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Letters Home from McMurdo Station

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Greetings. all!

"Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink"

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Coleridge

If you recall this poem from school, the Ancient Mariner's boat is blown off course towards the South Pole. Of course, water becomes a crucial issue to the sailors in the poem. And I've been thinking a lot about water recently.

Did you know that the Antarctica is drier than the Sahara Desert? In the winter, the water content of the air over the poles is about 2 mm, while it is about 8 mm over the Sahara. It's hard to believe, isn't it? But, cold air is dry air. The colder it is, the drier it gets. As a result, even though the Antarctic has an ice sheet that is more than a mile thick, the air itself is very, very dry. Even though the buildings here are heated to a comfortable temperature, I suspect that the relative humidity inside must be only 5% to 10%.

One of the problems we face in camp is a supply of fresh water for drinking, cleaning, etc. Naturally, we haul our water from McMurdo when we get a chance, but we also use clean snow drifts to supplement the supply. It's a far cry from just turning on the taps.

Even in McMurdo, water conservation is a concern. Our water comes from desalinated seawater. As a consequence, we are allowed one shower every three days and these showers are "Navy-style". A more unsatisfying type of shower I can't imagine. (I know that a friend, who was a Captain in the Navy, must be laughing at this.) You are suppose to run the water just long enough to get wet, then you have to turn the water off, soap up, and finally run the water just long enough to get the soap off. Total time of the shower should be about two minutes. Showers aren't an issue in camp. We don't have them. Sigh...! It can get grim out there after three or more days.

As you probably realize, we completed the last of the move out onto the sea ice this week. Our new home, which incidentally is called the Penguin Ranch, is on top of six feet of ice. That ice is over approximately 1500 feet of ocean water...Yikes!

We also now have eleven penguins. One of them wandered in just as we finished building the corral. Talk about good timing! Penguins are like cats. They are very curious and will investigate anything unusual. I'm sure that this bird regrets its curiosity. The other ten birds were collected by more conventional means at the ice edge yesterday, if anything can be conventional about a penguin round-up.

For those of the you that are concerned about the animals, the birds will be released unharmed after the studies are concluded. In fact, while they are guests at the Penguin Ranch, they won't have to worry about being eaten by their main predator, the Leopard seal. The camp is too far away from the ice edge for Leopard seals to be on patrol.

We also have the underwater observation tube installed. This is a small chamber under the ice that allows you to climb down and watch the penguins as they swim. I saw the "Ob Tube" thirteen years ago, when I was last here. It was a surprise to see that the same cracked window needs to be fixed! I guess some things take time. Things that make you go "Hmmm...!"

Many of you have asked about daily life down here. McMurdo is basically like any small, American town. (In fact, it looks a lot like Truckee.) There is one enormous gallery that serves a plethora of choices at each meal. The food is actually quite good and, frankly, that can be a problem. You can't gain too much weight or all that cold weather gear that they struggled to give us in Christchurch won't fit! Early in the season we get a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. I understand that there are now experimental greenhouses in town. Whether they will supplement the gallery later in the season, I don't know. In the past, as the season wore on, the fresh foods disappeared and were replaced by frozen or canned ones.

Let's see, what else? On the non-scientific side of the station. There's a bowling alley, although I'm not exactly sure where it is. And there are three bars, only one of which allows smoking. We have a chapel where various services are held. There are television channels that display the news, station bulletins, and a variety of movies. McMurdo has a small hospital, staffed with a doctor, a P.A., a nurse, an x-ray tech and a physical therapist. There's a station shrink(!). We have a store that sells the usual junk food, beer, tee-shirts and souvenirs. We have a beautician, if you need to get your hair cut. I'm not certain that they are set up to deal with anything more elaborate than a haircut, however. There is a library and a recreation department. As you can see, it is fairly much like home.

Of course, then there's the sea ice camp, where we are. We have three small, wooden huts, four, if you count the "Hilton" for the dive gear. One hut is for research, one hut is for cooking, and one hut is for sleeping. Robert and Dave have elected to sleep outside in tents. Brrr....!! They want their privacy.

Two of the huts are heated by a type of kerosene stove. The last hut is heated by propane. Our power is supplied by an enormous solar pod. It looks very high tech and works surprisingly well. What a far cry from the old Honda generators that hummed incessantly and smelled so bad! Of course, our power needs are relatively small, a few laptop computers and some small devices like battery chargers. Someday, it would be nice to get rid of the smelly heaters. I don't think that will happen anytime soon. The other night the temperature went down to -63C with the wind chill. I was very thankful to have the heater, smell notwithstanding.

That's the news! Be well.

Kathi