ARTEMIS

Rocking The Carp Shop Party

Front row view of The McMurdo Sound rocking live in our first ever gig at the end-of-winfly Carp Shop Party. (photos: Britney Schmidt)

Last Saturday, we played our first ever live gig at the end-of-winfly Carp Shop Party. John came up with our band name: The McMurdo Sound. Geographically, the McMurdo Sound is the region of water separating Ross Island from the Antarctic continent to the west. For a station rock band, the double meaning is fantastic, and were thrilled to confirm with a veteran music legend here that the name has never been used before.

Left-to-right in the photos above, the McMurdo Sound consists of: John – Bass Guitar; Bill – Lead Guitar; Justin – Drums; Peter – Rhythm Guitar & Lead Vocals – Chris: Keyboard & Vocals.

Our set list for the Carp Shop Party was:

1. Stray Cat Strut
2. You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive
3. White Wedding
4. Comfortably Numb
5. House of the Rising Sun*
6. Tribute

*John and I completely switch roles for House of the Rising Sun, and John sounds excellent on the vocals.

History is determined by those who write it, so I’ll report here that we were totally awesome and that the crowd loved us at the Carp Shop Party. We definitely had an amazing time, and we’re grateful to the Carpenters for letting us play along with some really impressive bands at the party.

Reporting by Peter Kimball

Current Monitor Recovered

John and I headed out to our field site on Sunday to remove the water current profiler from the drill hole. The drill hole is closing faster and faster, and we were concerned that bad weather could keep us away long enough for the instrument to become frozen in. The timing worked out well because we’ve now got a substantial current data set, but we’re also anxious to get the current profiler reinstalled into Sunfish (where it is a critical navigation instrument) and resume Sunfish operations at the site.

Conditions were beautiful on Sunday. John and I saw the excellent progress the carpenters had made on the bot house in nasty weather on Saturday. We chipped a significant amount of ice from the hole, recovered the instrument, and headed back to station. The Mechanical Equipment Center has outfitted us with a diesel-powered heated glycol pump, called a hotsy, to help us keep the hole from freezing in. Britney, Justin, and Josh used it to melt back about 8″ of radial refreeze on Monday, making the hole ready for Sunfish operations this week.

Back on station, I’ve plotted the water current data we collected over a tidal model. There’s quite a bit to say about the plot (below), but the most important thing is that low current velocity at our site is correlated in time with rising tidal amplitude. Tidal amplitude is predictable, so we should be able to plan our robot dives at low-current times of day, minimizing the amount of energy the robot has to spend swimming upstream.

The water current information we collected shows that current velocity at our site is correlated in time with tidal amplitude, and that the direction of high-velocity current is fairly consistent. These are valuable pieces of information as we plan robotic dives. (figure: Peter Kimball)

Reporting by Peter Kimball

Carpenter Heroes

Justin and I went out to our field site on Saturday to refuel the generator powering our water current profiler. Conditions were rather nasty out. When we arrived at the site, we were seriously impressed by the progress the USAP carpenters had made in assembling the bot house on top of the ARTEMIS culvert.

We refueled the generator, snapped a few photos, and jumped back into our warm Pisten Bully while these heroes continued building. “Another day at the office,” they said cheefully.

Reporting by Peter Kimball

Recreation Time… and Bill Ups The Ante

Most of the people at McMurdo are here for several months at a time. They (we) work here, but also live here. As such, there are some recreational options around the station to help people relax and maintain morale. Some of us have taken a particular liking to the band room.

The band room is a happy place. It’s very well stocked with guitars, keyboards, drums, amplifiers, microphones, a P.A., and all kinds of miscellaneous music making implements. The walls are adorned with photos and posters of great McMurdo Bands past and present.

A few days after our third trip to the band room, Bill announced to us at lunch that he’d booked us to play live at the big end-of-winfly Capenters’ Shop party. This is a legendary annual party, attended by roughly the entire station.

Bill’s announcement was alarming because we are not particularly good at making music. Now, two and half weeks later, the party is tomorrow! The impending “gig” has galvanized us, and we’ve spent a few more evenings in the band room putting together a short set of songs. Last night was our final band practice before the big day. Tomorrow is going to be a very good time.

Bill, Chris, John, Justin and I belting out one of our set songs at our final “band practice” before we play at the Carpenters’ Shop Party this weekend. (photo: Josh Moor)

Reporting by Peter Kimball

Installing The ARTEMIS Culvert & Measuring Fish Hut Orientation

We have committed to our field site! There’s nothing scary enough (from a robot deployment perspective) in what we’ve seen on the surface or under the ice to cause us to move elsewhere. Having committed, our first task was to install a large culvert in the ice. We’re hoping the culvert will help keep the ARTEMIS drill hole from refreezing. We were out at the site all day on Wednesday, working with USAP carpenters and drillers to accomplish the culvert installation.

The largest auger available on station is 48″ diameter. However, the culvert is 58″ outside diameter. So, the drillers drilled a ring of 24″ auger holes, and then used the 48″ auger to smash up the remaining ice in the center of the hole. We all worked with shovels to remove the large chunks of ice from the hole so that the culvert could be installed. For the finale, the drillers hoisted one end of the culvert into the air while those on the ground aligned it with the hole. The culvert was lowered into place using an iterative process to align it as vertically as possible.

With the culvert installed at the chosen position, the carpenters are now working to assemble our large bot house with its moon pool directly over the culvert. This will be our access, egress, and center of operations for ARTEMIS dives.

While at the site on Wednesday, John and I used GPS to determine the orientation of our fish hut with respect to the world. John carried a GPS receiver about 150 m from the fish hut, and we used radios to position him in alignment with the long side of the hut. We repeated this along opposite directions from the hut, and computed the bearing between the two positions. The long (~300 m) baseline between measurements makes the bearing computation more robust to position error than it would be with a shorter baseline, e.g. measuring positions of the corners of the hut.

We entered the GPS coordinates into our geospatial information software, and were surprised by the measured hut alignment: 90.0 degrees – within a tenth of a degree of due East-West. It’s just a coincidence, but it’s fun. We don’t really care what the alignment is, just as long as we know it, so that we can interpret the water current velocity directions that we’re measuring in the hut.

John stands in alignment with the long side of the fish hut in order to collect a GPS measurement used to determine the fish hut orientation with respect to North. (photo: Peter Kimball)

As usual, there were awesome things happening in the natural world around us. Toward the end of the afternoon, some small lenticular clouds were forming around Mt. Erebus. I will keep an eye out for more of these formations as the season progresses!

Lenticular clouds form above Mt. Erebus. (photo: Peter Kimball)

Reporting by Peter Kimball