teeks

It’s easy to forget sometimes that I’m living an a giant iceberg. Sure the iceberg is 50 miles long and the ice is over 100 metres thick, but it’s still floating on sea. I’m reminded of this stupid iceberg when ever I’m thirsty…

You see, we have a slight problem with fresh water. You could argue that we’re surrounded by it, but unfortunately it’s all frozen. We do have liquid sea water below us, but that’s a good 130 metres down, and as we’re moving 2 metres a day towards the west we cant really drill into it and tap that ohh so lovely liquid water that we all take for granted.

One bright spark many moons ago suggested a tank, which snow is shovelled into and then melted, providing ample millilitres of water for everyone to drink, wash and spill over the kitchen floor with. I bet this bright spark has never had to dig a ‘melt tank’ as we call it, and any one that’s a semi-regular on here will have heard those dreaded words before…

A simple rota is made up each month by Rich, and three people take it in turns to ‘dig the sodding melt tank’ each week. It’s not that bad really, a dozer pushes snow and makes a funnel shape above the melt tank shaft entrance (around 40cm wide) and we then stand on this mound and shovel snow into the tank (which lives 30m under the surface) until a certain level is reached. This usually takes 20 minutes with three eager diggers, and less with more volunteers. The melt tank is dug everyday in winter, and twice in the summer – it provides all the water on base so it’s mucho important. Even in terrible blowy or cold weather, the unlucky suckers still get to go out and throw snow down the melt tank until the glorious Red Light illuminates our stupid frozen faces … ahhhh.

We had such a day in July, and even though we’ve had countless horrible melt tanks’ throughout the winter, I’ve only managed to film one. Here it is…

Filed by admin at 12:43 am under antarctica
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How many people get to celebrate Sun up with a lunar eclipse? We were lucky it’s been blowing 35 knots for the last 9 days, and apparently the sun finally rose for the first time in over a hundred days on the 10th of August, but we never even saw it. We patiently waited for a break in the weather, and on Saturday evening the wind stopped, letting 11 hardy folk to venture outside for a fantastic BBQ and fireworks display. The timing was perfect, as the moon was taking a stroll in the shadow of the Earth …

The moon starts its journey behind the Earth

Hard to keep a 400mm zoom lens steady enough for a sharp image, even with a solid tripod

This is the furthest the shadow reached, it gradually moved to the underside of the moon, before the moon become whole again

Sun up, a momentous occasion for all on base usually results in merry celebrations, and we at Halley love our celebrations. We eat our dinner on the platform (on plates … not literally on the platform), make fancy German drinks called Feuerzangenbowle (thanks Tom! – UAV pilot 07) and fire off a load of expired flares.

‘It’s like Iraq’ to quote a voice I heard on the platform. Yeah, just like Iraq… except for the… you know, SNOW.

An eerie red light descends upon the perimeter.

Standing a hundred metres away while your fellow winterers are shooting things into the sky, popping smoke and having fun while you’re standing there cursing that you’re not wearing your overalls and your hands are freezing and the stupid battery keeps running out is exactly how I want to spend the next BBQ!

Filed by admin at 10:47 am under antarctica
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I like nightwatch. You get to relax and get on with those little projects you’ve had planned for years. I was on nightwatch last week; I managed to read a few books, I watch most of Charlie Jade and I even got my camera out for some high speed messing around…

The subject – water
The equipment – Canon 20D with 100mm macro + 28-135 zoom (both canon lenses), a bowl, a syringe, 3 really bright lights and about a billion tripods and stands to hold everything in place…

The result? Water, which falls as snow, then thrown into a big tank 30m underground, then melted, then pumped into the base, poured into a bowl, sucked into a syringe and then ever so slowly dripped out as my camera goes click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click…

Drip…

A liquid crater with ejecta

0.23 seconds later

Each drop made a crater, then a drop would rise up like this. You can almost see my reflection in the droplet, which gave me an idea…

A quick change of position, and a backdrop of our mid-winter photo…

I tried a different angle with the 100mm macro using the lights as a backdrop

Oops, I dropped the syringe but I managed to catch the impact

The swell of chaos a fraction of a second later

I took around 900 photos in total, spread over 4 hours over two nights. The hardest part was getting the drop in focus and timing the shots as the drop hit the surface. For info, I was shooting a combination of ISO400/800/1600 at speeds of around 1600, 2300 and 3200, with the macro going down to f2.8 and the other zoom at 3.5. I tried opening up to f11+ for a bigger depth of field, but it was too dark with those shutter speeds.

Filed by admin at 1:15 pm under antarctica
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