Tuesday 16 July 2013

Tuesday 16th July 2013

Today I had to write an article for Icy news. This might sound simple enough, but it's getting harder and harder to come up with something interesting that no one else has done before. After racking my brain for a while I decided to write an article on the weird things I have found out on the sea ice. I thought it would also be a good way of finding out what they are, which I did, but in the process I got into trouble for "collecting" protected items. Everything down here is protected and cannot be disturbed whether dead or alive. To disturb or collect specimen for science you need a permit, so from now on I will leave the Nephtyid polychaete sea worms stuck to the ice bergs.

The rest of the day was spent changing out the spare X-cooler in the ARPANSA building which has been failing ever twenty two days since we got here. The X-cooler is a refrigeration unit that cools down the gamma radiation detector to minus one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. So now we take readings every day and monitor the temperature for the next twenty two days and hopefully it won't fail.

After dinner I worked on my blog till very late before hitting the fart sack.

The X-cooler refrigeration unit
The digital gamma ray spectrometer
The gamma ray detector inside the lead shield

2 comments: