Hell Week

In college, the week before final exams is called Hell Week because there's an incredible amount of work and study needed to prepare. Well, our version was, as you might expect, the last few days before we returned to McMurdo (Friday 12/16). An incredible amount of work was needed and Joulien and I worked about 75 hours in a 96 hour period, including one all-nighter with no time to recover until the following night. When you go through grad school like Joulien and Jordan are doing, you are challenged to persist on one project for years...well past the point when most persons give up in frustration. The Ph.D. degree is recognition of that fortitude. After you persist in a task through great effort you feel awesome. You feel like you've overcome huge obstacles and it's a feeling of elation. Receiving the Ph.D. is a lot like that, and the effort Joulien and I put in in our little Hell Week also brought us a good feeling as a result of our intense persistence. I have to say that the effort in the last non-stop 37 hours was well beyond anything I've experienced outside a Buddhist monastic meditation intensive (i.e. "Sesshin").

It started off ok, with our usual 10-hour work days extended to 18 hours for a couple days, but then we had a surprise power failure with the station in the early morning of the last day. Unable to solve it in the remaining hour before our flights, we decided to bring the station back to McMurdo and plan to return with it on a short flight a few days later. With only an hour before the cargo helos arrived the three of us (Nate had been nobly supporting our efforts throughout) broke down the camp while the helos waited to load. In the intense effort to dig our tents out of the ice of the frozen snow, I think I frostbit all my fingertips, which are still numb 4 days later.

But let me back up a little. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday found us working in the main tent to identify, locate, and deal with two unexpected noise sources. To give you an idea for how difficult this is, let me just note that when an airplane flies overhead at high altitude (to or from the South Pole -- a couple times a day some days), their communications radio interferes with us. You might enjoy this episode of "The Big Bang" where they are in the Arctic searching for magnetic monopoles only to discover a new source of radio noise, which you can watch online for $2 at Amazon. Here are a couple pics showing the antennas we use beside the main tent and the stunning view out the back door on a good weather day.
At about 6am Friday 12/16 after working all night, we went to the 1km point, dug 4 trenches 5 feet deep and put antennas in them pointing down. The indestructible cables lead from each to a flag marking the location where we will put the station, beside the solar tower. Then we filled in the pits as fast as we could and headed back to camp to meet Nate for breakfast at 8am. We were to start breaking down the camp at that point, but we needed another hour to drag the station out and hook it up. Just then we suffered a mysterious power failure in the station which plagued us until midnight the next day in McMurdo. Here are a couple pics of the antennas and pits Joulien and I dug and filled in, in a couple short hours.
The first two helicopters arrived and waited while we pack up the camp, and a couple hours later the third helo landed to pick us up with our personal gear, blowing up a snowstorm as it landed. You can see in the third photo how things looked when we left...just remains of test pits dug in a vast plain of flat snow.

These photos from the helo, show the camp and 1km line out the window, and Joulien and I as passengers in the back of the Bell 212 helicopter wearing helmets with comms links.

Maybe you can see the dazed satisfaction in our eyes. We felt pretty good with the plan to fix the new power problem in a day or two and return briefly to bring the station back to the site next week. Great effort and fortitude with the pending reward of a working station for the 2012 year.