Antarctic Arrival!

Months of anticipation were finally satiated by our arrival in Antarctica last night! Following numerous flight delays to our previously scheduled December 28th departure due to foggy conditions in McMurdo, we were finally manifested on an LC130 instead of the C17 and the wheels left the tarmac at 1:23pm bound for the Great White South. The propeller-driven LC130 is significantly smaller than the jet powered C17 and is fitted with skis in order to simplify landing conditions on the Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo, but with a resultant increase in noise and a longer duration flight. None of that mattered to me though; I was on an adventure and completely relished every aspect of the journey.

The two dozen passengers sat in jump seats along the inside walls of the plane’s fuselage which in combination with our extreme weather clothing (ECW) heightened the sense that we were embarking on a mission of utmost importance. We floated through the skies in the giant leviathan with roaring engines too loud for even a single conversation. The surreal experience eventually gave way to the realization that we were over the continent and closing in on our destination. Shoulders were pressed side by side as we busily fired off photographs of the fractaled ice below through the tiny port hole windows, and we even occasionally had the privilege of joining the pilots in the cockpit for a few minutes of 180 degree panoramic scenery. After 7 hours of flight, we were back in our jump seats and without a view of the approaching ground. The sound of flaps and landing gear deploying was accompanied by corresponding changes to airspeed and aircraft orientation, but it was always nervous not being able to see the ground throughout the descent. Finally, the plane touched down and the graceful landing was subtly punctuated by the sound of skis chattering on the snow. We had made it safely to Antarctica!

Minutes later, we had all disembarked and found ourselves standing with our very own feet on the Ross Ice Shelf just off the main continent and Ross Island. We slowly turned in circles trying to absorb the surroundings, but there was simply not enough time, so instead we boarded vehicles that would carry us 50 minutes across the ice to McMurdo. The Delta vehicle was an airport shuttle bred with a monster truck and was typical of the vehicle abnormalities that we were about to see throughout McMurdo. As we were cruising slowly down the flagged ice road, our driver suddenly stopped to give us a chance to meet and greet our welcoming party. Two Adelie penguins trotted along the ice in an uncharacteristic location displaying their adorable waddle/run antics. Without a doubt, we had arrived in Antarctica.

Click here to view the photo album in a new window.

If you would like to read Sam Dorsi’s perspective on our arrival, head on over to this post on his blog.

A Kiwi Christmas

This holiday season, I feel great sympathy for Santa Claus and the extreme journey he takes around the globe each year as he delivers presents to all the children of the world. My own journey may not have been quite as arduous as Saint Nick’s, but traveling half way around the world for over 24 hours straight at Christmas time was still quite ambitious and worth every minute. Instead of finding neatly wrapped presents under a tree in my living room, my gift was a few days on the warm sand of New Zealand under the indigenous Kiwi Christmas trees!

This brief pit stop on the North Island was a great way for Lars, Sam, and I to take some personal time and break up the long monotony of air travel on our way to Antarctica. We arrived in Auckland midday on December 24th after losing a day at the International Date Line and proceeded directly to Waihi Beach at the north end of the Bay of Plenty. This sleepy beach town was in the midst of experiencing exceptionally nice weather which made the stunning coastline appear all the more breathtaking. The laid back attitude of the beach town was easy to adapt to during our first day, and we continued to enjoy this easygoing life on Christmas Day during a gorgeous hike up the coast to another cove and a tropical waterfall. Kiwi families were out and about on the trails and beaches after celebrating Christmas at home in the morning which was an interesting contrast to our usual expectations of a Christmas afternoon spent in the snowy North. Be sure to check out the photos below, or click here to open the photo album in a new window.

Colonial British countries, including New Zealand, have instituted a holiday immediately following Christmas called Boxing Day. Apparently this day’s name is derived from boxing up donations to send to charity after experience great wealth the day prior, but I think it is more likely just a great reason to keep the holiday season momentum going. Our last full day of vacation was spent celebrating Boxing Day with throngs of tourists and locals alike at a curious natural feature up the coast on the Coromandel Peninsula called Hot Water Beach. The ocean’s edge in this location just happens to coincide with a geothermal site that heats subsurface water and drives it up to the surface much like the thermal pools in Yellowstone National Park. However, the exact locations of the hot springs are limited to a few hundred square meters and are only accessible within 2 hours of low tide, so when tourists descend on Hot Water Beach, they do so in throngs. And when you add the fact that it was Boxing Day when we visited this attraction, you can only imagine the mad scene that ensued. In fact, the experience was both simultaneously hectic and ordered in the way of a beehive. After I caught a few waves on a rented surfboard, I perched my GoPro on a precipitous cliff high above the scene and captured this panoramic time lapse that does a nice job of conveying the natural and cultural oddity of Hot Water Beach.

We knew that our days on the beach were limited, and this morning we parted with the Bay of Plenty for a quick, 1-hour flight to Christchurch on the South Island which is our launching point to Antarctica. Upon arrival at the Christchurch airport, we were greeted by a representative from the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) who briefed us on our schedule for the next two days and warned us that aftershocks are persisting from last week’s earthquake. The news was not meant to be frightening, but it was a somber reminder of the natural disasters that have struck this city twice in the past year. Although we had heard of the damages the city had sustained, we boarded a bus to view them first-hand. Initially, we concluded that perhaps the damage was not as bad as reported, but upon further exploration, we came across a city that looked war-ravaged with closed streets and fatally compromised structures. The downtown was barely passable as a place worth visiting at all, but farther away, the smaller buildings showed less damage. Unfortunately, the city’s namesake church was irreparably destroyed in last year’s earthquake when its high steeple toppled to the ground, and now construction towers scrape the sky in its absence. On a more positive note, the Canterbury Museum survived these recent natural onslaughts, so we are planning on a quick visit to it and the adjacent, lush botanical gardens tomorrow morning prior to our departure to the cold, white South.

In 24 hours, I will be stepping foot on the most remote, the highest, driest, windiest, oddest, and of course, the coldest continent on the planet- Antarctica! Stay tuned!

If you’d like to read Sam Dorsi’s perspective, head on over to this post on his blog.

See You on the Flipside

Today marks the 2011 Winter Solstice which means the days are getting longer in the U.S., but in my case, the days are about to get much longer. Rather than a paltry 10 hours of daylight per day, starting today I am embarking on a journey that will be providing continuous, 24 hour-per-day sunlight! If your physical geography lessons are still fresh in your mind, then it won’t be too difficult to solve the puzzle of how I am about to affect this change. That’s right, I’m going to Antarctica!

It is going to be a topsy-turvy trip akin to Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole during which my 24+ hour travel will result in a complete loss of a calendar day (only 364 days in 2011 for me) and an almost immediate transition from winter to the Austral summer where I will be hanging by my feet upside down on that quirky side of the planet. Apparently, our old friend Coriolis will make the toilets flush backwards and the sun will traverse the sky counter-clockwise. It truly will feel like a upside down, mixed-up Wonderland.

This incredible opportunity presented itself this summer when my friend and colleague at LASP, Lars Kalnajs, asked if I might be interested in joining him and another friend and colleague, Sam Dorsi, on a campaign to install and test ground ozone monitoring stations in remote locations on Antarctica. First off, if these names ring a bell, it’s because these two guys are the same characters with whom I launched 3 balloons to the edge of space in 2010! One of the most important lessons I learned from those adventures is the incredible importance of working well with others in challenging situations; and I knew that if I had an opportunity to work with them again in the future, I wouldn’t blink an eye. So when this proposal was put on the table, my answer required no deliberation: Of course I wanted to join this expedition to the far reaches of the Earth!

The details of this scientific enterprise will be addressed in future posts, but I’m sure you’re wondering where exactly we’ll be going, how long we will be going, etc. Our research campaign will be based out of McMurdo Station which is the largest such research station (~1000 people), which by extension also makes it the largest settlement in on the continent, since Antarctica is a continent of science only! The launching point for McMurdo is 6 hours north in Christchurch, New Zealand, but international flights only go to Auckland on the North Island of NZ which are 14 hours from LA which is 3 hours from Denver. As you can see, it is quite a journey just to get to Antarctica, but compared to the epic journeys of the early polar explorers, this trip is a breeze. The additional complications of the holiday season helped dictate a slightly early departure from Denver with the added benefit that we will get to explore a sliver of New Zealand over the Christmas weekend before getting down to business on the icy continent. After the quick holiday, we will hop our flight down to Christchurch where we will deal with the final logistics before boarding a C17 military transport on December 28th for the actual flight to the ice. Upon arrival at McMurdo, more logistics and training will ensue before we can finally begin our work in earnest. We will then spend 5 weeks preparing the ozone instrument stations and deploying one per week in remote locations in the vicinity of McMurdo. Then finally in mid-February after the scientific campaigns have been completed, we will fly back to Christchurch where I will vacation with the Kiwis for a few weeks. Finally, in mid-March I will return home to Colorado.

My departure from Denver is imminent, and I must admit that the build up to the trip is like nothing I have ever experienced. I have pored over books and movies of the great white South, and have pictured myself a thousand times on the exotic continent of Antarctica. In my mind, this is the trip of a lifetime and is like going to the Moon or Mars to me. And like the pioneering polar explorers, the Apollo astronauts, and the Mars rovers, I aim to document my experience to my full capacity. My gear packing is short on clothes, but long on electronic gadgets. I have no fewer than 6 GPS devices, 5 cameras, 2 panoramic time lapse rigs, and a fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with onboard video that I will be exploiting to the fullest to capture my experience of Antarctica. This adventure will certainly be the essence of my website title as I share my stories and explore technological means of sharing those stories.

Although I am skeptical of its performance in Antarctica, I will be checking in periodically using my SPOT Messenger which will update the map below. So sit back, sign up to follow this blog (top right of the webpage), and enjoy our expedition from your favorite easy chair!

Bixler GoPro

For the second Saturday in a row, I had some fun mounting my new GoPro Hero2 onto something unique in order to capture a cool vantage point. This time, I attached the camera to my stock Bixler remote control (RC) airplane and launched it into the wild blue yonder! If it seems like I’ve done this before, it’s because I flew Gumby on my old EasyStar plane just before Christmas 3 years ago. And if you remember that video, you also remember that the quality was far from perfect due to the live streaming downlink I used at the time. Well now that I have a high-definition GoPro, there’s no excuse for grainy video anymore, but as I found out, the quality still wasn’t quite perfect. I shot all of these clips in the 1080 30fps mode with full-width 170 degree field of view and you can certainly see the significant fisheye distortion along the horizon lines, so the next time I fly, I’ll try the slightly narrower 127 degree field of view which should significantly decrease the distortion. Another minor gripe is that the vibration of the electric motor resulted in a slight “jello-effect” if you look closely, but I’m hoping that the anti-vibration plug accessory will cut down on that on future flights. On the plus side, the plane flew extremely smoothly and there was no need to stabilize the video digitally in my video editing software. Overall, I’m thrilled with the footage from my first 4 flights and can’t wait to fly again!

And if you’re interested in how I mounted the camera, it really couldn’t have been easier. I reused the display mount from the packaging and simply trimmed it to fit within the cockpit area. In order to attach it, I wrapped two of the 2-sided velcro straps around the camera plate and the fuselage and voila, instant GoPro mount for my RC plane!

GoPro Hero2 camera

I finally bought a GoPro helmet camera and have been dying to try it out. Unfortunately, it’s been a little too chilly to kayak and I’m not quite ready to mount it on my RC plane or quadcopter, but I’ve always wondered how River Dog sees the world. So this morning I had a little fun playing with the new camera and then figured out how to use my new PowerDirector video editing software. Check out the morning from River’s perspective:

Although this is my first GoPro helmet-cam, it isn’t my first helmet-cam, nor is it my first GoPro. Over a decade ago, I rigged up a helmet-cam by mounting a spy camera in a headlamp with wires and batteries that hung off my head and led down to a full size camcorder that was stashed in my backpack. At the time, it seemed pretty innovative compared to the previous standard of mounting an entire camcorder to your helmet! It also isn’t my first GoPro. Before they became the unanimous leader in point-of-view (POV) digital cameras, they sold inexpensive waterproof film cameras at whitewater rafting gift shops. It’s impressive to see that waterproof enclosure design has barely changed in all these years while the digital technology of today was unthinkable a decade ago. So far I’m really impressed with the Hero2 from GoPro, and I’m thrilled to add it to my camera quiver! You will be seeing lots more footage from in the coming months and years!