plateau, at about 12,000 feet altitude. They used to keep it open year round, but it's now just a summer facility. |