Camp

Written November 11, 2009

Our camp is a comfortable place to live for a month and a half. We have four large tents that are mostly heated by propane heaters. When they work, they keep things above knee level from freezing. Two of the heated tents are Endurance tents (striped), and two are Arctic Oven tents (yellow). One of the Arctic Ovens is our cooking and eating tent.

The bright yellow tent in the foreground is our cook tent. 100 lb bottles of propane provide fuel. The white boxes on the left are our “freezers”. Note the giant rocks holding the tent down. The pointed tent in the background is our Scott tent with the toilet (see below).

We have a propane Coleman stove for cooking and boxes of food on the floor where it stays cold or frozen. We also have water jugs and a cooler for water. We drink the lake water, dipped from the dive hole, and it’s tasty.

The rest of the heated tents are work spaces. One of the Endurance tents is for electronics. Wayne is using a ground penetrating radar (GPR) to map out ice, sediment and bedrock in the subsurface. He uses that tent a lot to set up his equipment and charge his batteries. The rest of us use it for computer work, and I keep a couple of things in it to keep them from freezing (toothpaste and wet-wipes). It also houses the (rarely working) wireless internet equipment and is the hub of our solar power station.

This is our electronics Endurance tent. Our six solar panels of various sizes are on the left side. The white tube on a tripod is supposed to be our internet connection. It’s pointed at the top of the mountain next to Mt. Coates, where there is a repeater that is supposed to beam our messages to the repeater on another peak, then to McMurdo, and finally to you. Oh well. The large white boxes are storage for extra camping gear and food.

We need enough power that we also have two small generators to run equipment and charge batteries.

The little red thing is the generator. The grey bucket is a human waste bucket. The brown can is gas, and the cardboard box has white gas in it. The yellow tub is a “spill kit” and has everything we’d need to clean up a fuel spill. The beige “tray” that these are all sitting on is called a berm and is designed to catch any spilled fuel. We have one for every fuel area

Our other two heated tents are on the ice. They are put up on wood platforms because the ice is very uneven. Jessy and Lisa, from the Berg Field Center, McMurdo, put them up for us with some help from me and the others.

Our lake ice camp from near our main camp

Our lake ice camp

Jessy putting up our lab tent

We tied down the lake ice tent with ice screws. This ice was entirely clear before I screwed in the ice screw. I got to watch each of the cracks in the picture form.

The second Endurance tent is on a wooden floor on the lake ice. It’s our lab tent. We have two microscopes, an instrument that measures photosynthetic activity, various chemicals, and miscellaneous other experiments set up in it. It is also where I dissect microbialites and take pictures of them.

The other Arctic Oven is dive central. It is right next to the dive hole and houses all of the dive equipment, including dry suits, dive masks, the communications and air supply box, Hal (an underwater manipulator for microelectrodes that can be - sometimes - controlled from the surface), underwater cameras, instruments that log water properties like clarity and pH, etc. This is where the divers put on/take off their dry suits as well as dry out and repair their gear.

We have a fifth, unheated large tent, called a Scott tent (like the ones we put up at Happy Camper). It’s our toilet.

The actual “toilet” is a bucket inside a wood box with a hole in the top. The toilet seat is blue foam which doesn’t feel too cold to sit on. The bucket is mainly for poop and toilet paper, and once it’s full, we put a very very good lid on it and use a new bucket. The buckets go back to McMurdo via helicopter for disposal. For pee, we go in bottles and then dump it into a 55 gallon barrel. These barrels also go back to McMurdo for disposal. We have to collect all of our pee so that we don’t add extra nutrients to the environment here. It’s fairly easy for men to pee in a bottle, but harder for women, even if it is a wide mouth bottle (trimming your hair helps). Fortunately, women can use specially made funnels that make it easier and less messy. People at McMurdo put together some tips on their use that I will link here later.

For sleeping, we each have our own mountain tent. They are smallish, but big enough for me and most of my non-science stuff. They are very sturdy in the wind.

My tent with my address (G441, our project number)

This is our home for weeks!