Jack, one of our galley crew, made some excellent from-scratch snickers bars for dessert tonight. Definitely beats the rock hard (and expired) actual snickers we have on station.

Went back out to SPT early this morning for our biweekly greasing. Temps were pushing a chilly -90 but fortunately the winds were relatively light.

41 people on station for a year means our galley crew has a lot of time to practice variations on birthday cakes. Today's happened to be ice cream cake for Research Associate Tyler.

Today's all-station emergency response team training involved a discussion of what needs to happen in a worst case scenario, say part of the station burns down or the main power plant fails. It's certainly a very low probability but given our environment and limited rescue options it's an important thing to think about. 

A small tragedy in the greenhouse today when we discovered tiny bugs had infested our mizuna and celery trays. It's a weird thing to see any sort of bug after six months of not seeing a single one but once the novelty wore off we realized we would need to kill off those trays to prevent them from spreading to the other veggies. RIP.

The monthly two day weekend means it's time again for powerplant volunteer rounds. I'm happy to report that the lights will remain on at South Pole station (at least for a little longer)

Another long (2 day) weekend means another excellent burger day put on by PM Foreman Rich and other volunteer crew members.

Out and back to the telescopes twice in the last few hours. Nice to finally put the feet up.

When you're the only person on station with a proper CAD suite you may find yourself modeling seal install tools for bulldozers on a Thursday night 

One important feature of an isolated station like South Pole is redundancy in the case of emergencies. Today myself and a few other crew mates who support radio communications did a review of our backup comms room. Here we can contact the outside world even if our main communications office were damaged beyond repair.

April is typically "space month" in a lot of the world but our April at South Pole was pretty busy so it's been bleeding right on into May. One of the events we held recently was a science talk in the galley where another aerospace company alum and myself talked about how to get things into and out of space (as well as what happens when you fail).

The high level of solar activity continued today, though not quite as mind-blowingly brilliant as yesterday. Purples and blues have given way to mostly green auroras covering large swaths of the sky. Hoping for as many days like this as we can get this winter.

It's hard to put into words what a G5 solar storm hitting the South Pole looks like but I'll try: You walk outside on a moonless night and find it odd you don't need to turn on your headlamp. It's bright somehow. Right in front of you is an unimaginably tall wall of green, red, blue, and purple auroras shooting straight up into the sky. You barely register the minus one hundred degree wind chills and twenty knot gusts. Your jaw doesn't close for the next hour.

Well we still have frozen boxed egg, but it's gonna be a good long while before we see anything sunny side up. The galley staff made the most of the last stock with a special treat of eggs benedict this morning which served as a nice send off. 

Up in the SPT receiver cabin installing some test electronics.

Active space weather is making for pretty skies near the poles this weekend. NOAA has predicted that increased solar activity will cause a "G4" (out of 5) geomagnetic storm - the first since 2005! It's still a bit windy down here but hopefully the sky stays clear enough to get some more good shots.

After adjusting some settings in the greenhouse system we're harvesting more veggies and herbs per week than ever before, including this big pea haul.

This past weekend as part of our space month events, several of us embarked on a "Walk to Endor" where we did cardio workouts while watching the first six Star Wars films. 15 hours later we finished exhausted and frankly delirious. You gotta find creative ways to have fun during winter at the South Pole.

Every once in a while our galley team digs out long-frozen special occasion foods for a crew morale boost such as today's selection of King Crab legs. Just don't tell Krystian the crabs were probably caught before he was born...

Given how far we are from advanced medical care, staying healthy on the ice is super important. Today we held a health fair in the medical clinic where our winter crew members could drop in and get their cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metrics checked. 

Recently, as part of space week at South Pole, we had a screening of Interstellar followed by a short lecture about the science of the film with one of our resident astrophysicists. Long story short: a lot of the science is great but don't go flying into black holes unless you've got some friends in the fifth dimension.

Some days you're staring at black holes, other days you're changing lightbulbs. All in a day's work at the South Pole Telescope.

6 for 6 on successful IV placements in ERT training today. One day NOAA  station chief Krystian will let us stab him...

We're sadly approaching the end of our fresh egg supply. Time to go heavy on the omelettes for the next two weeks.

One of the downsides to a thriving greenhouse full of vegetables is the root systems that want to occupy every open space. In this case roots from a row of pea plants went wild and clogged a drain in the hydroponics system. 

South Pole is usually pretty late to the game when it comes to new movies or shows that come out due to satellite bandwidth limitations but we finally managed to catch Dune Pt. 2 on the big screen in the gym. Well worth the wait.

David from our supply team put on a paint night this past weekend. This photo is from early in the night but it should be obvious that we are all amazing artists and the final paintings looked absolutely stunning. 

Today we hosted a Yuri's Night celebration in the gym on station. Yuri's Night is an event marked around the world during the month of April to commemorate the first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961. We don't typically need an excuse to throw a party down here but this was a pretty good one!

Today our ERT-6 Technical Rescue team drilled a patient recovery from the subfloors under the station. Facilities teams occasionally need to perform check in these areas and if there is an injury down there it can be very tricky to safely extract a person without doing more damage. Andrew, our safety engineer, generously offered to play the victim today and we were able to successfully backboard him, strap him into a basket, and remove him without too many issues. As you can tell he is thrilled to be here.

A few folks decided to do some organizing of our extensive board game cabinets today and it looks like an old copy of Risk has gained some geographically appropriate updates over the years.

We've managed to get a copy of the new Fallout show on station and it seems that some of our crew members are big fans. I guess life here isn't too different from a sealed underground shelter. Fortunately though our winter isn't a nuclear one.

It's pretty spectacular to see the full moon out this time of year when only about a week ago you could barely see 20 feet in front of you when going outside. The brightness tends to wash out the auroras a bit but as you can see they're still very prominent!

With such a small staff on station during the winter we tend to celebrate everyone's holidays and use them as opportunities to bring the community closer together. A great example of this was last night when RA Beni converted one of the conference rooms to host passover seder. 

Our fresh eggs will only be good for another month or so which means Sundays are oeuf-heavy.

To the naked eye this aurora looked like a bit of hazy grey clouds with maybe a hint of green high in the sky. But with a camera exposure of several seconds and a bit of color correction you can see what the human eye sometimes can't: huge colorful bands of ionized gases, green for oxygen and purple for nitrogen. That's not to say that every aurora photo you see is a lie. Depending on solar activity the auroras can look as bright as this in person or even brighter. We've already seen some of those this year and are certain to see many more.

We haven't had a delivery of fresh fruit since late February so what's left on station is starting to get a bit rough. I'm sure my next orange in October will taste a good bit better than this one.

CPR/AED practice today with the ERT team. Despite best efforts we never found a pulse :(

No Roxanne here, but all of our outbuildings still have their red lights on. They help with navigating around station in the pitch dark and they also reduce interference with sensitive aurora cameras mounted on the station roof. 

Had our first real strong burst of auroras yesterday. It was a spectacular sight to see and it's still early winter. This year is expected to be a peak in the 11 year solar cycle so there should be a lot more where this display came from. Next time I'll remember to bring my tripod and wide angle lens with me...

I've had birthdays in a lot of interesting places, but having one at South Pole is pretty special. Thanks to all the surprise conspirators and Jack for making a stellar cake!

View from the floor of the gym when you don't want to do another set.

The Icecube team (+ Beni) contemplates some modifications to a crate of equipment that supports neutrino observations at the South Pole.

Our EHT campaign is complete! Time to catch up on some sleep.

Here we see NOAA Station Chief Krystian Kopka getting a lesson in harvesting and hydroponics tray cleaning from greenhouse lead and research associate Beni Snow.

Can you guess which celestial object we were observing with the rest of the Event Horizon Telescope today...?

No solar eclipses (and no sun) around here for a good long while...

EHT week is well underway and today we started observing Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole! It can take years to actually publish data or images from these scans so there really isn't much for us to see right now. We'll just have to settle for checking that the data recorders are starting and stopping at the right times. So far so good.

After a week straight of hardware installation, tuning, calibrations, test recordings, checkouts, and re-checkouts, the 2024 EHT observing run at South Pole has officially started! Now for a long week of staring at quasars, red supergiant stars, galaxies, and black holes at the exact same time as several other large radio telescopes around the world. It seems only right to be working through a book like "Pale Blue Dot" during the downtime while we monitor SPT.

Rule 1 of well, anywhere is to make friends with the people who make your food. 

We made some final tweaks to EHT hardware on the roof of the telescope recently. Working in the cold makes every minor task harder and when you're working around highly ESD-sensitive instruments it's even more challenging. Don't drill and tap 6-32 screw holes in -100F wind chills if you can avoid it...

A big part of setup for EHT observation involves detailed checkouts of all of the downstream signal processing electronics. This equipment translates the extremely faint signatures of far away black holes into usable data that can then be correlated with the many petabytes of data collected at other EHT sites. Fortunately our checkouts this year went relatively smoothly and we're nearly ready to start observing for real!

More IV placement practice for the ERT-4 medical team. Only a little unintentional spillage and vasovagal syncope.

Growing vegetables in the greenhouse is a bit of a game of odds. Depending on the type of plant, how well they respond to hydroponics, how old the seeds are, and other factors, you may end up with a really low yield of sprouts. I'm a big fan of bush beans and up to now we've only successfully grown three plants out of many attempts. Luckily three more popped up in the last couple weeks!

Today we completed Event Horizon Telescope instrument calibration checks and prepared the data storage racks to receive fresh black hole observation data at a blazing fast 64 Gbps. The storage array for SPT's portion of EHT alone holds ~1.3 petabytes which we will fill up over the course of several days.

Today Thibault, one of the BICEP telescope winterovers, introduced the station to "poisson d'avril" (April Fish) which is France's version of April Fool's Day. You celebrate by sneaking a paper fish onto someone's back and then you run away shouting "Poisson d'avril!". We may just make it a monthly tradition.

With the sky darkening a bit more every day we caught a glimpse of our first star this evening. Soon there will be many, many, many more.

This weekend marked the kickoff of setup for Event Horizon Telescope observations! EHT requires some fairly substantial hardware changes and calibration work to get ready for the observation window in early April but all the long hours are worth it knowing we're contributing to cutting edge black hole research.

Searching for veins via ultrasound before we started IV placement practice.

Time for SPT's monthly full moon feeding

A glimpse from our latest Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) drill involving all emergency response teams on station. In this case the planners tried to be tricky and created a scenario where an electrical fire caused an oxygen tank explosion in the medical clinic which deprived the medical response team of our main treatment location. The teams did a great job handling the situation. As for me, I was a patient who was electrocuted by a microwave and died. 

We just had our first full moonrise of winter so get ready to see a lot of angles of this guy. The rise itself was pretty spectacular with a "squashed" looking moon due to light refraction through the atmosphere near the horizon. And if you look closely at the bottom you'll see a small "red flash" similar to the green flash sometimes seen with a setting sun. 

Though the sun has dropped below the horizon the ice cap at the South Pole is so flat that you can still see sunlight reflecting off the bottom of low clouds in the distance. It makes for some pretty cool photography.

With the sun fully set now you can easily see the dark blue shadow of the earth sandwiched between the horizon and the pink glow above it. That shadow will grow over time as polar twilight gives way to full on darkness. Pretty wild.

Nothing like putting It's been exceptionally windy lately which creates some really interesting shapes in the snow outside.feet up after a rare two day weekend.

Nothing like putting your feet up after a rare two day weekend.

While the cloud cover that has plagued South Pole for much of the last week didn't clear for us to see the actual sunset, our traditional sunset dinner more than made up for it. Once again the galley team pulled out the stops with beef wellington, ahi tuna, cornish hen, risotto, fresh greenhouse salads and more. It's a great way to celebrate the transition from the cold season to the colder season.

Sunset tomorrow. You wouldn't be able to tell right now with it currently blowing snow in 20 mph winds bringing visibility to about a hundred feet, but this view from early morning was quite nice.

More trauma response team training today, this time with a focus on patient airway management. In all likelihood we'll be leaving any intubations to the doctor or PA but it's pretty neat to get to try out the tools.

Things are getting a bit frosty at the Dark Sector Lab as we close in on sunset.

Sunday is the one day off per week for most of the crew here on station but when there's equipment that needs fixing you can bet Benny and Ronny, two of our superstar handymen, will be on it.

With our small winter crew there's often a need to get help with bigger tasks around the station. This week we helped take down some heavy calibration equipment from the roof of one of the outbuildings for the BICEP telescope team. Nothing like exertion to help stave off the -100F wind chills.

In the MAPO shop today turning some annoyingly tiny bushings for a greenhouse flow meter.

This would be your view if you were the secondary mirror of the South Pole Telescope. Light enters the cabin from the 10-meter primary dish at the top of the photo and is redirected via two mirrors through IR-absorbent windows and into the SPT3G instrument where sensors held at high vacuum and three-tenths of a degree above absolute zero collect valuable data that helps us understand how our universe works.

Mary from the galley team was a great sport during today's medical emergency response team drill. 

With the sun so low these days a quick look can almost convince you that there's an ocean outside the windows.

Hydroponic vegetables are sneaky buggers. Look away for too long and cucumbers will start infiltrating the ceiling unistrut...

The first of many trivia nights at South Pole

Ten days since the last plane departed and we're rapidly depleting the fresh fruit supply on station. Been having a kiwi, orange, or apple with every meal since then. 

Working on SPT is fun because there's always a good mix of hardware and software problems to deal with. Some days you're climbing around the telescope structure inspecting drive motors, other days you're staring at data acquisition logs to see if certain pesky bugs pop up. 

This account will be going through phases. We've already passed the "lots of pictures of airplanes" phase and are cruising right into the "lots of pictures of snow in low light" phase. Bear with me 🙃

The sun is just several degrees above the horizon now with a little over two weeks until the only sunset of the year.

Got some mighty strong looking peppers growing in the greenhouse these days.

Paint date with Bob and Amanda.

Per tradition, at station close we all get together and watch John Carpenter's classic "The Thing" along with the 2011 prequel and the 1951 original "The Thing from Another World". It's a great movie marathon to get one in the mood for eight months of isolation...

The Icecube winterovers hiking out to ICL for another riveting afternoon of UPS replacements.

The last demobilizing flight has departed and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is officially closed for winter. Temperatures are dropping too low for aircraft to safely operate so our 41 winterover crew members won't see a new face for eight months. See ya'll on the other side.

Today was our last day of hauling food from the supply arch up to the station for our winter stockpile. We now have the majority of all the ingredients the galley will need for the next seven months stacked in boxes on the outdoor balconies. Having a natural freezer out there is pretty convenient.

You know things are going well in the greenhouse when you've got massive cucumbers hanging from the ceiling.

No Ark of the Covenant here, just lots of frozen meat and vegetables. Last week our freight elevator broke down and will be out of commission for the season. Since this was the main route we brought food up from our long term cold storage we were faced with the difficult prospect of hauling boxes up to the station in the dark of winter. Instead, we decided to have everyone on station work together this week to move the majority of our winter food stock into the station while it's still relatively "warm" out.

A hundred days at Pole seems as good a time as any to shout-out my partner Amanda and Ruth for holding down the home front while I'm away. Y'all are the real MVPs.

Today we received what (we think) will be the last aircraft to land at South Pole station for several months. This Basler DC-3T is owned by the Chinese Antarctic Program and like most aircraft this time of year, it is making a pit stop to fuel up before leaving the continent for winter. Despite geopolitical issues various countries may have with each other, it always feels good to see how the Antarctic Treaty continues to unite the world in the name of scientific advancement. Hopefully this can be a blueprint for how we handle our presence on the moon and beyond.

Sunday mornings are for coffee house and the NYT saturday crossword puzzle.

(Sunday afternoons are for fixing eternally leaky hydroponics and sending out the second to last plane of the season)

We had another "cue ball" weather day yesterday with pretty terrible visibility. It may seem like a bad day to pick to install more flags on the route to the dark sector but out here more cloud cover typically guarantees warmer temperatures (i.e. only -40s instead of -60s...) so Research Associate Tyler used the opportunity to start flagging. These flags will become pretty essential on windy winter days when the visibility may only be 20 feet or so. 

LAN parties are not so common anymore in our hyper connected world of 2024 but at South Pole, when the satellites are down, it might as well be 1997 all over again.

Today a few of us learned the process for doing rounds in the station power plant. The plant needs to be monitored 24/7 so in order to give the plant staff time off during holidays and long weekends the station crew chips in to cover those shifts. The lights and heat at South Pole are kept on by these 750kW CAT3512B engines which will burn through a couple hundred thousand gallons of AN-8 to get us through winter. It's a real shame there hasn't been a renewable or nuclear energy solution implemented down here though. It's the perfect place for it.

With winter closing in we've recently started moving more supplies held in outbuildings into the station. Our population is about 25% of the summer peak which means there are lots of empty berthing rooms which can be converted into storage. Today's cargo move involved booze, soda, and so much Lacroix.

Station isn't officially "closed" yet with a few more demobilization flights passing through but we do finally have our full winter crew here so today we spent a few hours doing teambuilding activities. One of these involved building gliders out of cardboard and throwing them around the gym. We definitely had fun trying out different designs but a winter aerodynamics seminar may be in order.

Spotted in their natural habitat, our two intrepid Icecube instrument winterovers Connor and Kalvin are hard at work maintaining an array of optical sensors which detect neutrinos blasting through the ice sheet underneath the South Pole. They also double as professional UPS installers and are definitely *not* intentionally triggering earthquakes around the globe.

While LC-130 flights have (probably) wrapped up for the season we're still seeing air traffic at the South Pole. Yesterday we welcomed four planes which have been operating for the Australian Antarctic Division and USAP during the summer. These planes are demobilizing for the winter back to their home base in Canada by way of South America. For them, South Pole is just a gas station along the way.

Believe it or not, working with SPT is more than just groundbreaking discoveries about the birth of the universe, there's also a lot of grease. As with any large mechanical structure operating in a harsh environment, regular TLC is needed to make sure the telescope is actually able to point where you want it to when you want it to with high precision. To accomplish this we regularly apply ultra low temperature grease to exposed elevation gears which keeps pointing nice and smooth. We can only do this work while the telescope is not observing though which is how we found ourselves on the roof in a -75F wind chill at midnight tonight.

One of the many cool aspects of working at the South Pole is the opportunity to help out in roles outside of your day job, especially as the larger summer crew begins to depart. During the summer season we typically have one or two full time comms operators who manage things like aircraft arrivals, departures, fueling/cargo coordination, 911 dispatch, etc. Our summer comms team left yesterday so there's a few of us winterovers working flight ops for the remainder of the season.

Anytime you find avocado on a salad at the South Pole is a joyous day. We're quickly working our way through the final delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables before winter so it's important to savor every ingredient we won't see again for at least several months.

Yesterday we welcomed SPoT-3 to station; the convoy carrying our final large load of fuel to power everything here through the winter. SPoT is critical to the survival of South Pole station, especially given the challenges in aircraft arrival cadences over the past few years. To put it in perspective, the 40+ LC-130 flights have delivered 52,000 gallons of fuel since November while the two fuel-hauling overland traverses have brought 335,000 gallons. Thanks SPoT! 

Each day during the Flight Ops morning meeting we consult the all knowing magic eight ball regarding the days' flights. Will we have five flights? Just one? Will McMurdo weather hold out for a few more hours? Today's question though was a simple one: "Will the USB stick with the recording of the Super Bowl make it to Pole?" The oracle answered a definitive "Yes" and as always it was right.

Even in the bowels of a telescope, grumpy cat is always watching...

You know you're watching movies with Polies when the commentary focuses on the characters' poor choice of cold weather clothing.

Relative to yesterday's challenging flight attempts to and from Pole, today was a great success! A new LC-130 arrived carrying mechanics and parts for the stranded Herc and after repairs were completed they boarded thirty members of our summer crew for their return to civilization. In its current configuration the LC-130 can carry up to forty passengers at a time so this group along with baggage and cargo certainly made for a tight squeeze on the three-hour flight back to McMurdo. This time next week the station will be closed for winter and we'll have whittled down the crew to just forty hearty souls. 

It's been a busy week for our Emergency Response Teams. Today an outbound LC-130 had to turn around after experiencing mechanical problems at altitude. It landed back at Pole where our Fire and Medical ERTs were deployed to the runway, ready to respond to any problems. Fortunately the aircraft landed safely and all the passengers were fine. It was a bit of a nerve-wracking day but each of these situations gives me more confidence that our teams will respond well in an actual emergency during the winter when it will be incredibly difficult for outside help to reach us.

The face you make when a fresh mango arrives after just a few months without one. It's going to be a long winter...

A C-17 is an uncommon sight in the skies above South Pole mostly because they're too big and heavy to actually land on our skiway. Once a year though one flies through to train their crew for an emergency cargo airdrop in case our station ever needed one. 

It pays to have friends in cargo ops in McMurdo, like when a stack of pizzas arrives after flying 800 miles to South Pole on a military aircraft. I hope they left a decent tip!

You ever have one of those days when you're woken up at 3:45am by an alarm set off by a cranky fuel pump? It happens to the best of us.

There was a bit of added excitement today around dinner time when a fire alarm went off in one of the telescope outbuildings on station requiring our emergency response teams to deploy. Fortunately it was only due to a faulty alarm and not an actual fire but it served as a helpful drill for our fire, medical, and logistics response teams.

The first tomatoes are finally starting to ripen in the greenhouse. Of course a few had to be harvested for quality control purposes.

A pile of bags and big red parkas in the station hallways means one thing: a plane made it in! Weather has not been great at Mcmurdo and South Pole for the past several days but the one flight that arrived today carried two dozen people with it; mostly the remainder of our winterover crew along with some short term workers who will only be with us for a week or two to get us ready for station close.

Five planes were due at Pole today but when the weather is so bad you can barely tell the difference between the sky and the ground, you're probably not getting any.

When SPT scientist Anna decided she wanted to make a cool South Pole Telescope shirt, naturally every person on station wanted one too. The screen printing factory has basically taken over the arts & crafts room for the last few days and soon everyone will be modeling some sweet SPT swag.

A recent supply shipment means the snack selection at the station store has drastically increased in quality (and freshness) this week. Sour gummy candy might as well be currency around here and I made sure to grab a few bags of Doritos and Combos to stash away for winter since they will inevitably sell out soon. It's still a good idea to avoid the Twix bars that expired in 2017 unless you like chocolate with a hint of sawdust flavor.

Today we assisted the BICEP team in raising their calibrator mast on the roof of the Dark Sector Laboratory. BICEP is a cosmic microwave background experiment like SPT and they use the device at the top of this mast to calibrate their telescopes that sit in a building a hundred yards away.

In Antarctica as in the rest of the world, all great science is fueled by coffee. Beggers can't be choosers though so when all you have at the telescope outbuilding is a bag of New Zealand beans stamped with the words "Best by May 2017" you might as well drink it. It may not be "best" but it's plenty good enough.

Today our station's Technical Rescue emergency response team capped a season of training sessions with a full rope rescue drill at a 40 foot deep vault outside the station. Vaults like these typically contain network and power routing for outbuildings and if a person takes a fall there with potential spinal injuries it will be the responsibility of this team to package the patient and carefully lift them to the surface. Since windchills today were an unseasonably low -60 F we didn't subject an actual person to being packaged, instead we used "Tiffany", a roughly person-sized punching bag. Tiffany was rescued successfully and all rescuers made it out of the drill without frostbite. A big win for all!

On today's to-do list at the South Pole Telescope we installed a new transformer in one of the computing racks. Cable management may be a worthwhile winter task as well...

After a week long gap in resupply flights we had two LC-130 aircraft on the skiway yesterday at NPX South Pole Station. I've been supporting flight following in the comms office where it went from boring to busy *very* quickly. While we don't have a formal air traffic control here, we do communicate weather, cargo, and fuel loading information to arriving aircraft.

You can tell this photo was taken early on in the race because I still have the energy to pretend to be an airplane and my beard doesn't have a half pound of ice hanging from it. The South Pole Marathon was very fun but it was very hard. Five of us idiots set out to do the full distance and I'm happy to report that all five of us finished. My 5:35 time may be off my personal best by about two hours but I can't say I'll have many more opportunities to run a distance race at 10,000+ feet elevation with a -40F wind chill (thankfully not for the entire time). Looking forward to my legs working normally again one day.

The summer season at South Pole is a time for all sorts of equipment maintenance and checks before the start of winter. Today one of the folks on station who is responsible for checking out emergency kits found this pack of food rations... that expired in 2010. Supposedly it's a "shortbread flavor" but tasted remarkably like soft Flintstones vitamins.

The technical rescue team on station held another training this week on litter packaging. These sessions will culminate in a full outdoor drill where we'll need to package and lift a simulated patient from a 30 foot deep vault outside the station.

Another week, another massive haul of fresh veggies from the greenhouse. The last delivery of freshies via air cargo was way back before Christmas so the greenhouse has been a lifeline since then and will continue to be through the long winter. This round had 6+ kilos of mizuna, peas, chard, romaine, bush beans, endive, basil, cabbage, arugula, and kale. Not bad for a greenhouse smaller than a typical studio apartment!

The South Pole Marathon is nearly upon us, when 5 or 6 idiots (myself included) will attempt to run around outside for far too long than is advisable. 

This week marked the annual maintenance period for the "Rodwell", our source of fresh water at the South Pole. 200 feet down this hole is a several million gallon bulb of melt water which is pumped to the surface to supply the kitchen, toilets, showers, etc. A couple days ago we pulled up the pump umbilical and then dropped down a heated metal plug to remelt the drill hole which closes back in over time. It's a pretty long process but super important if we don't want to be manually melting snow for water all winter.

Soccer nights here tend to be pretty competitive but at least during the summer season we try to not injure our colleagues to the point of NPQing them for winter. (NPQ = Not Physically Qualified)

6 kilos of mizuna, peas, romaine, basil, chard and kale going straight from the greenhouse to some very grateful galley staff.

For the past 8...9? years I've only gotten my hair cut in LA by the same person but with my sojourn to the South Pole I knew that streak would break and I'd have to cut it myself at some point. Fortunately, after a number of flight delays we were able to get McMurdo station's summer-only hairstylist to Pole to cut hair for a couple days! The likely-to-be-botched self haircut has been delayed a few months but don't worry, it is inevitable.

Past the station backyard where rows of old cargo storage seem to extend forever is a small berm where years of bulldozer traffic has piled up snow into a hill. Climb over the hill and you find yourself at the aptly named "End of the World" where the flat white polar plateau extends all the way to the horizon. Great spot for a beverage. 

Anna and Matt, two full time SPT scientists, gave an excellent cosmology science talk to the entire station tonight while I presented a single slide on the topic of our gear greases and which of them are the most flavorful.

Five and a half miles down the SPoT road from South Pole Station you'll pass the fork in the road to the edge of the Earth.

Nothing gets you in the pirating spirit quite like pirate spirits.

Unsurprisingly, the South Pole has some of the cleanest air in the world which makes it a perfect location for NOAA's Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO). Here NOAA scientists take measurements of trace gases in the atmosphere to better understand their influence on Earth's climate. ARO contains a number of complex instruments to monitor these gases but sometimes you need to collect samples the old fashioned way in glass vials like these.

Here at South Pole, Had a neat opportunity to poke around a Basler DC-3 which has been running fights out of the South Pole for the past several weeks supporting the COLDEX project. They transmit radar signals through the mile-thick ice sheet in search of ancient ice layers which can fill in the gaps in Earth's climate record. Not too shabby for a 82 year-old aircraft that saw service during D-Day.is a full contact sport.

Here at South Pole, Jenga is a full contact sport.

After our galley team churned out some excellent meals over the holidays the scientists on station once again gave them a break and cooked for lunch. They were by far the most passable grilled cheeses you've ever tasted. 

After a pit stop at South Pole, the Heavy Science Traverse team headed back toward Mcmurdo Station today. HST is the second of three overland resupply convoys that will haul fuel and other material to South Pole before the end of summer. After reading the stories of early polar explorers who struggled or even died while attempting to make it to the Pole it's pretty impressive to see how some barely-modified farm tractors towing insulated boxes on skis can make the thousand mile journey look rather easy.

Putting the station popcorn machine to good use.

Spent some time in the machine shop yesterday modifying parts for another experiment at Pole. It was a nice change from my typical work and a good reminder of how zen one can get when working on hardware in a manual shop. 

Another long-standing New Year's Day tradition at the South Pole is the unveiling of the new geographic pole marker. Every year the winterover crew votes on a homegrown design and the winterover machinist then fabricates it in the small (but capable) station machine shop. Unfortunately we weren't able to hire a full time winter machinist for 2024 so it looks like the machining work might be on my plate. No pressure...

Happy New Year's from the South Pole! Appropriately celebrated with sledding down a manmade hill (with minimal injuries) and an outdoor barbecue. Unsurprisingly, eating ribs with bare hands becomes a speed contest when it's -30F

The South Pole Marathon is coming up so it's time to get some more training mileage in. It was a balmy -25F today! Sadly there aren't many compacted snow paths to choose from out here so most days the only option is an out and back along the very long skiway with the occasional pitstop to clear ice out of your nose.

Per tradition, research stations in Antarctica send holiday cards to each other this time of year. It's a nice way to feel connected to others on the continent even though we're hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

Another day of technical rescue training with one of the emergency response teams. There aren't too many places on station where fall injuries requiring rope rescues could happen but we do have several "vaults" dug 20 or 30 feet in the ice containing experiments, power, or networking equipment. Right now we're building up to a drill where we'll practice a rope rescue in the field at one of the vaults. It'll probably be a bit harder to set up than in a nice warm gym.

When you're working on the telescope roof for extended periods of time, you start to see things...

Always a good day when a cargo plane actually makes it into South Pole, this time carrying some loaner tradespeople from McMurdo to help our shorthanded staff on projects that need to get done by February. It's hard to believe but when the station was being built about 15 years ago, South Pole alone was getting over 300 LC-130 flights per year! It's an even crazier stat when you account for the fact that planes don't land during the 6-ish months of winter. 

Per South Pole tradition for about five decades, on Christmas Day we run the Race Around the World! Now this race *could* just be a quick loop around the pole marker but where's the fun in that? Instead, most folks dress up in costume and run, walk, or board a trailing tractor-pulled float for a 2ish mile course around the station with the requisite lap around the actual pole. The weather was beautiful but the pressure altitude for the day was nearly 11,000 feet which is the go-to excuse all of us who didn't win the race are using to explain our performance.

Once again the galley team has outdone themselves with an incredible holiday dinner. Merry Christmas from the South Pole!

Though we live in one of the most remote places in the world, our station is fortunate enough to have a pretty sizable hydroponic greenhouse at our disposal. Here we grow tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, herbs, and LOTS of lettuce, spinach, and kale. During the summertime when the station is at peak population we don't produce enough for everyone to have fresh veggies all the time but in winter a well-performing greenhouse can produce salads for the station crew nearly every day.

At 4:27pm today the sun reached a whole 23.5 degrees above the horizon; the highest we'll see this year. Tomorrow begins the long descent down the sky before the sun fully sets in mid March. Happy Summer Solstice!

SPT is a fun instrument to work on as an engineer because there's a wide variety of hardware and software elements that need attention on any given day. That said, greasing hard to reach bearings to give the telescope a smooth ride can sometimes be a painful activity in itself. On the bright side, at least we won't have to do this in the winter when temps can drop to -100 F or lower.

Today was the day! After weeks of logistics challenges and inbound planes being turned around for weather and medevac reasons, a cargo carrying LC-130 finally arrived carrying stacks of packages for Polies! It's a true Christmas miracle and yes, you better believe this plane had eggs.

It's been weeks since a cargo of fresh food ("freshies") has made it to Pole. One of the most obvious and heartbreaking signs of this long stretch has been the disappearance of fresh eggs from the breakfast line. Rumor has it there should be some much needed food cargo coming in this week though. Send thoughts and prayers for the eggs 🙏

The community here at South Pole finds all sorts of creative ways to have fun. And I'll just leave it at that.

This week marked the 112th anniversary of Norwegian Roald Amundsen's expedition reaching the South Pole and to mark the occasion we organized a bunch of events like a flag raising and cross country skiing near the station. We also assembled some old school polar tents and constructed an igloo in our "front yard". A few of us have even slept overnight in the igloo! To be honest it wasn't that bad with enough sleeping pads and cold weather bags inside. Yesterday we woke up and it was a toasty 17 deg F inside (compared to about -30 F outside).

This week our station Emergency Response Teams (ERT) met to review litter packaging for patients with potential spinal injuries. During the winter the station doctor and PA are the only formally trained medical staff onsite and there's no easy way for outside responders to get to us so every winterover joins either the Fire or Trauma response ERT teams. Over the course of the year we conduct trainings like this along with emergency drills to make sure everyone knows how to respond efficiently to an emergency.

Today was a busy transportation day here at South Pole Station with arrivals and departures of a KBA Twin Otter (seen above gliding down the skiway in front of the Dark Sector) and a White Desert Basler BT-67. We also welcomed the South Pole Overland Traverse convoy which has spent the past 34 days towing diesel fuel bladders all the way from McMurdo Station on the coast. 

This evening we spotted a pretty impressive sun dog in the sky. Sun dogs are an atmospheric phenomena that occurs when light refracts through ice crystals in the atmosphere, often creating a large halo and bright spots or "mock suns" on either side of the real one. 

Cameras, detectors, and optics get a lot of attention in the cosmology game but the real core of a telescope are the many computers, backup computers, and backup backup computers which keep data flowing. Most of the time when there is a computer hardware failure on SPT the alerts are detailed enough to tell you what needs attention. Most of the time...