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Off the ice

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Toto, I think we're not in Kansas anymore Conditions:  Temperature 70° (70° with wind chill).  Sunny. Population=381,500  Well, we got off the ice.  The trip proved somewhat harrowing and prolonged but we are now blissfully ensconced in the Crowne Plaza in Christchurch, heading back home tomorrow. Antarctica is shutting down for the winter. The Pole will close to all transportation in about two weeks just as the sun begins to set, leaving only the 40-50 person overwinter crew behind to face the brutally cold and dark winter.  McMurdo will close more slowly and, for the first time, will actually have winter flights to facilitate the new base construction.  Usually, about 150 people would be left in McMurdo by mid-February.  This year with all the new base construction underway, they expect to winnow down the current 1100 people to about 400in the next 10 days and and then to 300 or so at the end of April and 150 in June. The whole...
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What we've been up to

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Ross Island looking out from the Pegasus crash site on the Ross Ice Shelf.  The peaked mountain is Ob Hill with McMurdo to its left.  Erebus is obscured by clouds.  The two dots halfway between the camera and the island at the left tip of the island are emperor penguins.   Condition:  Temperature 41°F (Windchill 39°).  Mostly cloudy Population = 1141 We've been extremely busy.  We've had several bad injuries on the base, including last week a hand smashed by a 42 ton ship's hatch.  Once again, Dean did an amazing job with the injury but with broken planes and unrested flight crews, the patient ended up spending seven hours in an ambulance waiting on the runway before being brought back to the clinic to wait some more. I was assigned to care for him that evening, re-bandaging his wound twice, giving him his pain meds and antibiotics, helping him shower, and ultimately, putting a squirting hole in his IV tubing AND covering myself ...
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South Pole Traverse

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The South Pole Traverse moving down the Leverett Glacier: my dream job. Conditions:  Temperature 19° (4 ° with windchill).  Cloudy.  Population = 1100+ I mentioned in a previous post, the cowboys of the Antarctic are the South Pole Traverse (SPoT) team.  Like Scott and Shackleton, they troop slowly in tractors, pulling necessary supplies--particularly fuel--to the South Pole.  The Pole base could not exist without the traverse; planes simply could not carry enough fuel to supply the base. The eight man crew drives tractors 1031 miles, averaging about 5 miles per hour over 25 12-hour days (it took Amundsen 57 days and Scott 78 to reach the Pole).  The tractors transport diesel fuel in long bladders that drag along the ground. They also pull the team's living quarters.  On the way back, they fill the bladders with air so they drag well and also bring back the waste that needs to be shipped off ice.  Although I think of this as my dream...
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Medicine in the field

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Thwaites/Mt. Murphy field camp trip (credit: Chris Simmons) Conditions:  Temperature 19°F (7° with windchill). Snowing. Population = 1045  Most NSF research in Antarctica occurs in the field camps that dot the continent.  These camps--which are often in remote, high altitude and windy locations--range in size from two people to dozens. Either a Wilderness First Responder (a 'woofer") or a Wilderness Emergency Medical Responder (a "wemmer") works at each camp.  Woofers receive an intensive, 5-day course including basic life support and first-aid management of trauma/fractures, hypothermia, frostbite, and high altitude sickness as well as instruction on communication and transport from remote field sites.  Wemmers are certified EMTs with 50 hours of additional wilderness training.  For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to lump them both together as "woofers". I meet with the woofer--and often the entire team--from each field camp be...
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