The Mother Ship Has Arrived!!!

And yes I said Ship because I have been told that if it is 0-50 feet in length it is a boat, and if it is from 50-75 feet it is a yatch, and if it is over 75 feet than it is a ship. Don't screw this up when you are around Coast Guard people. You are likely to get your head bitten off.

The ship is the Sweedish Ice Breaker Oden. http://www.polartrec.com/odenexpedition/overview And they are currently cutting a shipping channel into McMurdo through the sea ice. They arrived at the ice edge on Christmas Day and they have been working all week. We can see them very easily from Hut Point which is the point just off of town about a 1/2 mile walk from our room.

This is the updated location of the ship. If you look at the two black dots on the right side of the Oden's path, those are Tent Island and Inaccessable Island, which we drove past a month ago on our Delta trips to Cape Evans. Also, around Tent Island (the dot closer to McMurdo) is where I did my Sea Ice School back in October and at that time the ice thickness was over 4 meters thick! However you can see from the map that the shipping channel is the same for this year as it was for last year. That way they don't have to break through the thicker, stronger multi year ice. Also, one other interesting note. They will be cutting right along where the Ice Runway was a few weeks ago. The Ice Runway was built on the new ice from last years shipping channel.

These are some shots of the Oden a few days ago when a group from McMurdo went out to the ship by helocopter. I have no idea why they went, I just know that they took photos, and that is all I really need.

Here is a tour of the control room. If you look at the screen to the left, this is the navigational proximity vector target tragector thingy. Ok, I am a light vehicle mechanic, this doesn't qualify as a light vehicle in any sense of the word. So lay off me if I don't know anything about how they drive the ship! At least I know it is a SHIP!

And this is the finished product. Well not the finished product, but the finished product for right now. They will make several passes to widen the channel and open up the harbor here in McMurdo I am told. Also they will continue to pass through the channel during ship offload to keep the channel from freezing up again.

These are some natural ice crack near the ice edge. These cracks combined with some good winds from the south will open up McMurdo Sound for us this year hopefully.

We are having a very windy day today and we are expecting wind and snow for New Years Day here, so hopefully that will help push out some of the sea ice. Well it is about 4 hours until New Year here, so I hope you all have a very good New Years and we will be spending our New Years Day sitting around out of the wind watching NFL football.

Enjoy.

R.J.

Websites

Here are some websites for some of the science projects that are going on here.

http://clarkson.edu/projects/antarctica/blog/

This one is a project to study the breakup of warm sea ice. It is from Clarkson University from NY. Paula went to Happy Camper School with the Principle Investigator. So if you go to the photos section and look for Happy Camper you will see a few shots of her.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15834019/

This is a blog of a reporter that was down here for a few weeks putting together a story on global warming. The story will be aired sometime in Jan. we are told. The site is somewhat slow so only try it if you have high speed. If you go to the slide show some of the photos have audio attached to them that you can play. The audio is of the person in the photo explaining what they do. That part is pretty interesting. If you see Kevin Field at the bowling alley, listen to him. He is our daytime lead mechanic.

http://www.andrill.org/

Andrill is a huge project out on the ice shelf. They are drilling down through the ice shelf and then doing core drilling at the bottom of the ocean. It is just finishing up right now and it is a very big project here this year. And they will be back again next year to drill in another spot.

http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/antarctica/ice0607.htm

This is the LDB project. LDB = Long Distance Balloons. They are launching large experiments on these LDB’s. The projects are 1000’s of pounds, so you can imagine the size of the balloons. You can see the current location of the balloons on the website. They plan to have them circle around about 6 times before they drop the payload.

http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/polarsea/home.htm

This is the website for the Polar Sea. It is the Coast Guard Ice Breaker that will be cutting the channel to McMurdo. If you look at the current events link it shows some of the trip from Seattle to Antarctica.

http://www.polartrec.com/odenexpedition/overview

This is the website for the Oden. It is a Swedish Ice Breaker that will assist the Polar Sea in the Channel. They arrived at the ice edge today. And if you hike out to the point you can see them 25 miles away.

Well that should keep everyone busy for a while. These sites are very interesting and I have spent hours looking at them. Some of the photos are very good.

Take Care and Happy New Year.
R.J.

McMurdo Area Power and Water

Here in McMurdo we have a Water Plant, and Power Plant, and a Waste Water Plant. These are all currently in a state of change. Currently the setup for the town has three separate facilities each with their own separate functions. The new plan will still have three buildings but the Power Plant will serve as a backup Water Plant and vice versa. This will act as a redundancy plan in case of a loss of one of the buildings.

The water plant has 3 Reverse Osmosis water treatment systems. Each RO system can purify about 28 gallons of water per minute. Also the plant holds about 100,000 gallons of reserve capacity for fire fighting operations. This season we are working with only 2 RO units. The new configuration of the Water Plant will have 2 RO units and 100,000 gallons of water storage as well as 2 diesel generators and a power plant switchboard.



These are the RO units. What you see here is two complete units. The basic theory of a RO unit is that water is forced through a membrane at very high pressures and the membrane filters out the bad stuff. There is allot more to it than that, but that is what I learned on my 10 minute tour of the plant.

The Power Plant currently has 6 generators ranging from 750 to 850 kW. These generators were built in 1979 and went online in the early ‘80’s.



You can see from the status board here that each has allot of hours on them. All six are in the 100,000 hour range at this point and they are old technology at this point and parts are hard to get for them. They all get maintenance every 500 hours of operation. And every 10,000 hours each engine gets an entire top end rebuild, which involves the fuel system, cylinder heads, turbochargers. And then every 20,000 hours they all get an entire engine teardown. This season engine #4 is offline for a 20,000 service.



The Power Plant operates 3 generators at a time with the remaining 3 in reserve. Once in a great while the station needs a 4th generator to keep up with demand but it is rare. The controls for the power plant also are early ‘80’s vintage. This bank of controls is the heart of the power side of the generators. Please pay no attention to the legs under the desk. That operator has been there since the mid ‘90’s.



This is control monitor display. It shows what 3 engines are running, which cooling fans are
running at anytime, and other key real time information.



Here are some photos of the engine rebuild process. Each CAT engine produces around 1200hp and runs at a consistent 1200 RPM.



Here is the 16 cylinder engine block with the world famous Matt Strine posing next to his handy work.



Here is the turbocharges. There are two for each engine.



The camshaft valley.



Here is Al the power plant manager posing with the oil pan for the engine.





Some used pistons and cylinder heads.



And here is Matt and Mick. The mechanic and the electrician at the plant. Mick is the electrician, he is the one who doesn't look like he just put his finger in the electrical outlet. That is why he is the electrician.

Happy Holidays.
R.J.

Road Closed

Well it is official; today the sea ice is officially closed. We are no longer allowed to drive or walk on the sea ice. This means that all of the fish huts and dive huts have been brought back here to McMurdo. So we will not have many more good animal photos until if/when the sea ice breaks out to MacTown. So I have been busy watching the public folder here and I have gotten allot of penguin and seal photos. Today I will share some seal photos. These are all from the Hutton Cliffs seal camp. Hutton Cliffs is just south of the Erebus Ice Tongue. The camp was setup just after mainbody started and they closed up camp about a week and a half ago. They are tracking and studying the Weddell Seal population here in the Ross Sound.

Will we have a white Christmas???

Well that is not very likely. Of course there is plenty of snow in the area, but here in town most of it has melted off leaving lush grass behind. Well more like dirt. Things are very nice in MacTown right now. It is usually in the mid 30’s and if there isn’t a wind it is extremely nice. I got the chance to work outside on a Delta for an hour today and it was very enjoyable. A long sleeve T-shirt and jeans is all that is needed.

Our work week will be a little different this week due to the Town Christmas Party. The party will be held in the Heavy Shop. This means that on Thursday we will stop working on all vehicles and make a greasy shop look like a presentable venue. We will drag out any projects that can’t drive out under their own power, which should be interesting since today (Monday) we had six major projects in the shop. A Delta with an engine change with a different type engine going in it, a Volvo dump truck with an engine change, a D8R dozer with a final drive planetary gearset blown up, a D7H dozer with an engine change, a D4 dozer that is having both tracks replaced as well as most of the idler wheels replaced, and a Grizzly Snowblast with a blown up final drive chain case. Good thing we have lots of big tractors around to tow things out. So we will be cleaning on Thursday and Friday with final setup on Saturday. Then the party is Saturday night. On Sunday we will have our big Christmas dinner in the Galley and we will have Monday off of work.

And then the weekend after that will be our New Years break and we will have Ice Stock on Sunday the 31st. This involves a few flatbed tractor trailers as stages in the main parking lot and live bands playing all day. Also there will be a Chili cook off on that day.

So we have plenty of things to keep us busy for the next few weeks. And shortly after that the Ice Breaker should be in town and then the Cargo and Fuel vessels will be here. That is an exciting time I am told since the offload of the ships continue 24/7 until they are done.

So I will leave you with random photos from here.

This is our lovely living room, kitchen, bedroom and den.



Here is one of my transmission projects from last month.



A close up view of a C-130 takeoff at the Ice Runway.



This is a view of the Galley.



This photo is for Missy. If you have to ask, then ask Missy.



Paula’s flight down on the C-17.



And one more seal photo.



Well if I don't get to write another blog before then, have a good holiday season everone.
R.J.

A drive in the country.

Where do you go when you want to go on vacation when you are in MacTown? Well you go for a nice drive in the country. And since we are in the mountains here the only place to go for a drive is on the sea ice. There are three main traverses that originate from here in McMurdo. They are the South Pole Traverse, the traverse to Black Island, and the Marble Point Traverse.

The South Pole Traverse is a new operation that was completed for the first time last summer. For three summers in a row a crew set out towards the Pole to survey and build a road to the pole. This route will become a major fuel re-supply for the South Pole starting next year. Currently all of the fuel for the station is flown in on C-130’s for the NY Air National Guard. The figure that I have heard is that they burn 3 gallons of fuel to every gallon that they deliver. And so it is a costly process to get fuel there. The overland traverse will make this a much more economical operation. However there was no south pole traverse this year for various reasons and they are getting geared up for the first season of fuel traverses next year.

The Black Island traverse is a common traverse that happens during the summer. Black Island is our communications hub for McMurdo. All of our information is sent from town to the Black Island facility and then is shot up to the satellites and out to you people in the rest of the world. The reason for this is because McMurdo is in the shadows of Mt. Erebus and we are in a satellite dead zone. I can’t figure out why they didn’t think about this when they built the station back in 1956. So the Black Island traverse takes out food, drinking water, fuel, and any parts needed for the station there. The station is staffed by three people in the summer and the live in basically a ranch size house.

Marble Point is on the other side of McMurdo Sound to the north and it is the only field camp run by Operations. All of the other field camps are science based. Marble Point is a fuel supply depot for helicopter operations. This extends the range that the hellos can fly into the Dry Valleys which is a major science area. Marble Point holds 144,000 gallons of JP-8 or in other words high grade diesel fuel. And they are normally re-supplied buy the fuel ship that comes to McMurdo every year. While the fuel tanker is docked at McMurdo the ice breakers cut a channel to Marble Point for the re-supply. But the sea ice conditions have been very poor for ship traffic the last few years. This is because the iceberg B-15 has been blocking McMurdo Sound from the open water for the last five years. And so the sea ice has not gone out in the McMurdo area for eight years now. And sea ice does become thicker as it gets older, but it gets much tougher and that makes it much harder for the breakers to get through.

Since there was no Pole traverse this year and because of the sea ice conditions they decided to refuel the Marble Point station by traverse over the sea ice. It was an easy choice because they had all of the new Pole equipment here and not committed and the price of fuel has gone up so much that it was more cost efficient to truck the fuel than to ship it. Each of the four traverses to Marble Point consisted of one CAT Challenger with a grooming sled towed behind, two Deltas, and two Case Quadra tracks each towing four 3000 gallon fuel tanks. All four of the traverses this year were successes with no mechanical breakdowns or weather problems. They took a total of 96,000 gallons of fuel to Marble Point.











Here is the pumping station at the ice edge. They cannot drag the tanks up onto the land and so they will pump all of the fuel from the tanks up to the holding tanks.



This is the Marble Point Station and tanks.



A view back to McMurdo Sound. Anyone need an iceberg?







And lastly this is just a very nice panoramic view of the Royal Society Mountain range.



Signing off.
R.J.