12/05/02
Walking over to the Dome movie
Up early to snoop around. I got over to the pole in front of the dome. Well, BOTH poles, because there's an official one, more of a stake, and the ceremonial one with the mirror ball. Took the mandatory pictures, and more besides.
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Yours truly from the mirror ball used to mark the pole. Well, the fake pole, the one that, according to Bai, Canadians paid $25,000 apiece to fly into for 3 hours and get their pictures taken. |
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This is the marker for the real pole. A new one is made every year, and located January 1st. The ice is slowly moving.... |
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lovely view of the "fake" or "ceremonial" pole. This is right outside the entrance to the dome, and the flags are of the nations that are signatories of the Antarctic Treaty, which has preserved Antarctica as a research zone. |
Still feeling slow & stupid from the altitude,
but had a tasty breakfast, did some email, ran into Bai, and we
made plans to meet for lunch and go over to the SPASE (South Pole
Air Shower Experiment) hut with my portable cosmic ray detector.
Bai nearly insisted I go back to bed for a while. He was feeling
pretty good on his second day, and had a very full agenda, so
he did a lot of digging that afternoon. It took him 2 days to
recover. So I took his advice and went to work on movies (yes)
and have a nap (no, computer troubles).
I talked to Bill McAfee, the local Tech guy, and laid out my ambitious
and insane kite aerial photography project (concerns about radio
interference from my transmitter), and QuickTime streaming server
projects. Not a problem! Very easy guy to talk to, and was very
willing to help get it done.
Internet connection here is actually FASTER than McMurdo! At least
when the satellites are up, which is somewhat less than 12 hours
a day.
After lunch, Bai & I got a shuttle (Ford van) over to the
Jamesway to pick up the cosmic ray detector, and walked the last
quarter mile out to the SPASE Hut, an elevated structure on the
edge of the civilized world that is the South Pole. If you walked
past the SPASE hut, you could walk over a thousand miles of snow
before you got to the coast. (and then what, you might ask?)
Along the way, we stopped at a 1,000-gallon tank that was installed
by TEA Jason Petula last year. There are numerous questions about
this tank that can only be answered by inspecting it. Did the
ice freeze clear? That's important, because charged particles
create faint light in the ice, and with air bubbles, that light
won't be detected. Did the ice contract and expand and crack with
the changing temperature? More than a meter of snow has drifted
over it since last year. Bai's been digging it out, and has done
a Herculean task (though more awaits us tomorrow).
The pole is really flat, and anything that sticks up collects
drift around it. The bulldozers have been going 24/7 around the
pole station, building drift walls from snow as high as a house.
Bai dug some more, and I installed my detector. Thank you, Hans,
my electronics guru from the University of Washington! It works!
Bai came back in, and we used the oscilloscope to look at the
detector PMTs (photomultiplier tubes, the ubiquitous light sensing
devices that lie at the heart of every cosmic ray project I've
worked on). We discussed some experiments we could run using the
detector, and headed over to MAPO, the Martin Pomerantz Polar
Observatory, to look around.
Christian Speiring was there, and walked me through the current
project: a somewhat tedious calibration of AMANDA's 600+ PMTs
using a laser sent through fiber optic to trigger the PMT, and
observing the timing of the return signal. When ICECUBE is installed,
it will be all digital, and this brute force approach will not
be required. Phew!
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This is a pole bike, made by the Art Institute of Pittsburg. Does it work ? Well, walking is easier... |
There are about 10 other experiments in MAPO, and I'll try to
describe them in more detail in upcoming journals. But you'll
be interested to know that somebody from the Art Institute of
Pittsburg designed a "snow bike", and sent it to the
pole, and it was sitting outside MAPO, and Bai & I tried to
ride it. It's geared incredibly low, so it's impossible to get
going except by riding down a ramp. And then you have to pedal
like an insane monkey. Back to the drawing board, folks.
Dinner, and career talk with Bai, and a peek at the greenhouse.
Bai wintered over here one year (the famous doctor medevac winter,
actually), and he said the greenhouse was really important. That's
pretty easy to believe.
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This is Bai Xinhua, my friend and colleague. He has been to the pole several times, including a winterover. He would often come to the greenhouse and site and read for a few hours during the 6 months of darkness. The most beautiful thing, he said, was the sky at night: the millions of stars, the aurora, but especially the moon. He was lost for words when trying to describe the quality of the moonlight on the snow. I can attest that the quality of sunlight here is unlike any place I've been. Bright like a welding torch. |