When you see mountains and wildlife, you know we’re not at the South Pole anymore. But we are still in Antarctica, and these first few images are from IceCube winterover Raffaela’s R&R trip to McMurdo.
Since the winterovers spend a full year at the Pole, they get to fit in some R&R at McMurdo Station on the coast before the long stretch of winter isolation sets in. IceCube winterover Raffaela was off last week, after a two-day flight delay, leaving Johannes to hold down the fort on his own.
The IceCube detector started out the year with no major issues. Yay! But there was plenty of excitement in other arenas. Everyone gathered at the geographic South Pole for the unveiling of the new pole marker.
Last week was the third annual “Bermingman,” where folks go out into the berms to dig for buried treasure. Things are buried because of accumulated snow, not from actual snowfall but from storms and winds that blow in and deposit snow. In fact, just after the Bermingman, a huge wall of snow appeared on the horizon
If you didn’t have snow over your holidays, you can enjoy it vicariously through these South Pole pictures. They had all kinds of fun in the snow—sledding and tubing, snowmobiling, and running! The sledding worked up their appetite for celebrations.
Last week was a busy one at the Pole. A lot of holiday preparations and some visitors on station, including folks from Arctic Trucks, getting a station tour and giving tours of their vehicles.
There’s always something going on at the Pole, and last week was no different. On the fun side, the winterovers got in some outdoor photography—well, technically indoors for this shot of the icy stairwell down in the fuel arches
The many flight delays this season affected the arrival of not only personnel but cargo, too. It eventually showed up though, and last week IceCube’s winterovers were busy managing it all at the IceCube Lab. It was a lot of carrying, and it was exhausting, but they were still smiling after it was all said and done
It was a busy week for IceCube’s newest winterovers. A plane arrived after a long hiatus, bringing some new folks to the station and taking away last year’s winterovers, finally. But much of the excitement came from alarms going off—the ones for fire were false alarms thankfully. But it gave the new winterovers a chance to apply their training to emergency response operations.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog
Last week kept IceCube’s newest winterovers busy, but not too busy, with a number of activities. Johannes was on call, and got his first page to deal with a detector issue, but not too big of a problem. Both winterovers were trained on the PistenBully, or snowcat, and then drove around to the IceTop stations to take snow height measurements.