31 October 2007 GPS with Joe and Thomas

Journal

We have a great view of Erebus from New Harbor. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, an early explorer with both Scott and Shackleton, described seeing Erebus for the first time. "I have seen Fuji, the most dainty and graceful of all mountains; and also Kinchinjunga: only Michel Angelo among men could have conceived of such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal than the vertical. And so he is the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew our hut would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.”

Everyone is so happy at New Harbor. Even though there is a lot of work, it is so great to be in this amazing environment and to have a warm place to retreat to when you need a cup of tea or a change of socks. Today we GPSA Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system used to track the location or position of objects on the Earth’s surface.’d (geopositioned) all the sites for the human and ROV dive holes, plus an extra four sites around each of them for possible transducer sites. We need the transducers for the navigation system on both SCINI and the VideoRay. Joe Pettit and Thomas Nylen came in on a morning helicopter while we were still eating our oatmeal.

Joe with Stacy and Marcus at breakfast in our sweet little Jamesway

The outside of our Jamesway - Notice the lace curtains!

Stacy and I went out with Joe and Thomas to determine site locations. Joe’s backpack has a battery on it for the GPSA Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system used to track the location or position of objects on the Earth’s surface. receiver. It is really heavy!

Stacy, Joe and Thomas honing in on a site

We GPSA Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system used to track the location or position of objects on the Earth’s surface.’d 4 main sites with four additional directional (North, South, East, West) sites around those as possible transducer locations. We marked 20 different sites total.

Later, Stacy and I drilled out a 5" hole that was meant to be melted out by a tool called a "hotsie". The hotsie has glycol that is heated to a high temperature and gets recycled through it. The glycol never leaves the piping and gets into the environment. The action end of the hotsie is called a "hot finger" and has conductive metal tubing to transmit heat from the glycol to melt the ice in the hole. Eventually you can melt out a large enough hole you can dive through it!

Bob driving, and Nick "riding” the Hotsie

We use snowmobiles and this 6-wheeler to haul all of our heavy equipment around. It is fun to drive but you can see how bumpy the sea ice is!

When we took the hotfinger out to put it in the drilled hole we saw that the tubing connector had broken so we had to radio to McMurdo to have them send us another hot finger. Then the glycol in the hotsie had accidentally been mixed with water before we received it, so it was slushy and couldn't be use.

The broken pipe connector on the hot finger

This put us a little behind, but that is the nature of field work. And we saw some beautiful things today. Both large, like Erebus, and small, like these ice crystals.