Best Laid Plans on Ice
by Men
March 14, 2006
Herman: Started the day with yet another heavy breakfast. But with the
cold up here, you have to eat a lot to just maintain your own body
heat.
Got the word that the replacement
transmitter would be on either the morning or the evening Alaska Airlines
flight. We knew then that we could get the data we came for no matter
what.
We knew from yesterday that the transmitter
had about 50 minutes that it could take of the cold. Again, the receiver
was fine, so this was a problem with only the transmitter. We also knew
from our work yesterday exactly what we could do in 50 minutes. Here was
our plan:
1. We put everything together inside the
theater.
2. We immediately walk out onto the ice; it
takes about 5 minutes to trudge with our snowsuits and equipment to the
survey line.
3. We immediately lay out the tail of the
OhmMapper, punch the "take the data now" button, and start
walking.
Aside: The unit takes a data point every
second. As you can see from the picture
with James and the array, the tail of Ohmy is strung out about 50 feet
behind the operator. And the data is taken in the middle of that tail. The
operator walks very, very slowly so that you get 2-3 data points in every
meter.
4. It takes about 15 minutes to walk along
our 300-meter line. Then, about 2 minutes to turn the array around very,
very gently, lengthen the rope between the transmitter and receiver, and
restart the data taking.
5. We go one way along the line with one
rope length and thus looking at one depth. Then, we go the other way with
a longer rope length, looking a bit deeper.
6. We get to the end of the second line,
knowing the transmitter is going to cronk out in just a few minutes. So,
we pick everything up and head back inside to warm up the
transmitter.
After being inside for about 40 minutes, we
head back outside, and get two more lines, looking deeper each time. We
get the lines, and head back in for lunch and to check the progress of the
shipment of the transmitter. We find out it will be on the evening plane.
This is OK since it gives me time to finish the PowerPoint presentation
for my talk for tonight.
Lunch, then back at it and two more lines.
The first one goes relatively smoothly, with only one scare that things
were turning off. But it was fine. Turned around and started on the sixth
line. About one-third of the way through, the console gives the message
that it's no longer receiving data. I'm operating it now, so I reset some
things, back up to the previous flag and try again. Again, the error
message comes. James is checking the transmitter, and it's working. I try
again, get about 3 points, and more cronking out. Transmitter still OK.
More of this for a few minutes, but we know we're running up on the 50
minute barrier.
However, we finally figure out that maybe
we're getting onto the area of thinner ice, and the closer,
very-highly-conducting seawater is eating the signal. We also know that we
have 5 depths, and that should constitute a decent set of data. We finally
decide to head inside and call it a day, waiting until tomorrow to try
again with the new transmitter that will be here in the
evening.
We ate supper with a couple of local
teachers, who, like many teachers, are very extroverted and very friendly.
And, we learned a lot of interesting things. First, the school buildings
up here are fantastic.
Sparkling, new and filled with the latest
educational stuff. The teachers love it. The school district that includes
Barrow is physically the largest in the U.S., covering an area of 87,000
square miles (yes, that's actually the number). There are 200 teachers and
2,000 pre-K-through-12 students. Of course, some of those teachers in
remote villages have only a few students.
We also heard about some students' bus ride
to school. There are some islands where the school bus is an airplane
(seaplane, actually) that picks them up in the morning, and brings them
home in the afternoon. No kidding folks. And no, it's not
yellow.
Athletic teams fly to their games, often
switching teams so the planes aren't empty. For example, if a boys' team
goes to some town on a plane, then that town's girls' team comes back on
the same plane. The girls get back on the plane at the end of their game,
go home, and the traveling boys then get on the plane to go back to their
home. The plane goes from Town A to B, then back to A, back to B, and
finally back home to A. Four flights, two games, no empty
flights.
Later Tuesday night
I gave an odd talk tonight, odd in the
sense that it was really two talks in one. For the first half, I talked
about our use of the OhmMapper both at Radford and here. I told them about
Drs. Whisonant's and Boyd's work in Saltville, and how geophysics was
helping that out. Also, some geophysical work I did in Arlington on some
Civil War era earthen forts. And how James and I got ready for this trip
using the Dedmon Center's lower soccer fields as sort of a reverse model
of the sea ice (thin upper layer with undulating boundary between that and
thick lower layer).
For the second part of the talk, I talked
about Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity, and my
research into the interior structure of black holes. It seems that BASC
has an agreement to try to arrange a public lecture to be given by
scientists working at the BASC facility. The teacher who coordinates this,
Jill Exe, told me in an email that maybe I could talk about my PHD thesis
work and how it relates to Barrow. Uh, that might be difficult, as I told
her. But she said that I could do this two-art talk thing. And it seemed
to work out well. There were about two dozen people there, and no one
threw anything at me. And, I did flash up "Radford University" in large
letters in front of them, and said it a few times, in hopes that the very
interested 11-year-old in the audience might one day be a
Highlander!
But the big thing that came out of going to
this talk in a room in the town's nice, new Inupiat Heritage Center, which
is a very nice museum containing much of the Natives' history. James
pointed out that once we got off the plane, we were ferried straight to
the BASC science station in the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory camp,
and we never came out of this little shell. We were cut off, it seemed
from civilization. I know there's a small TV in my room, but I use it to
hold my heavy wool socks at the end of a workday. And we eat in the
building next door, which houses both the BASC offices, conferences rooms,
an Inupiat 2-year college, and the world's greatest small cafeteria (more
on that later). But we'd obsessed for days about ice and equipment, and
getting the data. Evenings were troubleshooting and blogging, and for me,
working on my presentation when I wasn't sleeping.
We rode to town with a couple of teachers,
heard about their actual lives in this "normal" small town, and I was
struck with the fact that I was "not" at the end of the Earth. Granted,
we're hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle, but we're also in just
another small town with the same people in it as every other small town.
James realized this, but I guess I was so obsessed with trying to get as
much data as possible that I'd not caught any of this.
We caught a ride back to the BASC facility
in a big van with the members of the CRREL team who came to the talk.
Again, more "normalcy" that I just did not expect. And I know that
tomorrow I'm going to be walking on the north polar ice cap itself.
Watching with one eye for polar bears, one eye for cracks in the ice, one
eye on some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and one eye on
the equipment. It's a strange mix.
We decided today to give ourselves a break
after tomorrow morning's data collection with the new, properly-working
transmitter. Given that we've been working hard and continually for 4 days
straight, it makes sense.
We're going to start at the Cultural
Center, where a big
whale hangs above the information desk. I'll put a picture of that up on
the web. We know we also need to do some tourist shopping for our
families to thank them for letting us come all the way up
here.
March 2006