"Adventure is just bad planning" -- Roald Amundsen

100 years ago today, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first men to stand at the geographic South Pole, beating Robert Falcon Scott by around 5 weeks. We have had frequent updates to our "infoscreen" in the dining room over the past couple of weeks showing the historic entries from both Amundsen and Scott's diaries and the contrast between the two. While Amundsen's team seemed to go from strength to strength, finally triumphing in the race, Scott's team seemed to have the worst of things thrown at them every day, ultimately ending tragically in the deaths of all party members. However, Scott's name is lauded as a hero due mainly to his difference of motives. Whereas Amundson was seemingly driven by a desire for speed, Scott was uncompromising in his dedication to science. Scott's expedition would frequently collect samples and perform various measurements along the way, and it's this legacy that sticks in a lot of our minds down here.

But anyway, some photos...

Field science season is in full swing. Pilot Doug Pearson does final checks on the Twin Otter before heading off, with Tamsin and Tom, to service an Automatic Weather Station on the Larson Ice Shelf.

The James Clark Ross arrives at Rothera bringing much needed supplies for the summer season. We all engaged in relief duties, shifting all sorts of cargo off the ship and into it's place on base.

And as a treat, the out going winter crew of 2011 were invited on board for a meal with the Captain.

"And I got patches on the patches on my old blue jeans" -- Aint No Fun, AC/DC

So there it was. Gone. After more than two hundred days alone, we received a plane carrying fresh vegetables, and fresh faces. It has been an odd experience greeting new people, after knowing only 19 other people.

Summer has well and truly begun. The scientists have been back on base in order to carry out wide and varied field projects including some of the guys involved in the Subglacial Lake Ellsworth project, which seems to have been getting quite a lot of publicity back in the UK.

In order to make deep field projects more manageable, there are a number of refueling depots in the British Antarctic Territory. Two of these are at the summer manned stations of Fossil Bluff and Sky Blu. Anyone who reads this blog may remember that I had the pleasure of staying at Sky Blu for a little while last season. This season, myself and Ian Hey, one of my fellow winterers, were sent out to Fossil Bluff to open up the station and man it for a few days.

Fossil Bluff is located on the eastern coast of Alexander Island, at around 71degrees South. The island is separated from the mainland by the King George VI Sound, a huge expanse of ice which opens into amazing melt pools in the summer. "The Bluff" is now a summer only station, but during my stay there, I started to read a copy of The Silent Sound by Cliff Pearce who wintered at the small station in the early 60s. Looking at the tiny Bluebell Cottage that forms the main living and communication centre of the base, I wonder what calibre of person it takes to be able to winter in such a place. Our time at Fossil Bluff (or Base KG to give it its historical designation) was short. I think I would find the sense of isolation, that looking east across the King George VI Sound would bring, maddening after a few months!

Having said that, it wasn't such a hard life...

I managed to get a bit of sight seeing done too, and all in the name of World Class Science. A GPS receiver station is based in Belemnite Valley, about an hours walk from Fossil Bluff. It forms part of the Isostatic Rebound experiment that is run by Newcastle University, and which I went to service last summer. I managed to get a cracking day out of going to look for it.

Another fantastic spot was just behind the base itself, where there is a field of bizarre ice structures. I am not sure how this was formed, but they were absolutely stunning to look at and walk around.


Despite enjoying the few days holiday I had out at the Bluff, it was great to get back to Rothera. The population of base had seemingly doubled in the days I was away. There had been several flights of the Dash 7, some of which had brought post from friends and family back home. After around eight months of bad repairs to clothes, with dodgy patches on my jeans held on with even dodgier stitching, I finally have some shiny new trews. I still haven't had a chance to say thanks to everyone who sent stuff, so thank you. Mack, I will try and call you as soon as possible!!

My replacement, Tom, has now arrived. I am currently in the process of training him up to take over from me, but I don't think he'll have any trouble. The new Metbabe, Rosey, has also arrived to take over from Tamsin. All four of us physical science type bods will be needed over the summer, as we have a few field trips to get involved with, as well as being able to provide the hourly met observations for the aircraft operations here on base.


Despite the tea drinking, relaxing nature of this photo, we were all hard at work. We had a short, base wide power down, which required all the experiments shutting down in a controlled fashion, and then restarting as soon as possible after the power and network systems were restored. I think this photo sums up the coiled springs that we were, waiting for the nod to get everything going again!

And no, after more than a year here, I'm still not bored with the view from my bedroom window...

“Pioneering work and perfectionism are not a healthy combination” – Marc Millis

The end of the winter is in sight. We saw the sun for the first time in a few months and, as is tradition, marked the occasion with the of the flag ceremony. The youngest member of the winter crew, Frazer Prescott, had this honour. Rothera is too far north to have the perpetual night that more Southerly regions have. The winter here has meant our days have been short, with about 3 hours of day light during the solstice period. Now however, the days are getting very noticeable longer -- the sun is rising at about the time I go for breakfast.

The Rothera Angels, and their Charlie, at the Raising of the Flag

Although we could see the sun during the ceremony, it was only just visible through the layers of cloud. It was a while later before the sky was clear enough to see the full disk of the sun. My shadow is back!!

The work is steady going. By job is mainly pro-active maintenance checks on hardware and data. I have been pretty lucky in that I have not had many problems with the kit, and most of those problems I have had, have been simple to remedy. One issue I keep coming across are problems with switch mode power supplies. We have had several fail and diagnosing a fault becomes a bit of an issue, especially when the entire module is seen as one component to be replaced. As a result, there are rarely schematics available to trace the problem. I have, then, come up with a rather elegant solution to this:

One of the distinct advantages of working down here is the amount of skills that we all cover, and the ability to learn from one another. I have been learning how to recondition and rebuilt an engine from a Ski-Doo recently, with the generous coaching of Curly, the vehicle mechanic.

One of the big things that has kept a few of us busy over a number of weekends is the Antarctic film competitions. They are run by some people at McMurdo, the large US base, and are open to any wintering Antarctic base. We entered films into both categories of the competition -- the Open category is for a 5 minute film based on something Antarctic related, and the 48hour category is for a 5 minute film which has to be made over 48hours, and contain 5 particular elements. This winter, those elements were the character Popeye, the sound a dripping tap, a t-shirt with a chocolate bar on it, a saw, and the line of dialogue "which I imbibed rapaciously".

Our 48 hour entry:

and our Open Category entry, the Lost Diary:

This version of the Lost Diary is the long, "directors cut". We severely cut it down for entry into the competition. For interest, the shorter version is available at http://youtu.be/dGqqPjiI5kY

Insert clever quote here -- by quoter

Two posts in a month?? Not even enough time to drag up a quote from somewhere. We're about to head into Midwinters week -- a big deal for us. We're going to celebrate with Winter Olympics, presents, big meals, a few sherries, and sleeping in front of the TV with the top button undone. So just a quick post to say...

Happy Midwinter from all of us at Rothera Research Station

"The hallmark of a good traveler is to live as live as comfortably as possible using the minimum of equipment" -- British Antarctic Survey's Field Operations Manual

I've suddenly realised how lapse I've been. Over two months and no blogging. Some people would say "I've been too busy", and, even though I haven't exactly been sat around doing nothing, I'm afraid it's due mainly to laziness.

We're hurtling towards Midwinter, which is a big deal in Antarctic terms. I'm not sure if it was he who started the trend, but Shackleton celebrated Midwinter on the Endurance with gifts and good food back at the beginning of the 20th century, and the tradition remains. The sun began it's steady decline a few months ago, and now it barely makes an appearance. We still have

daylight, but only for a few hours a day, and this will reach it's low point in about a weeks time. Most of us have chosen to spend some of the dark evenings in various hidey holes around base, beavering away at our winter gifts, which we will present to our designated recipient during Midwinter's week.

The work continues to be steady. There have been some minor hiccups with certain experiments that I look after, but all have been solvable. Which has meant that there's been time for some fun stuff. I was approached by Rod Strachan, our Winter Base Commander a few weeks back, who asked if I'd be interested in taking part in the sponsored World Busk for Musequality (http://www.worldbusk.org). I jumped at the chance -- a few of us on base had played guitar together and were forming a rudimentary band, and myself and Dave Hunt, the boatman, managed to throw a couple of acoustic songs together for a busking video, to be shown on You Tube for the World Busking Record Attempt. Our part in this is now on show at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmGNaCPVtZo and here:

I've had news from back at headquarters in Cambridge that my replacement has started training and preparation for the coming summer season. We've been in contact, and it sounds like the season is going to be interesting, with some field trips to some amazing places. Some adaptations to the experiments running at Rothera will also be quite interesting. For example, a system for analysing "whistlers", which are lightning strikes so energetic that they leave the Earth's upper atmosphere and travel along its magnetic field lines, changing their properties as they go, and are detected at various places in Antarctica. This new system would use the properties of the whistlers as inputs to mathematical models for predicting space weather -- important to the successful functioning of satellites, and to the safety and wellbeing of astronauts on the International Space Station.

With the loss of substantial daylight, it's important for us to take advantage of good days. There have been a couple recently, but normally it is snowing more often than not. When the opportunity arises then, a few of us have been getting off base, and going snowboarding, ski-ing, climbing etc. This picture was taken during a trip to the Stork area a few weeks ago. Try not to concentrate on the very dodgy facial hair -- it is left over from a party we had the night or two before. Instead, try to imagine my feet bolted to the plank of wood next to me, and me trying to look as cool as possible while hurtling down the slope. I definitely need more practice!

"Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better, even of their blunders" -- Nietzsche

So here's some photos I forgot:

We made a point of going down to the RRS Ernest Shackleton at 06:30 to say goodbye to our friends from the summer season. This was the first night of my week of night watch, so I was a little dazed...

Everyone managed to get on board on time, which apparently made a change to previous years...

The legend that is Dave Dive. Conveniently named since he is the wintering dive officer...

The tradition of seeing off the ship with a load of flares continues. The atmosphere was electric, with both nervous apprehension and excitement...

"In all the world, there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the ice age -- no warmth, no life, no movement" -- from Endurance by Alfred Lansing.

The past few weeks have seen a lot of people leave the base. Quite a few good friendships had been forged over the four months I've spent on base, but one of the things I learned after living in Cambridge for a three years is that people come and people go. I've become used to saying goodbye and just getting on with things. The last of the planes left at the beginning of March, and now the ship has gone.

So here we are. Twenty people -- a motley crew of mountaineers, scientists, engineers, chefs and doctors -- left alone, not only on the base but quite likely the whole of Adelaide Island for the next eight months. The ship, Ernest Shackleton, left Rothera on Sunday 20th March 2011, taking the last remaining personnel from the summer season.

This years winterers had been invited on board the Shack on the Friday night for a meal. I hadn't realised at the time, but one of the luxuries that the crew of the Shack have been enjoying is milk. We have a powdered milk substitute on base which is an acquired taste -- so much so that most of the people on base have no intention of acquiring it. So when I got my first chug of real milk on the ship, I was very tempted to leave the base behind and stowaway.

So on to work. I've been left to my own devices since the end of February, when my predecessor, John Wedlake, left. It was an excellent handover, and if I'm honest, I've got my work cut out if I'm to do a good a job as he did. My job now, and for the next 8 months, is to keep the experiments running to the best of my ability. Most of the work is computer based, and the traditional IT Crowd-esque, "turn it off and turn it on again" is a good start. (This is a valid technique by the way!! NASA engineers call it "cycling the hardware") However, there have been a number of occasions where I've had to get down and dirty with cable impedance matching and other electronicy goodness. In my geeky heart of hearts, I know that this is where the fun lies!! I am by no means an expert in the systems here on base, but an old boss of mine once gave me some advice, "If you don't know how to fix something, there's bound to be somebody in the world who does!"

The nights began to draw in noticeably about a months ago. This meant that the sun actually dipped below the horizon for a few more hours each night, and the stars began to put on one hell of a show. There's an area of the base which is devoid of any man made light and by picking a good time, we can go up there and see the Milky Way in all its splendour. This is amazing to me -- I've grown up in and around Wrexham, and like most people living near towns and cities, we've grown up with light pollution. To see the stars in crystal clarity, as well as a host of meteorites and satellites, was amazing. Unfortunately, my camera skills are still next to nothing, so trying to capture what I've been seeing is almost an exercise in futility. But here's one attempt!

"No more adventures" -- C-3PO

So they sent me away. I managed to spend a few weeks at Sky Blu Runway, a deep field station south of Rothera. This was part of the work I have been doing for a project run by Newcastle University, but through BAS, whereby a network of global positioning satellite receivers have been setup to monitor how the Antarctic surface moves over time. Sky Blu is a perfect location for me to base myself while flying out to these sites.

This summer only base is generally manned by only one or two people, who have the job of clearing the blue ice runway of any snow, in order for the BAS aircraft to land. For the small Twin Otter planes, and their fitted skis, snow is not much of a problem, but for the larger Dash 7, the clearing of the runway is essential. Weather at Sky Blu is harsher and colder than at Rothera, and living is definitely more basic, but there is something appealing about this "frontier" outpost. We were reliant on the aircraft for our food supplies, and found ourselves switching to possible 24hour work patterns in order to get jobs done to make this happen.

The base lies in the shadow of Mount Lanzarote, (shown in the photo) and is an area of nunataks: mountainous areas whose peaks just rise up above the snow. The base was set up around twenty years ago when a survey flight identified the blue ice area as a possible site for a runway in order to facilitate deep field science insertion. Since then the base has developed to accommodate three living and sleeping melon huts, two underground garages for the over-winter storage of vehicles, and a history of happy campers travelling to and from the deep field.

After a few weeks out there, waiting for the right conditions to get out to visit my sites, we finally managed to get the work done. Not only that, but we also managed to get a trip out to Site 8, one the field fuel depots on the Ronne Ice Shelf. These fuel depots are setup for the Twin Otters to refuel in the field, but get covered with snow over the course of the year. Our job was to go and uncover Site 8. Our triumph at moving the 20-odd full drums of aviation fuel to higher ground is amply captured in this photo.

And it has Winnie the Pooh too.*

(*Winnie the Pooh, the most well traveled bear in the world, courtesy of Mike "Smiler" Stainer)

"That aint workin', that's the way you do it" -- Money for Nothing, Dire Straits.

I've been following the blog of my good friend, Andy Dixon, the wintering Met Tech over at Halley Research Station. Andy is an excellent communicator and has written some great pieces

about the science that BAS does over there. I thought I'd follow suit and write about some of the experiments that I am looking after here at Rothera.

Two of these experiments are radar systems. The Medium Frequency (MF) Radar and Skiymet are both looking at the way air moves in the middle and upper atmosphere. The three huge masts visible in the photo are three of the four corners of the square MF transmitter, which sends radio waves into the sky. When air parcels move past each other in the upper atmosphere, they rub and the resulting friction causes particles to become charged, or ionized. The radio waves from the MF reflect off these charged areas and three radio receivers, which are specifically tuned to pick up the MF waves, detect the reflected wave. By comparing which receiver received the reflected rays and in which order, the positions and directions of the charged air parcels can be calculated, and so the speeds and directions of winds high up in the atmosphere can be known. The Skiymet radar does a similar job, only this detects the ionised gas trails left by meteors as they enter Earth's atmosphere.

One of my favourite experiments around the base is the Very Low Frequency array of experiments. These detect the VLF radio waves generated naturally by lightning, or artificially by transmitters. When lightning strikes anywhere in the world, it emits radio waves with lots of different frequencies. Imagine your radio trying to play Radio 1, Radio 2, Virgin FM and good old Wrexham's Marcher Sound all at the same time. We hear that noise in Antarctica as a crackle as the radio waves travel from its point of origin and bounce up and down between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere -- that part of the Earth's atmosphere that is comprised of charged particles. Sometimes, a radio wave is produced that is so energetic that it can break through the ionosphere into space. When this happens it can return to the southern latitudes by travelling along Earth's magnetic field lines, and when it arrives, is can be detected. These particular energetic radio waves are known as 'whistlers' due to their characteristic sound when they are detected. By analysing the properties of the sound, information can be gathered about the region in which the radio wave traveled in, eg. outer space, prior to it being detected. As a result, the VLF experiments are used in world wide lightning location, and space weather prediction, amongst others.

More recently, I have had the chance to get out into the field to perform maintenance and data collection on an array of GPS receivers. These are part of an experiment set up by Newcastle University where by the motion of the snow and rock can be monitored over a long period of time. This work involved flying out to some spectacular sites for some spectacular sights and then trying to do as neat a job as possible with frozen fingers.

On a return journey from one of these sites, the pilot of our Twin Otter aircraft took us over some areas where melt pools had formed over the summer season. It was fascinating to see all these little rivers in the middle of the snow with their own little tributaries and ox bow formations. In the same area, we flew over something that reminded me of the mine remnants from back home in Wrexham, only here it had been formed by naturally occurring processes instead of human activity.

December has been busy, with my fellow electronics bod, John, off base. But all work and no play makes Ross a dull boy, so I've done my best to have some fun. A few of us organised ourselves into a band for New Years Eve, and along with three fantastic sets from DJ Wedders, DJ Bowen and DJ Haymaker, a good night, and morning was had by all. The band, The Dominic Savage Experience, consisted of myself, Fraze "Axl Rose" Prescott, Riet "Keith Moon" Van de Velde, and of course, the legend that is Sir Dom Savage.