Friday, October 12, 2012

Happy Friday everyone! At the moment, we are kind of stuck in a holding pattern since our Pisten Bully (PB) is still out of commission. The PB has a 9 foot track/tread. I like to describe it as a snow tank. It can cross over really big cracks in the sea ice. Up to 30 inches across, even if there is open water in between the crack! It is really important for us to be able to do our work because our two main fishing sites are nearly impossible to access unless we have a PB or a snowmobile because of all of the sea ice cracks. Therefore, we are just kind of stuck not doing much until we have a vehicle to be able to do our work.

It was a pretty cold day all day today. Most of the day the it was -27 F with the wind chill. It is expected to drop to about -52 F tonight and possibly -58 F sometime tomorrow. However, I still have a few pictures for you.

We have a taxi service here at McMurdo. However, our taxis are not like the taxis at home. To me, they look like little monster trucks and vans! The vans are lifted quite a bit and they have wider axels and MASSIVE tires. Here are a few pictures of our "taxis."

The next thing that I want to describe is the waste management system we have here on station. It really is pretty incredible! Over 60% of everything we use gets recycled in some way. In order to do that, we need to do some serious sorting of our waste. Sorting gets pretty intense here. We sort our waste into a lot of different categories. Light metal, fabric, food waste, batteries, aluminum cans, paper towels, mixed paper, glass, plastic, aerosols, and non-recyclables are just some of the categories that we have to sort our waste into! It is funny sometimes to see people standing in front of these sorting stations and just look confused because it takes a long time to get used to and sometimes you don't really know where something goes! Here is what one of these stations looks like.

While everyone on station takes recycling very seriously, there are still ways to poke fun at the fact that sometimes we all struggle to decide what goes where. Some of the people who work in the waste department made some funny "fake" waste stations last year. I found most of them last year. I was wondering if they would still be around this year. I found my first one of the season. This one is for glitter and other similar items. I especially like the sign that says what you can and cannot place in this waste container

One thing that a lot of people on station really enjoy is taking a tour of the Crary science lab. For the last part of the tour, they go down to the aquarium. They are not allowed to touch anything in the aquarium but the Crary staff always makes a "Touch Tank" so that people can touch something. It is pretty small but the divers bring up a lot of really interesting creatures from the bottom of the ocean. Here are a few pictures of the touch tank. In the second and third pictures, you can see a giant isopod and a really huge sea spider. In the extreme cold waters in the Arctic and Antarctic, you see a phenomenon called "polar gigantism." This is where organisms grow to incredible sizes as compared to other more temperate species. The reason for this is that cold water has a much higher concentration of dissolved oxygen than anywhere else. Also, the maximum size for these types of organisms is directly related to oxygen availability. These things can get huge and look really incredible!

Finally, I wanted to get a good panoramic shot of the station for you. Especially with the big blue building...the galley. Here it is. And while we weren't able to get a lot of work done today, it was still a great day!