Kara and I arrived in Antarctica a little more than a week ago. As of today, I have now spent more than an entire year of my life, spread over 15 trips starting with my first one in 1994, in Antarctica. For this blog post I am going to share some memories and photos from my previous Antarctic trips.
Mark Seefeldt, a fellow graduate student and currently a scientist in my research group at the University of Colorado, and me in Christchurch before our first Antarctic trip in 1994. Mark and I were both master’s students at the University of Wisconsin. At the time I thought this would be my only chance to visit Antarctica, but I fell in love with Antarctica and decided to continue doing polar research for my PhD.
The research group that Mark and I worked in was led by Prof. Charles Stearns at the University of Wisconsin. This group maintained a network of automatic weather stations (AWS) across the continent. These AWS could run for years without anyone visiting them and our job on this, and many future Antarctic trips, was to visit and repair AWS sites across the continent or to install AWS at new locations. It was a great job because we got to travel to lots of places around Antarctica.
This map shows the location of all the AWS in Antarctica. The group at the University of Wisconsin, now led by my colleague and friend Prof. Matthew Lazzara, maintains the weather stations shown by the red triangles on this map.Two of my former graduate students and friends, Shelley Knuth and Melissa Nigro, at Sabrina AWS. This AWS was named after my daughter and is located on the southern part of the Ross Ice Shelf, near the Transantarctic Mountains. Most of the AWS are similar to this one. They are usually 8 to 12 feet tall and measure wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity and pressure. (Photo courtesy of Shelley Knuth)On my first Antarctic trip I was lucky enough to visit the South Pole to service several AWS in the area. Here I am posing next to the geographic South Pole at 90 deg S.In this photograph from 1995 I am standing next to the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star in port in Hobart, Australia shortly before setting sail to Antarctica. On this trip I worked, once again, with Mark Seefeldt. For this trip, unlike all of my other Antarctic trips, we travelled to Antarctica on an icebreaker rather than flying to McMurdo Station from New Zealand. (Photo courtesy of Mark Seefeldt)
In 2009 after six Antarctic trips that mostly involved repairing and installing AWS that were part of the University of Wisconsin network of weather stations I started using uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) or drones to make weather measurements in Antarctica. The trip in 2009 also marked the first time I visited Antarctica outside of the usual summer field season – deploying in late August, which is the end of the Antarctic winter.
This late winter season is known as Winfly and it is my favorite time of year to be in Antarctica. I have been lucky enough to have done four Winfly deployments in 2009, 2012, 2016 and this year. Unlike summer, when the sun is up 24 hours a day, the sun rises and sets every day during Winfly as Antarctica transitions from months of 24 hours of polar darkness to months of 24 hours of polar light with beautiful sunsets and sunrises every day.
In this photograph from 2016, McMurdo station, on the left side of the photograph, looks small under the dark Antarctic sky with the Southern Lights dancing above.This is one of the many achingly beautiful sunsets I have seen during my Winfly trips to Antarctica. This photograph was taken just a few days ago. McMurdo Station is nestled behind the conical hill in the center of this photograph.
The weather, as you’d expect, is quite cold during Winfly and I love experiencing these harsh Antarctic conditions. On my 2016 Winfly trip Mark Seefeldt and I were doing drone flights at night when the temperature dipped to -56 F, without wind chill. This is the coldest temperature I have ever experienced. At this temperature the air causes a cold burning sensation on any exposed skin and you can feel the moisture in your nose freeze as you breath in. At these temperatures you need to be careful with everything you do outside or risk getting frostbite or worse.
After a 2 hour hike in sub-zero temperatures my hat and face mask are coated in ice with just my eyes exposed to the cold air.In 2009 and 2012 we flew Aerosonde drones to make weather measurements of strong winds, known as katabatic winds, blowing off of the continent and over the adjacent ocean and sea ice. The Aerosonde drones had a wingspan of almost 12 feet, weighed over 40 pounds and could do flights of more than 15 hours. This large drone was launched from a rack on the back of a pickup truck and would take-off once the pickup truck reached a speed of nearly 50 mph. In this photograph you see an Aerosonde shortly after it has taken off from the back of the pickup truck racing down the ice runway.This is a photograph taken by the Aerosonde drone as it flew over an area of newly forming sea ice just offshore of the Antarctic coast in Terra Nova Bay. This type of sea ice is known as pancake ice since the individual floes, which are several feet across, resemble pancakes. Eventually the pancakes will freeze together making a solid ice surface on top of the ocean. The ripples in the photograph are large waves generated by near hurricane force winds we had just observed with weather instruments on the Aerosonde. One of the things I love about working in Antarctica is the collaboration with scientists from other countries. In 2012, while servicing a weather station located more than 100 miles north of McMurdo Station we stopped at the Italian Mario Zucchelli Antarctic research station where we were invited inside to enjoy a delicious lunch.In January 2017, on my 14th Antarctic trip, I deployed with the New Zealand Antarctic Program instead of the U.S. Antarctic Program to work with colleagues from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. For this trip we were using drones to make measurements of the atmosphere over one of the few places on the continent that isn’t covered by snow or ice year-round – the Dry Valleys in the Transantarctic Mountains. In this photograph you can see the New Zealand field camp, next to Lake Vanda, where I spent two weeks doing drone flights.I am holding a much smaller drone, known as a Small Unmanned Meteorological Observer, or SUMO, on the shore of Lake Vanda. After two field campaigns using the large Aerosonde drones we switched to using the much smaller SUMO drones. While these drones didn’t have the long range or ability to fly in hurricane force winds like the Aerosondes their smaller size makes them ideal to use in remote locations like our field camp in the Dry Valleys.In 2014 myself and my graduate student at the time, Melissa Nigro, along with a mountaineer, that helped us avoid crevasses – deep cracks in the ice, spent two weeks at a field camp on the Ross Ice Shelf making weather measurements with SUMO drones. Here Melissa and I are watching a SUMO circling overhead. Melissa is holding a laptop computer that is running software to control the SUMO autopilot while I have a remote control sitting on the ice in front of me that can be used to manually fly the drone during take-off and landing.Unlike the beautiful mountains and lake near the Dry Valley field camp I was at in 2017 our field camp in 2014 on the Ross Ice Shelf was completely flat. All you could see in every direction was a flat horizon with the only feature being small ripples in the snow carved by the ceaseless wind that blows over the ice shelf.Strong winds drive blowing snow past our tents, and the snow walls we built to shield the tents from the worst of the wind, at our Ross Ice Shelf field camp in 2014.
I’ll end this post with some bad news. Due to a cargo handling error in Christchurch the drones that we were planning to use for our research this year never made it onto one of the four C-17 Winfly flights from Christchurch to McMurdo so Kara and I are in McMurdo without the drones we need to do the fieldwork we had planned. This is unbelievably frustrating for us but we are trying to do what we can to salvage our field season. Luckily, we had packed some of the meteorology sensors we had planned to fly on our drones in our regular luggage. We have attached these sensors, that measure temperature, humidity and pressure, to a van and we are collecting temperature data along a 10 mile snow road between McMurdo and the ice runway. In the last two days we have measured temperatures on this 10 mile stretch of road ranging from -13 deg F to a very chilly -46 deg F.
Here Kara and I are enjoying a beautiful Antarctic sunset during one of our weather sampling drives along the snow road between McMurdo Station and the ice runway.
When I was growing up I would dream about visiting far flung locations but never imagined that I’d ever get to go to Antarctica. I am so thankful and feel so fortunate that I have been able to visit and work in Antarctica for the past 30 years.
