Ginger and Gadget
The two Casa aircraft that took so long to arrive - resulting in the AMISOR project being cancelled - are now in the unwanted spotlight again. On Wednesday 12th two of the pilots, Jorn and Garry, flew Anya and Mike out to Rofe Glacier, and when coming in to land over the sastrugi one of the skids flexed, the tip drove into the ice, and a bolt came loose. This resulted in the four of them having to camp out and live off emergency rations until the weather opened up and they were able to be rescued by the other plane. They arrived home on Sunday. I asked Anya how it was. She said: "idyllic". The pilots reckoned it was a great location for their first Antarctic camping experience - very scenic.

End of a Long Day
Tonight is the first night that the sun will set at Davis Base. This is a Cause for Celebration (like just about everything else around here) and ends a day that has lasted for over a month and a half.

In Other News
The tradies end a 10-day straight working week following the transfer of the station's power load back to the main power house. We have been running off the emergency power station for a while, to allow maintenance of the main station, and to check that the backup system works. The backup system is located close to our dongas. We won't miss the roar that it makes when it is operating.

Also: the Vasily Golovnin (also known as Voyage 4) will arrive at Davis tomorrow morning at around 6 a.m. This means we get a chance to send out some letters, get some more fresh food, farewell a few friends who are leaving, welcome a dozen or so new faces to the base, and drink with the Russian crew in the bar in the meantime. Most other station ops are suspended during the resupply period; we're all rostered on to other jobs ranging from driving the barge which will ferry goods to and from the ship, to bringing the morning tea! I'm rostered on to unloading goods into the store.

I got back from my weekend hike to discover a million rumours going around the station - on Saturday a station meeting was called, and Rachael told everyone that the Vasily was running short on fuel: there was not enough fuel to proceed to Mawson and then Hobart as planned. Since the only places where one could procure the fuel needed were Freemantle and Singapore, the revised plans were for the Vasily to go straight from Davis to Freemantle. Promptly rumours went around that the Vasily was taking everyone to Singapore, leading to general consternation and prompting an official denial of this story by Rachael. The next wave of rumours was speculating about the reason for running out of fuel. Someone said that the Russians (from whom the ship is chartered) were to blame - they'd pocketed some of the contract money and skimped on fuel. Someone else said that the Aurora Australis had run out of fuel in much the same way two years ago, proving that it was the AAD that was skimping on money by not filling the tanks before departure, and the Russians were just a scapegoat. Today, however, we all received an email from AAD headquarters denying that any of it was true at all - that the Vasily has plenty of fuel to go around, and that no-one will be going to Singapore or Freemantle at all, and that the ship will follow the original plan and head to Hobart via Mawson.

The Great And Most Intrepid Brookes/Watts Hike Succeeds Despite All Obstacles
Featuring Treacherous Bridges (kind of), Blizzards (well, they were forecast) and Meagre Rations (creative term describing fresh basil, hot meals, well-stocked field hut fare, tea, red wine, Baileys and butterscotch schnapps, lebkuchen, risotto, dark chocolate... we were totally roughing it.)
The Doc, Peter and I had a great 3-day walk on the weekend. First night was at Brookes Hut - the third time I've been there for the night, but the first time I've slept inside. The Doc cooked up an awesome bolognaise using a STASH of basil which he, being hydroponics chief, SMUGGLED off station for our own private enjoyment. (He denies any wrongdoing and claims he made sure the Davis fridge was well-stocked with fresh veges before he left.) The forecast 60-knot gusts were notably absent - the weather was still, albeit cloudy.

The harsh conditions at Brookes Hut

The bare minimum of survival rations: fresh basil c/o the Doc

Peter and the Doc intrepidly try to work out where the hell we are

We walked to Watts Hut for the second night. The landscape was bleak and almost depressingly lifeless; it's the first time I've looked at the Antarctic landscape and it's seemed utterly desolate. But: in the evening the sun came out and cast the hills in a rosy dusk glow, and everything came to life again.

We whipped up a makeshift bridge to cross the treacherous Ellis Rapids

Watts Hut

We napped, then read for a bit, then Peter cooked us up a risotto, then we drank red wine, then napped for a bit more, then went for a walk up a few neighbouring peaks, then I took a book outside and sat against a rock with a glass of Baileys and butterscotch schnapps from some half-full bottles Griff left there on New Years coz he couldn't be bothered lugging them back to base, and read for a bit with the rosy hills and fjord rising behind my book. Then I went to bed. So: it was a lovely day.

Solar halo near Watts Hut

We walked back on Sunday through a wide valley. It looked like an old ocean bed; a desert; another planet. A cactus would not have looked out of place. Instead, we came across a lost penguin.

   
Titan (Saturn) v. Vestfold Hills (Antarctica)

In The Shire, At The Meteor Array, and More Magnetic Anomalies
This afternoon Damon, Peter and I went out and had a good look at SHIRE (the Southern Hemisphere Imaging Riometer Experiment). It's a 30 metre square array of 64 antennas - 8 by 8 - which measure the cosmic background radiation. By seeing how much the signal is damped compared to what they expect, scientists can deduce the density of the ionosphere. This array allows a density profile to be mapped over a region of sky 200 kilometers square at an altitude of 90 km. We climbed all over its precarious (and high!) network of walking planks and inspected all the cables, guy wires, connectors and frame structure for damage, mostly caused by the snow buildup in winter pulling on cables and tensioning the wire ground-plane. Most of the repairs were minor and we got most of it done before dinner. Two more cables to replace, and that'll be it for the next few weeks - we've got to muck around with its gizzards just before we leave.

Yesterday afternoon I helped Lloyd at the new meteor radar site, pulling cables through polypipe to protect them from the penguins and the elements. We quadded down to the site to save a 20-minute walk - it's the first time I've been used a quad on station. On the way there we were held up waiting for a penguin to cross the road; instead of crossing it directly he ended up waddling right down the middle of it in the direction we were going, so for a while we formed a procession of penguin, quad and quad, trundling ceremonially and bloody slowly along the dirt path while we observed the required quad-to-penguin distance. The radar itself detects meteorites, but it's not actually interested in them per se; it uses their dust trails to gather information about the velocity and temperature of the upper atmosphere. I asked Lloyd how long they have to wait to see an appropriate meteorite. He said: "oh, there are between 10- and 20-thousand a day."

The site is right near the end of Heidemann Bay. While we were working, small waves were lapping on the shore and the water was crystal-clear and sparkling blue and green. Pengins occasionally wandered up through the site and stumbled over all the cables we'd just laid.

I ran a few tests and looked at some old data and the picture keeps getting murkier w.r.t. the weird magnetic readings I've been getting from our instrument, which I mentioned last post. Something strange seems to happen at certain signal frequencies in one of the coils... The working hypothesis is Aliens. Klucky (LIDAR guru) told me today that quite a few people over the years have used strange images from the Davis Webcam to justify their belief in UFOs. Although (between you and me) the blobs are more often lunar reflections, skua poo, or ice on the lens (or SAS physicists posing shiftily in the freezing cold), it is possible that aliens are coming to Davis specifically to sneakily insert a rectifier into our magnetic pulsations circuitry.