Ice the Orca

Ice the Orca

I’d like to introduce Ice the Orca. This is Ice’s second trip to Antarctica. She came with me to South Pole and Hercules Dome two years ago.

She loves getting into trouble and sending photos back to her friends Orcie and Blizzard who are with Olivia and Adrian.

Ice really enjoyed the ice core drilling and got involved in everything:

She snuck into my bag

ran the drill

operated the winch

checked out the cutters

And inspected the ice core.

She even helped us answer the daily trivia question: What type of whale is actually a dolphin? Of course Ice doesn’t identify as a “Killer Whale” – she’s an Orca.

She even pretended she was the ice core

Tilted Layers, Tilted Radar

One of the best parts about being a scientist is trying out new ideas. A few days ago, Margot and Liam set up a “tilted radar” experiment:

They chiseled into the ice to set up the antennas at progressively larger angles.

The reason is that the internal layers of the ice sheet and the bed of the ice sheet are tilted in this region. Liam measured an angle of about 20 degrees in the ice core, and previous radar measurements show the approximate slope of the bedrock.

The hope is that by orienting the radar at the same angle as the layers (i.e. making the radar wave propagation perpendicular to the layering), the reflected energy will create a stronger signal. Will it work? We have no idea. Lots of science is trying creative things that end up not working out.

Ice Core

It’s been quite a season getting camp and the main ice core drills up and running, but we have produced core at last!

The BID – blue ice drill – has a diameter of 9.5”, compared to the drills I’ve used before which have a 4” diameter. Because we are *only* drilling to 200m, and not 2000m, we can recover much larger ice cores. These give us more ice to analyze since the layers are more compressed.

The drill has a 2m long barrel that collects the ice core at the bottom, and the chips – the ice that gets cut out around the core. A good run at this depth bring up about 60 cm of ice.

The drilling of the ice core is a pretty slow process. First you lower the drill down, in this case about 150 meters. Then we slowly lower it the last meter so we don’t bang the drill on the ice. Then we start spinning the drill and cutting very slowly. The core quality is better with slower cutting, although getting good ice core quality is still very hard.

Here’s an example of typical core quality. The alignment of pieces can be seen with the line drawn on the ice, but there are lots of cracks that run through the ice.

Wind Features

The wind shapes this environment. Sometimes it’s blowing snow, sometimes it’s Ice Waves.

The ice is flowing over shallow rock on its way to the basin below, but it’s the wind that makes these features.

These are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Blue Ice Areas may be windy, but they are beautiful too.

Glaciology

The weather has not been friendly, so we are still waiting to get our drill tents up and the ice coring going. We have been able to get out and do some glaciology and study how the ice moves.

Here’s  Margot with a radar. You can see the controller, the yellow box, by her and one of the antennas to the right by the red flag. The other antenna is to the left, out of the picture. It transmits energy and records the energy reflected from layers within the ice and from the rock beneath the ice. Ice is quite transparent to radar, so we can “see through” it and record the returned energy. This is great for scientists. It was not great for WW2 pilots flying over the Greenland ice sheet and getting confused by where the surface of the ice sheet was.

Margot is making fancy measurements where she can figure out how the ice crystal are oriented. And by making repeat measurements, she can see how the ice flows vertically.

Here Margot is checking the radar settings. I promise she is not just trying to hide from me.

Margot will make about 30 of these measurements throughout the region. She will then use them in an ice flow model to figure out of ice moves in the Allan Hills.

Wind and Snow

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that wind is currently our main concern. It’s always windy here – that’s why there is old ice – but we have been hit with consistent high winds.

What you may not appreciate about camping in the wind is the noise. Not just the wind itself, but everything that it causes to flap. Here’s a video from inside my tent. Hopefully you can listen to it.

The wind does make cool structures though. Here is a feature I loved. 

Can you tell which way the wind blows?

Weather Day Hunkering

I learned in mountaineering “hunkering is a skill”. Sometimes, the weather is such that there just isn’t much you can do but hang tight. Today was one of those days. We could get a few small tasks done, but mostly we are just waiting for better weather.

So what do we do? We work on our computers

This is Ishraque tracing volcanic ash layers on a satellite image.

We play chess

Here’s Margot and Liam battling it out as fellow grad students should.

And we make friendships bracelets

Here’s me with my second attempt using Jenna’s board to aid me. And one one made for me by Elizabeth.

We also do a lot of reading and blogging, of course.

What bad weather looks like

Today at our morning meeting we had big plans. That ended abruptly when I stepped out of our group tent and saw this:

Blowing snow. When I walked in from my tent 1.5 hours earlier, it was clear and only -29C with 20 knot winds (aka a typical day). By the end of our meeting, the wind had picked up to 27 knots and picked up lots of snow with it.

You can see drifts forming behind the stuff in our sleds. And hopefully you can make out the snow blowing by on the right side of the image.

Instead of our science plans, we headed out to secure our tents and cargo.

Then we spent most of the day in our tent and out of the elements.

Camp Life and Sleeping Tents

Here is a first installment about our camp. I’ll focus on the sleeping tents. We have three types of tents people are using. Each person will get their own tent, although the weather was too windy to get everyone’s tents up right away.

The Scott tent is an Antarctic classic. It’s great in high winds – but hard to get set up in high winds. The entrance is quite interesting and requires either a crawl or a lunge through the circular portal door.

It’s made for two people to sleep and cook in, although we are using them as singles this season. We don’t cook in them, but we do use the stoves for heat, boiling water, or espresso as Abby is doing here. One advantage of Scott tents is the height allows standing. One downside is that they are drafty because they have vents on top.

Another type of tent people are using is what we call a mountain tent. These are North Face VE25 tents for mountaineering.

They are much lighter than a Scott tent and much more similar to your typical camping tent. They are easier to set up but take more care as the lighter materials can tear.

These tents are pretty low. We use cardboard (used to ship our cargo) under the tent to insulate from the cold. This tent would fit 2 or 3 people for mountaineering, which allows space for an individual to stretch out and manage all of our stuff.

The third tent is an Arctic Oven pup.

This is the type of tent I used at the West Antarctica ice core site. It’s not as tall as a Scott but bigger and more robust than a mountain tent.

It fits two, which we did the first night, but it much more comfortable for one.

V-Threads

I’m used to camping on dirt, sand, and snow, but at the Allan Hills, I’ll get a new experience – camping on ice. Actually, there is a thin layer of snow. The camp location was selected to be on snow because it’s a lot easier to move around on snow – ice is slippery and uneven. But because the snow layer is so thin, we can’t tie down our tents by digging into it.

We will anchor our tents with something called v-threads. V-threads are commonly made with ice screws, but we will do them on a bigger scale with augers. 

The first step is to auger a hole at about a 45 degree angle

The second step is to auger a second hole, spaced about the auger length apart horizontally, and also at 45 degrees. 

The goal is to get the two holes to intersect and form a V. This can be hard to do and even harder to take a picture of.

The third step is to put your piece of rope or p-cord down one of the holes. Then in the other hole, you put the auger down and wind it in reverse to grab the rope or p-cord. Then you pull the auger and cord back up. You can then tie the cord together, forming a loop that you can then anchor your tent to.

These big v-threads are incredibly strong. I’ve used this technique before when practicing crevasse rescue on the lower parts of glaciers. This will be my first time using them for camping and in Antarctica. My previous field sites have always had a thick layer of snow at the snow at the surface.