Working at the South Pole…Not Your Average Day at the Office
I live in the western wing on the first floor of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station. SOUTH POLE JOURNALRefael Klein blogs about his year working and living at the South Pole. Read his earlier posts here. My room is small — perhaps 3 meters by 3 meters (9 feet by 9 feet) — with […]
Readying for Winter, South Pole Station Is Awash in Activity
From November until February, the South Pole is awash in activity. With only four months to ready the station for the coming winter and fix what broke during the previous one, everyone is consumed with work. The cargo and materials specialists are unloading and organizing 70 C-130 airplanes worth of food, fuel and building supplies. […]
Exploring South Pole on Cross-Country Skis
SOUTH POLE JOURNALRefael Klein is blogging about his experiences as he spends a year working and living at the South Pole. Read his earlier posts here. On a clear day at the South Pole, the horizon sits about 16 kilometers (10 miles) away. We measure the visibility at any given point by referencing large wooden […]
Braving Brutal Cold to Tower Climb at the South Pole
Yesterday, it was minus 34 Celsius (minus 29 Fahrenheit) and sunny. Winds were low and visibility was perfect. The sky was a uniform shade of blue, stretching from horizon to horizon like a taut canvas. Walking to work, I felt like a red line running down the middle of a Barnett Newman painting. I was […]
Curiosity Hits Silica Jackpot; Sleep Aid & Strokes; Freshwater Supply Threatened
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds Plenty of Silica As they reviewed data gathered by the Mars Rover, scientists found that some rocks in Gale Crater contained the chemical compound silica. In fact they say it’s a very high amount of the compound. According to the researchers, silica is actually a combination of silicon and oxygen. […]
How to Avoid Getting Lost While Living at the South Pole
Cardinal directions become meaningless at the South Pole. There is no east, west or south. You are at the bottom of the world. Any direction you move is north. This makes certain tasks complicated, like giving someone directions to a building they have never been to before, or trying to describe which way the wind […]
New Report Predicts Possible Dip in Global CO2 Emissions
An international collaboration of scientists, in a new report, predicts the percentage of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may actually dip slightly in 2015 compared to 2014 levels. “In 2014, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels grew by just 0.6 percent,” said the report’s lead author Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth […]
‘Medieval Warm Period’ May Not Have Been Global Climate Event
Some of those who argue against human causation of climate change often point to a number of Earth’s past climatic events and periods such as the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age’ as examples that climate change can be the result of natural and not necessarily anthropogenic in origin. But now a new study published in the journal ‘Science […]
What Happened When I Landed in Antarctica
It was early afternoon when our plane, an LC-130 operated by the New York National Guard, began its descent towards the ice runway at McMurdo Station, the logistics hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program. Last I heard, ground temperatures were minus 31 Celsius (minus 25 Fahrenheit). In the next half hour, the plane would land and […]