Wednesday 19th February 2014

This morning the wind was down to 20 knots and all the sea ice around the station had blown out and the blue ocean looked beautiful. All the ice in the west bay ice fall has floated out and there are small icebergs floating around everywhere. Looking through the binoculars the fast ice still surrounds all the outer Islands for as far out as you can see.

After doing ARPANSA, at smoko it was announced the ship will head back to Hobart to pick up four helicopters and return to us next month for a flying resupply. So now the Aurora Australis is not due at Mawson until the 20th March and they have scheduled twenty days for a flying resupply and then the Aurora Australis with us on board is not due back in Hobart until the 2nd of May. 

After smoko I went for a walk over to the variometer building to check on a problem with one of the GPS in the building. At eleven thirty I had an interview with the Divisions psychiatrist who confirmed I was still nuts. At one thirty the wind had dropped right off so we decided to send three boats over to Bechervaise Island to collect the two biologists who have been working over there for the past two months. We couldn't push through the brash ice so we had to moor at one end of the Island and carry all their gear back. While waiting, a large iceberg threatened to crush or block our boats so I had to push it out of the way with the boat. The biologists were very happy to see us and we took them back to the station to drop off all their gear. 

As the weather was still good we took them out to Petersen, Verner and Welch Islands to do Adélie Penguin surveys. Out of the 17,000 breeding pairs in our immediate area, not one chick has survived this year due to the sea ice not breaking out and nearly all the skua chicks have died also. 

While waiting for the biologists, I had my boat parked up in some moving brash ice and I was lying on my back enjoying the sun when I noticed the weather balloon straight up above us silhouetted by the blue sky. We all saw it and I watched it for about two more minutes, then to my surprise it burst and disappeared. It was an amazing coincidence and we laughed about getting hit in the nuts by the radio sonde. Later when we got back to station I asked Darron our MET guy what height was today's balloon when it burst and I was amazed to hear it was 32,660m high !!

Abandoned Adélie penguin rookery

Tuesday 18th February 2014

This morning it was still blowing about fifty five knots all day. Last night the Aurora Australis left Davis station to see if it can get through the sea ice to Mawson, but the latest sea ice satellite photos show that not much has changed. As it was blowing so hard, I decided to spend the day down in Biscoe hut installing a Cisco switch, IP telephone and a new UPS. I also removed the TV we used for the 60th celebration and a faulty UPS. Later back in the workshop I installed a new battery in the faulty UPS. At five o'clock I had a sked with Clifford in Sydney using Olivia and later I worked many European stations on 10m.

This is the massive storm that has just passed over us. Anywhere else you would have to evacuate 

The mass of fixed ice and sea ice entrapping Mawson station

Monday 17th February 2014

This morning it was blowing about fifty five knots all day. Some sea ice has blown out in Kista Strait but the sea ice still looks to be firmly fixed as far out as you can see. After sorting my email and doing ARPANSA, I worked on my blog for a few hours. In the afternoon I went and put signs up in Shackleton hut, Wilkes hut, Dovers hut, Weddell hut, the old works hut and the old electricians hut. I then spent about three hours cleaning Dovers hut which was a mess and full of rubbish. It was too windy to cart all the rubbish away so I piled it at the front cold porch until we get a nice day with light winds. By the time I had finished I was filthy and had to immediately go and have a shower and wash my cloths.

Dovers hut erected 1969

Old electricians store erected 1954

Famous rocks of Mawson Station

Scattered around the station are numerous large glacial erratic rocks that have been deposited by glaciers. Some of these rocks are significant in the station’s folklore while many others have been bulldozed out of the way or blown up such as “Piss rock”.

West of the EVS is chock rock, a huge boulder that threatens to roll down the hill at any time, destroying anything in its path. It is held in position only by a few small rocks at its base. Early in the stations history some good humoured person has painted on the rock “Do not remove chocks”.

Down below the mechanical workshop there is a huge boulder with the words “Stor Klippe” painted on it. The language is Danish, most likely from a crewman on one of the four Dan ships that used to resupply Mawson (Kista Dan, Thala Dan, Magga Dan and Nella Dan). In Danish,“Stor Klippe” translates to "large rock", which shows that the painter had a good sense of humour.

Near Stor Klippe is another rock with RTA written on it. (Return to Australia) Probably the best known rock of all is split rock, two immense rocks north of the EVS. John Bechervaise called it the “Johanna Stone” and described it as “ponderous granite erratic”, well rounded and about 10 feet tall, which has at some remote and lonely time broken cleanly into two parts like a cut pear”.

There are many other un-named erratics around station and these mentioned are just a few.

Where do we get our water from?

What’s that you say?
Where do we get our water from?

Getting a drink of water or having a shower in Antarctica is still not an easy task 66 years after the first expeditioners settled the station. Back then they had to melt snow by boiling it. Although we are surrounded by trillions of litres of water, we first have to melt it to get access to it which uses an awesome amount of energy. Lucky for us we don’t have to collect the snow first like the expeditioners before us. Melting snow is very inefficient as snow will only produce 10% of the same volume of water as ice will produce.

Well it all starts with a thing called a melt bell. Hot water is produced by an electric boiler driven by our wind turbines. If the wind stops blowing then a diesel powered boiler automatically kicks in. This hot water circulates through the melt bell heating it up which caused the melt bell to melt the surrounding ice causing a water well to form in the plateau's blue ice. This melted water is then pumped into our three water storage tanks. Half of the water in the storage tanks is always reserved for fire fighting. From the storage tanks, water enters the site services ring feed mains supply. 

This piping system supplies water to every building on station and the water is circulated through heat exchangers in the power house extracting heat from the engines and also from boilers that run on wind power or diesel power if the wind stops. This stops the pipes from freezing and bursting. All the pipes in site services have heat trace installed in them as well. Large storage tanks hold water in the basement of the red shed and there are sewer and grey water holding tanks as well. Sewage from the flushing toilets and grey water from the showers etc, is pumped to the sewage treatment plant and the treated effluent is discharged into East bay.

Melt bell

Water well

Electric / diesel boiler in the pump house

Pump house on the left and the tank house on the right

One of the three cast iron storage tanks in the tank house

Site service pipes

The waste treatment plant

The shit pipe (effluent outlet)

Sunday 16th February 2014

I managed to have a bit of a sleep in today which was great. I worked on my blog for a few hours trying to get it up to date and then had a shower and put on some washing. For lunch I heated up my last Fray Bentos pie that I have been saving for ages. It was great and worth the wait. The wind outside was still blowing strong but now down to about forty knots. At about three o’clock I ventured out and wandered down to the transmitter room. Compared to yesterday, propagation was very poor. I persisted for a while only managing to contact half a dozen Japanese stations and also a guy in Jakarta. Eventually I gave up and went for a walk along the water’s edge before heading back to the red shed for some dinner. After dinner I watched this week’s episode of Coast and then we watched an interesting documentary about building the new Scott / Amundsen base at the South Pole.

All the four thousand Adélie penguin chicks on Bechervaise Island are now dead and probably every chick within a two hundred kilometre radius from Mawson due to the sea ice not having broken out. This could possibly be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dead penguins. Around Mawson there is no wildlife at all compared to last year. Normally the adult Adélie penguins come in to moult this time of year, but as they have to fatten themselves up first out at the ice edge it’s probably too far to walk in so they might have all gone to the closest Island to the ice edge. We normally have dozens of Weddell seals laying about the station also and this year there is only one lone seal showing up now and again.

The Aurora Australis is now at Davis station waiting for the weather to improve to make an attempt to reach Mawson. All we can do is wait in limbo to see if they will attempt to get us out or head off back to Hobart. They are still talking about a fly off but we have strong winds and a blizzard warning for all this week. We are down to our last sixty mouldy onions and not much else.

Here is the display for the IPS HF Ionospheric Radio sonde showing elevation and frequency. A sweep signal is beamed strait up and a receiver measures what is reflected back. This is a convenient indication for me to know in advance what conditions are likely to be on the various bands.

Saturday 15th February 2014

Today it was blowing the clappers. The wind was gusting sixty knots with blowing snow. There is a chance a few days of strong wind might blow out the sea ice that is trapping us and there are a couple of leads inshore that have opened up so far. For my Saturday duties I cleaned and vacuumed the upper corridors of the red shed, did some washing and went and made myself something to eat.

It was so crappy outside I spent most of the day in my room catching up on my blog and then in the late afternoon I ventured out and went down to the transmitter building. Propagation today was off the dial and there were many stations on ten meters so I spent the afternoon working a huge pile up with stations from Europe, South America, USA and central Asia. Tonight was a few documentaries in the cinema washed down with my second last bottle of red wine.