SPRESSO (Not Espresso)

5 miles away from the station, down a 30ft ladder into a vault in the snow is the South Pole Remote Earth Sciences and Seismological Observatory (SPRESSO). There are a few different projects that use the vault due to its remote location but the main one is one of the...

My First White Christmas

I suppose that most people’s first white Christmas is not at the South Pole, after all, there are easier ways to be somewhere snowy in December. Nevertheless, here I am, seeing snow on Christmas for the first time while at the bottom of the world.The holidays were a...

Our Sisyphean Task

Snow is constantly being blown across Antarctica and accumulating across the plateau. This is why the old dome station was slowly being buried and the new elevated station was engineered to be raised. Snow management shows up in a lot of different ways whether it be...

Busy Busy… Penguin

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind. My days have been filled with work and hanging out with my fellow Polies.First, work!There are six experiments that I maintain (though three of them won’t get turned on until March or April when it starts getting darker). The...

90 degrees South

I had woken up early so that I could go get coffee (well, really I woke up early because my scheduled transport time to the airfield was 0730 but I woke up earlier than that so that I could get coffee). Then the waiting began. Just sitting, watching the transport...

One More Flight

And just like that my flight is next. After 26 days (out of a scheduled 11) in McMurdo and watching three planes of Polies fly south, this morning it was finally time for me to haul my bags up the hill to be weighed.For all that it has felt like it was dragging on at...