Life at WAIS part II

The food!
Food in the deep camp is much better then in McMurdo. The ingredients the cooks have are the same, but cooking for 40 people is much easier then cooking for ~1000. Food tastes better and more real. Also being in the middle of an icesheet, living in tents and working outside a lot contributes to good appetite.

No wonder the galley is called an "oasis" WAIS style:

As I mentioned before the second largest Jamesway in the campe is for washing/laundry and recreation.

All the water we drink comes from the snow. There are melting tanks in the galley and in the rec tent. Every day we shovel several buckets to use for drinking, cooking and washing. And many of you asked about showers - we had great showers at WAIS:

Since a shower increases an "average" use of water, everyone is supposed to shovel three buckets of snow to replace the water after a shower. In reality, everyone is pretty good about checking the water levels in the tank and fills up the water on "as needed" basis.

And last but not least - the question I get the most about the "deep field" camp. How do we go to the toilet? There are outhouses in the camp - the good old style - a hole in the snow. They have styrofoam seats, which are amazingly warm. We also have "pee bottles" - regular Nalgene water bottles used for above mentioned purpose. They are extremely useful during the night in your tent - it is so much nicer to use a pee bottle, rather then go to a cold outhouse in the middle of the night (especially considering that my tent was in the last row of the tent city).

(You can see a row of outhouses on this picture) 

Please feel free to ask me more questions about living situation at WAIS - I will be more then happy to answer them. 

Thanks for reading!

Life at WAIS

I am back in McMurdo now, so I will post some notes I wrote when I was living at WAIS without internet:

I have been at the West Antarctic Ice Station (WAIS) for the last couple of weeks. Life in the deep field is very different from life in McMurdo. The camp is set up for the summer season only – the main purpose of the camp is to support the drilling operations. However, since the camp is there several programs share its resource to support their activities as well. There are a number of AWS stations on the West Antarctic ice sheet and we’re staying at WAIS camp while servicing them.

There about 40 people at the camp right now, the population is rather dynamic and people are coming and going – passing through and rotating jobs. As in McMurdo the population is divided into “camp staff” and “scientists”, but since it’s fewer people we actually get to interact with everyone, which is really nice.

The camp consists of a few “Jamesway” tents – long structure for multiple people to use. The biggest Jamesway is the Galley , there is another large one for washing/laundry and recreation. There’s a communications tent, tent for temp visitors, tent for medical, tent for pilots and several science “office” tents. Jamesway tents have stoves inside them, so they are comfortable to stay in for the day.

Jamesway "buidlings" are the darkest vertical row in the picture. 

The four semi continuous vertical lines parallel to the Jamesway row are cargo lines - this is where we stored some of our equipment, and all of the camp stuff is stored there as well.

In the upper left corner you can see a couple buildings that are isolated from the camp - this is drilling offices. The main drilling arch is buried under 50m of snow. I went to tour the arch and their operations, so I will try to post about them separately.

At about a hundred yards away there is a tent city (dots in the upper right corner)- sleeping quarters for the WAIS camp.

***
First thing first - I had to find a place to sleep. I came to WAIS with a "sleeping kit", which included a tent, a couple of tents, a sleeping bag, small camping pillow and last but not least - a pee bottle. The camp had a spare tent, so I did not need to put up my own (mountain tent), and had a luxury of living in an "Arctic oven":

It is really warm and bright inside. The coldest it got inside my tent was -14C and the warmest temperature was +11C. Having a shield from the wind really makes a difference! My last week at WAIS a big storm came through - high winds, low visibility and cold temperatures prevented us from going outside unless we absolutely had to. Yet, it was really warm and cozy inside the tent (although quite loud).

Second most important thing in a camp - food ;) Here's a closer look at the largest communal Jamesway tent - the Galley. This is were we ate, socialized, and relaxed.

Here's the entrance to the Galley closer - as indicated by the WAIS sign - the Galley is the most important building of the camp. 

Here's how the Galley looks like inside. Note that there's no light bulbs - just windows in the roof of the James way tent. There is power in the Galley as well - so you can bring your laptop and work. The galley is also the place where we held camp meetings and science talks.

to be continued...

Back from the West Antarctica

Hello!
I am back from West Antarctic Ice Station (WAIS). It was the most awesome experience so far - I got to experience real "deep field" of Antarctica. We even got a storm passing by with strong winds, blowing snow, low temperatures and poor visibility. Besides giving me a flavor of the "other kind of weather" the storm delayed my return back to McMurdo by a few days.

We did not get many sunny days at WAIS, but the once the sun did come out it was just spectacular! Here's a picture of our "great white" with a couple of sun dogs and the low hanging sun circling around the sky.