Penguin Soup and Dozer Wars

Well, the title says it all really. The cute fluffy penguins are all dead

now and Halley has been transformed back into a construction site full of boys

and their tonker toys. And it’s still a great place to be. Forget the magic,

the mystery, the endless conversations with the stars, no, don’t forget them,

but they are the things of dreams and memories. Today we are back in continual

sunlight, bright, harsh and true. The light is still magnificent and becoming

more entrancing every day as the sun drops lower, the fogs have started returning

that obscure building legs and call icebergs up from beyond the horizon. Fairy

dust has been seen, and so have ‘barchans’, crescent shaped dunes of snow deposited

as blowing snow crosses the surface. Against my intuition, the outside edges

travel at the front. Skiing was slippery a few weeks ago but has now become

delightful, especially compared to sinking with every footstep that is the alternative.

Kiting has taken off, so many folk flying past the window strapped to snowboards

or skis, jumping, falling, laughing with the wind. Yes, it is still a magical

place to be. But the penguin chicks are dead and our dozers played tug-of-war

today.

There’s all sorts of things to report, it’s been a great summer so far. And

busy. Busy for us at the lab, more instruments arriving and a final push to

have a ‘summer intensive campaign’ that will produce data to justify our year

down here and the five years it’s taken to plan it. Plus, CODIS is moving in

and the impact might be similar to the years when dogs left or women arrived.

Everyone here knows what CODIS means, but no-one knows what it stands for. It

means internet, it means cheap phone calls around the world, free email with

unlimited attachments, privacy from BAS and more personal websites, news at

our fingertips and on-line shopping. Independence. Or another step away from

isolation? Who knows.

I went inside the big white sphere where the satellite sits the other day

and it really is impressive. It’s a big white ball that’s empty but for a huge

satellite dish and a locked box with electronics inside. So I guess, in your

world, it might not be that impressive at all. The thing that impressed me most

however, was the angle it pointed at. And the cool echoes it gave off when you

shouted into it. To all intents and purposes, it was pointing horizontally,

not up at the sky as you might imagine. To be precise, it sits at an angle of

5 degrees from horizontal. And that gives line-of-sight contact with a satellite

thousands of miles above the equator. Once again, a moment of thought to realise

quite how far south we really are.

Ok, ok, the penguins. It was cruel of me I know, shows how hardened I must

have become this year. Cruel but funny. And true. The penguin chicks are all

dead, those that hadn’t changed fluff to feather by about a fortnight ago. All

the sea ice at Windy Bay has gone. And I mean all of it. Right back to that

cliff that we climbed down to reach them. All that ice, that at one point stretched

beyond the horizon and doubled the size of this continent, all gone. I’m not

sure which I miss more, the ice or the penguins but I think it’s the ice. I

do feel for the penguins though, it was a particularly windy winter and then

such a warm summer. I don’t think the ice usually dissappears this early. In

fact, I know it doesn’t. It’s my third summer down here and in some ways that

means I know more than many but in others it means I am realising just how little

you can make wild sweeping comments about this place. Summer zero, so much ice

that the ship never even made it in. Summer one, not much ice at the beginning

of the season and none at the end. Summer two, a thirteen kilometre relief at

the start of season and a good few ks at the end too. Summer three, well, it

looks like a warm one again.

The lack of ice has implications. It means that any penguins that couldn’t

swim will have drowned. And as far as I’m aware, they don’t have the ability

or knowledge of how to swim as long as they wear fluff. I guess they don’t need

it. More selfishly, it also means that sno-cat after sno-cat won’t be able to

carry cargo down to the ship at the end of the season. And I have about 8 tonnes

of cargo that, in an ideal world, I would like to see on that ship when I leave.

If push came to shove, I guess we could get it down to 5 tonnes of ‘essential’

stuff. And if we can’t put it on a sledge behind a sno-cat, most of it could

be broken into smaller units that we could handball individually. Could take

a while though! First, though, I guess we should focus on getting some science

out of this kit.

Another very cool thing about this summer is the arrival of representatives

from the three companies competing

to design Halley VI. They’re here for a fortnight, along with the co-ordinator

of the competition, and seem to want to know everything about this place. They’ve

shown us their plans and in return want to know what is and isn’t viable, what

our grumbles are, what we love about this place, whether melt-tank is as bad

as it sounds and if we really need as much space as everyone bid for.

They have a budget of £19 million and all say it’s going to be tight.

Corners must be cut, glitz lost, to fit within that budget. So today, they had

a tug of war between two bulldozers. How much can a dozer really pull? How wide

could that ramp be? How much weight can the sea ice take? How reliable is the

relief operation? The winner will be decided at the end of this year and then

they’ll have a year to finalise and commission their plans, two summers to supply

and build the new site and one summer to move the science across before handover

to BAS in 2009–10.

It’s a ridiculously tight timescale on a fairly restrictive budget but these

boys are keen and it’s great to watch the zeal with which they attack each new

day. They’ve had, or will have, a day or two each with the science platforms,

the plumber (tunnels), electrician (fire), garage (vehicles), field assistants

(relief and logistics), steel team (legs) and chef. They ask about personal

space, work space, colour schemes, hydroponics, buildings that walk, auroras,

bar games and boot rooms. One told me recently that he thought the new environment

would attract more women and improve the gender ratio but I said it wasn’t really

a problem. In fact, I was quite surprised when he said he found it a very male-dominated

environment. I don’t. Shows how long I’ve been here. That, and the fact that

I enjoyed watching bulldozers playing tug-o-war this evening on tv and was seriously

interested in the loads they could pull. I’ve come a long way, and I’ve got

to go back a long way too before I’m half the girl I ever used to be.