Life in McMurdo Antarctica

It has now been over 4 weeks since I left our home in Fairbanks and we are still not on Thwaites Glacier where we plan to do our work. This is life when trying to get to such a remote place with all the gear we need to drill holes through that glacier. The logistical challenges are enormous: From the US Antarctic station of McMurdo we will fly several hours to a very remote field camp called WAIS Divide (WAIS is the West Antarctic IceSheet). From there we continue with smaller airplanes (mostly Twin Otters) for another several hours to our field camp on Thwaites Glacier. The weather in that part of Antarctica is notoriously bad, so we have been waiting patiently to finally get going. For the past week we have always been on the schedule to leave the next day, but then find ourselves disappointed, because the weather is simply not good enough, or the aircraft (ski equipped US Airforce LC-130 Hercules transporters) are not available.

So how does one spend the time waiting? First, there was quite a bit of training we had to do, plus all the cargo needs to be moved through the system and forwarded to West Antarctica. Other than that, we do have office space, so we can continue doing some of the work we didn't quite finish back in the US. There are a few recreational opportunities with hiking and skiing trails. One local highlight is a visit to Scott's Discovery hut. This hut was used by Robert Falcon Scott on his first Antarctic journey and also during his ill-fated attempt to the South Pole, where he was beaten to the pole by the Norwegians under Amundson, and where he and his men tragically died on the return journey. The hut is just a short walk from McMurdo and is well preserved.

Here are some pictures and impressions from the past two weeks.


Crevasse rescue training and learning how to travel with roped snow machines:

We also did an overnight trip to the ice near McMurdo to go through our camp gear and discuss the field camp set up. The tent in the foreground is a Scott tent, which is a very sturdy tent that has worked in extremely windy conditions. Behind it is and Arctic Oven tent (made in Fairbanks) that will serve as our kitchen and mess.

Mt. Erebus is our local volcano and it is active with frequent steam plumes.

Beautiful wind clouds

This is a Delta, a large wheeled vehicle for travel over the snow roads to get to the local air field.

The local airport, where all ski equipped aircraft operate.

The New Zealand Antarctic base is just a short distance from McMurdo and is connected by a road.

There are some nice skiing opportunities on the sea ice.

Thanksgiving Dinner is a serious affair at McMurdo and the kitchen goes all out for a wonderful meal.

The nicest local hike is up Observation Hill, where a cross commemorates the death of Scott and his South Pole party.

This is Scott's Discovery Hut, still largely intact.

Some mutton survived the past 100 years

This is some seal blubber that was left behind. Still looks somewhat fresh, but I wasn't tempted to try ...

Seals on the sea ice

McMurdo from Hut Point (where Scott's Discovery Hut is located)

A common sight each morning. Flights to WAIS Divide are cancelled ....

The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration

We're off to the next adventure. I am back in Antarctica, getting ready to fly out to the Thwaites Glacier. I am part of a very large collaboration between the US and the UK to study this enormous glacier in West Antarctica, which for all intents and purposes looks like it's at the brink of collapse. The Thwaites Glacier is the one place with the biggest potential for sea level rise in the next several decades. We're trying to find out how fast this could happen. Our contribution is to drill through the floating part of the glacier to directly measure how warm the ocean underneath is. It is this warm water which is driving the retreat of the ice.

There is a lot more information about our project and all the companion projects on this website.

But for now, we're still a long distance from our field site. At the moment we are at the US Antarctic station in McMurdo, doing training and getting cargo ready for the field. It will be a long journey.

The adventure starts in Christchurch New Zealand after a long flight from Alaska via San Francisco. Christchurch was destroyed by an earthquake in 2011. I've been back a few times since, but this is the first time when it felt like the city had mostly recovered. There are still many signs of the earthquake damage (as in this picture), but there is a vibrant new town.

.. but it is the only place where I have ever seen a hotel advertising its earthquake safety. It's understandable, they have suffered many aftershocks since 2011, although I didn't feel any this time.

Here we are, all outfitted and checking in for the flight south

We're getting to Antarctica in a C-17 military plane

This is the inside of this huge plane with lots of space for cargo

Landing on the ice.

The weather was quite nasty when we landed, windy and cold.

McMurdo is an ageing station and is now in the middle of a total rebuild.

Right behind McMurdo is Observation Hill, which offers a great view. The volcanoes in the background are Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror.

The sea ice offshore from McMurdo

McMurdo Station from Observation Hill

Tibet

From Chengdu (previous) post we flew to Tibet for our actual field work. This involved a long journey that started with a flight to Lhasa. We had an extra day in Lhasa and used it to visit the Potola (palace of the Dalai Lama) and some of the cultural sites. Lhasa has grown immensely and is a modern city that seems to be expanding really rapidly. Everywhere in Tibet there is an unbelievable amount of infrastructure building at rates that we are not used to in the West.

From Lhasa we drove for two days to the east, first to Nyingchi and then Bomi, both towns with lots of construction, highway building, etc. We then stayed in Bomi from where we accessed the 24K Glacier, named after its distance from Bomi. The road leads right up to the glacier, so access is quite easy. The glacier front is at about 3800 m asl, but that wasn't so problematic since we had spent most of the last few days at slightly below 4000 m, and actually interrupted our drive to walk around a bit at mountain passes as high as 4500 m.

Working in Tibet is definitely different from other field work I've done. We worked through collaborators at the Institute for Tibetan Plateau Research. These collaborators were hugely important, because they paved the way for us in terms of permits (you need a permit for everything), cars (with drivers), and some equipment.

The country we got to see is absolutely spectacular with some very impressive topography. Because we were at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, we still have monsoon influence and a fair amount of moisture and clouds. So you don't get too many blue sky days, but it is still unbelievable how big and how rugged this country is.

Once on the glacier we did a variety of work involving UAVs, timelapse cameras, thermal cameras, ice penetrating radar (that was my contribution), mass balance, and terrestrial laser scanning. The goal is to get a detailed understanding of how this glacier, whose lower part is almost entirely covered in debris, is reacting to climate change, and how that differs from cleaner glaciers in similar climate.

Here are a few pictures:

The Potola Palace by night. Pictures cannot really capture how huge this palace is. We went on a tour of it, but weren't allowed to take any pictures inside the many, many temples. The extent of the temples and the amount of Buddha statues and decorations, often made of solid gold, are absolutely stunning.

The Chinese Communist Party is omnipresent in Tibet

... and nothing goes unsupervised. There are security cameras everywhere, especially in Lhasa

Drive to Nyingchi

Spectacular fall colors

There is an amazing amount of brand new infrastructure including high-tension power lines in some really difficult terrain

The Chinese are really trying to push for tourism, although it seems to be mostly aimed at Chinese tourists, although many signs are in English as well.

The amount of topography in Tibet is mind-blowing. This is the area of the Earth's deepest gorge in the headwaters of the Brahmaputra River.

This young mountain range together with the really steep topography makes for lots of erosion and valleys with big lobes of debris flows are seen everywhere and form a major challenge for all infrastructure

We commuted daily from Bomi, which is also growing very rapidly. I think until a few years ago it was essentially impossible for Westeners to even go here. Now there are parts that look more like Las Vegas than what one might have in mind for Tibet.

The road ends conveniently close to the glacier

Right by the parking lot is a monastary

We visited the monk who was very friendly. The photos shows some of the Chinese scientists and Tibetan field helpers.

The view from the monastery to the glacier. The lower glacier is all debris covered except for a prominent ice face at the front of the glacier. Prayer flags are everywhere, even quite high up on the mountain side.

A close-up of the ice face. This nicely shows that the debris cover is really quite thin and underneath it's almost entirely clean ice.

A weather station

A view of the neighboring glacier: 23K Glacier. Where did that name come from?

The glacier has a number of ice cliffs. These are interesting because they are places of enhanced melt, while the debris largely protects the ice from melt.

There are some incredibly steep hanging glaciers on these mountains.

The monastery from the glacier

We did some ice radar in the fresh snow; winter is starting.

This is an example of a radar profile. The blue line is the modeled bed elevation and red are our measurements.

Umbrellas are helpful in this wet weather.

Drilling some poles with steam. Because the rock is only on the surface, steam works quite well to drill holes into the underlying ice.

Our last day turned out to be very beautiful and on the way back to Bomi we saw this amazing mountain that we hadn't seen all week.

We had one spare day, a 'rest' day. So we got up extra early and did a high altitude hike.

A view of the glacier from high up. It nicely shows the lower debris covered part of the glacier