quote:

Posted

very good looking picturs

Great pictures Cusp, and probably my most minimalist wallpaper ever.

I've been bothered by a question lately and I wonder if anybody down South knows the answer - who was the first man to reach the South Pole?

Well, obviously it was Amundsen but, as I've seen from Cusp's pictures, there's now an official South Pole marker at the geographical pole, which I'm assuming is the point at which the lines of longitude converge. I believe that it get's shifted a few metres once a year to allow for the movement of the glacier upon which A-S base sits, but it is the official South Pole (capital letters). So who was it that first stood upon the spot of the shiny stick?

I've been doing a bit of research...

Amundsen and his team reached the pole on December the 14th 1911 and set up a tent base, which they named Polheim. They'd broken their theodolite on the journey and their primary concern, understandably, was getting home alive so they had little time and inadequate equipment to identify where the pole actually was. What they decided to do was to 'box' the pole: they marked a 10 mile square around where they believed the pole was and skied grid lines across it. After this they spent a few days taking readings, moving forward to their newly calculated pole position and skiing more grids.

It turns out that Polheim was, at the time, about 5.5 miles from the actual pole and that one of Amundsen's team members, Helmer Hanssen, was the one who skied closest, getting to a couple of hundred yards of the geographic pole. Amunden himself probably never got closer than a kilometer.

Scott and his team got as far as the Polheim tent and, as they now realised that they had been beaten and were in poor shape, turned round and started for home.

Nobody returned to the pole for about 45 years until Admiral Byrd led an airbourne expedition in 1955. His flight landed in the general vicinity of the pole to scout for the setting up of a permanent base the following year - the International Geophysical Year. The IGY base was intended to do science but was mostly to beat the Russians.

So who got to stand on the official, geographical pole first? Well, you could make a case for it being an American, Lt. Dick Bowers (I don't think that he was any relation to Scott's Bowers), who on November the 20th 1956 led the airdropped team that was tasked with identifying 90 degrees South with modern instruments. He may have been the man who erected the first marker, which seems to have been a bamboo cane. Paul Siple, the expedition's chief scientist, apparently took the first silver globe (originally a photographic lens for taking atmospheric pictures).

Does anyone down there have an opinion about any of this (or a copy of Siple's book about the IGY expedition)? I don't think that we ought to re-write the history books or anything but it is, er, quite interesting.

Nice article on the IGY base.

Hey there, sorry for being absent for so long. The satellites have been going down before the end of the work day, work days have been busy, and everyday is a work day for me.

'Dekka, that's indeed an interesting bit of polar history you found. I think uncertainty about actually finding the exact Pole (be it north or south) is pretty commonplace. If I recall correctly, there is also some contention about whether Byrd actually found the North Pole when he (allegedly) flew over it for the first time. It's naturally a mainly astronomic observation that determines whether you've reached +/-90 degrees latitude, and anybody who has done any sort of non-GPS-supported navigation knows how much uncertainty can be introduced by the smallest of measurement or computational errors.

Probably one of the best resources for Antarctic history, since he was there for it as of the 70s, is Bill Spindler-the guy that runs southpolestation.com. He's actually here at Pole right now, and I'm sure would be glad to discuss this (with a whole lot more knowledge than I have) with you.

Anyhow, there's a lot more light in the sky, behind some heavy overcast right now, and I'll try to get some photos posted once that clears.

quote:

Probably one of the best resources for Antarctic history, since he was there for it as of the 70s, is Bill Spindler-the guy that runs southpolestation.com. He's actually here at Pole right now, and I'm sure would be glad to discuss this (with a whole lot more knowledge than I have) with you.

Thanks, I shall certainly do that - looks like a very interesting board. I'll read it up tomorrow though - if I start now I just know I'll be up all night.

I'd forgotten that (presumably geostationary) comsats dip below the horizon down there. The dishes must be pretty much horizontal.

Alright, links to pictures with sunrise (still just twilight, though) on my blog:
Pic 1
Pic 2

A fire in the sky...

polerisemedium.jpg (39 Kb, 566 downloads)

Really nice.
It's also pretty fascinating that you can come back a few hours later and take the same picture.

quote:

Originally posted by CuspTech:
A fire in the sky...

If you squint your eyes, this image looks like ducks floating on the water.

It does. The world should be run by ducks.

How was the celebration? Heidi is happy, no?

Hello there, wigber of the Antarctic--
if you are still there?

Did you see them?

Hope they didn't have to eat their dogs again. NOT cricket.

Alright, I've been delinquent in keeping up posting here, but not without reason.

I am in fact not in Antarctica anymore. In mid-November I completed my contract and turned over the reins of my positions to my three replacements. I got in about 7 weeks of travel in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia then winged back across 13 time zones to the States. I put up some pictures on my blog if you're interested. I'm currently unemployed, living in my parents' barn, and looking for employment. The job hunt is going pretty slowly, which isn't a surprise, but I do have an interview out on the east coast in a couple weeks.

Your Man in Antarctica is no more. I'm sorry, but I have no idea now how the inauguration day celebration went or what the end of the Amundsen Race was like. There are undoubtedly folks blogging at Pole right now that wrote about the events. Believe me, I'm not a small bit sorry that this chapter of my life came to an end, but it really was high time I got a break. By the time I left I'd worked for just shy of 300 consecutive days, and I was getting quite fatigued.

Will I ever go back? I don't know; I'd like to, but I don't know exactly how to work it into the arc of my aerospace career right now. There definitely are little voices telling me not to worry about that, that things will sort themselves out somehow if you're doing something you love, but the practical side of me knows that I probably shouldn't remain unemployed until Pole opens back up in October. Plus, I've got this MS in Aerospace Engineering that I got in Dec. 2005 and haven't worked with yet directly in my field. That's all mundane worry on my part about a life that isn't shining quite as brightly now as it was for a while there on the Ice.

On a lighter note, in the course of my trip home I did have a reminder of Mr. Gibson. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia had this on display in their section on computing technology:

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CuspTech,

powerhousemuseum.jpg (37 Kb, 401 downloads)

Glad to hear from you again, mister Tech.

You worked for Raytheon, right?

I might be able to help you there if you email me. I know someone an art director at the El Segundo facility.

Good to see you back safe and sound. Good luck on the job hunting front.

Thank you for sharing that part of your life with us mr Tech!
Good luck on the job hunt and don't be a stranger.

Hey, thanks (all) for your interest and support. I will get things figured out at some point. In the last few days I have been really considering returning to Pole to do the work again. It actually is a much more financially viable option when compared to some of the full-time positions I have looked into since getting home. If I do decide to go back down then I will be seriously considering working on another degree over distance learning or trying to do some consulting work. That latter was floated as an idea last time, but being a FNG to science support at Pole I needed to spend too much time climbing the learning curve for my projects.

Uberdog, thanks for the offer to put me in contact with your friend at Raytheon in El Segundo, but I am interested in keeping my employment in the civilian end of the spectrum. I do appreciate the sentiment, though! Know anybody in NASA's astronaut selection office?

Anyhow, that's enough about this stranger in a strange land.

Life is so circular. I ultimately made the decision to return to Pole after a full year's job hunting without any other offers. I've been on the Ice since mid-October, and at Pole ever since. Due to a variety of reasons, R&R didn't happen for me, which was a bummer since folks staying for the winter got shipped all the way back to New Zealand, instead of just McMurdo Station, this year. So, I'll end up working that whole span of time from October 2009 to November 2010 without a day off, but at least I'm employed and doing something productive with myself.

What comes next after this? I have ideas, but know how hard it can be to make them materialize into legitimate options.

Anyhow, I'll try to check in reasonably regularly, despite a very abbreviated satellite connection compared to last time I was down here.

Great to hear from you again, CuspTech!

Would you mind reposting the link to your blog?

TheMinx - is http://ethansvivifyingadventures.blogspot.com/