Back to work

It is great to be back in the swing of being on shift and assigned to a truck.  I flew into McMurdo on Saturday and went straight to work on Sunday.  I am working two days in a row, affectionately known as a 48 and have the subsequent two days off.  There is a minor caveat that I have to respond to the fire station at any point in time during my stay.  I will have the opportunity to go out and take some walks around Ross Island but I need to make sure that the station officers know that I will be away for a little while.  There is a lot of rethinking how I will do my job because the environment and local rules change the priorities of what we save first in an emergency.  Usually in a urban fire call the priorities are life-safety first and foremost, property conservation and then environmental impact.  Life-safety is still our chief priority but because of the pristine environment and minimal human presence on the continent environmental impact is a huge consideration in all our operations.  For the entire base recycling and minimizing our footprint on the land, water, ice, and even our interaction with animals is a constant part of our daily life.  Right now the temperatures range less then 10 degrees F which is far below freezing.  Any operations that involve water is done with the mindset that any unheated water will freeze in less than 5 minutes.  Energy conservation and minimizing waste production from every day activities is constantly in everybody's mind because we have to sort everything that we throw away so that the things that can be recycled is recycled and the rest of the trash is packed away so it can be shipped away to a landfill elsewhere.   The focus of keeping the science station in the most self-sustaining mode of operations makes it seem like to me like I am a space traveler on a completely different planet where survival is less than guaranteed.  So, maybe you can tell I am reading a sci-fi novel for entertainment right now.. but still it seems an uncanny parallel. 

Ross Island, where McMurdo Station is located is an actual active volcanic island.  I haven’t seen the Volcano, Mt Erebus.   Right now all the snow and ice conceal the volcanic landscape.  On our base familiarization tour today, I got to get a better look at the local landscape.  The clear weather revealed vast expanses of white, which is the Ross Ice Shelf.  On the horizon the immense mountains of the Antarctic Continent piece the snowy plains.  The days are bright for a little bit, but the sun is still concealed by the   mountains as it traces its shallow arc above the horizon to the north.