Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
Dr. Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald, the 1999 w/o doctor who experienced breast cancer while at Pole, died on Tuesday 23 June from cancer. More info here....
Happy Midwinters Day! As always, it was a great event at Pole and elsewhere. Meanwhile, I've added a few more good w/o blog links....
Jake Speed has had even more surgery...news of that and the fundraising page! On 14 June I added a bunch more pictures of Jake, and Steff Richter contributed his version!
Matt Houseal the 1991 Pole w/o doctor who also worked at Palmer Station, was one of 5 military personnel murdered in Baghdad on 11 May...the funeral was held in Amarillo on 19 May, and we fellow Polies and Palmerites were represented.
A visit to Old Pole...officially directed by NSF...was one of the more interesting events on station just before sunset. Other documentation, historical reflections on recent and not so recent station events...meetings...are on the news page.
Sunset--well, the equinox was at 0144 on Saturday 21 March. Which means nothing. The big dinner was Friday, and it took a few more days for the sun to disappear. At this point in late April it is almost dark, the cardboard is on the windows, and auroras are putting on some amazing shows. No, I'm not at Pole as I was last year at this time, but yes, there are 43 winterovers this year, the smallest crew since 1999, check out the updated list of links to some of their blogs and websites. This past summer a record crowd of NGA visitors came and went...IceCube finished their "stretch goal" of 19 strings early...and the design team came to check out the LO, punch list, the new SPTR-2 radome, and all the other stuff that has been worked on over the past 12+ months.
1974 wasn't that long ago to some of us--by then I'd already made my first trip to the ice. But yes, it has been 35 years since the last Pole crew wintered at the original IGY station otherwise known as Old Pole. That winter was surprisingly well documented, thanks to The 1974 Negatives project.
The message boards are still around...stop by the new home of Mike Poole's Antarctic Memories, which now includes the archives of Glenn Grant's Iceboard. If yoe have questions or problems with this excellent resource...the best place for info on jobs and life on the ice, ask me for help!
2009 construction updates...before the sun set, a bunch of cladding was put on the roof to match the completed siding. Before the station closed, Rodwell 3 was started up and LO was finished up. As for the dome demolition :) it is now currently planned for next summer, so all of that food Ella restocked it with will have to go before the end of winter.
At the end of the 2008 winter, airplanes were in the news all over the continent, and finally on 6 November we saw the big ones--two ski birds and a Basler with passengers,..our two "soft opening" Basler flights showed up on Sunday the 26th and Monday the 27th of October, bringing 34 new faces, freshies, and the end of our winter. Meanwhile across the continent, a NYANG medevac from McM was successfully completed--the badly injured Australian from Davis Station was flown to Hobart. In October a medevac from Norway's Troll Station to Cape Town was completed, and one Russian was killed and 2 injured in a major fire at their Progress Station.
The 2008 winter began when the station closed a day early on 14 February 2008...and when the ice crystals settled there were 60 of us here...including me. That was my third winter; I left the station on 13 November. My second winter was in 2005 as the Title II Inspector (huh, what's that?)...and stayed on for a month after the 21 October station opening until the summer person showed up. I returned to the US on 21 January after 2 months in NZ/OZ. Hopefully before I left I wasn't too toasty to write a feature article for the 30 October 2005 Antarctic Sun..... Read it for yourself and decide...
More news updated 1 July.
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