Open Wide


We all went to the dentists this week. As if it wasn't bad enough that everyone had their teeth seen to by a doctor with 3 days dental training and an over eager grin, the doctor got by far the worst deal. He let us all loose on his dentures as doc school gave way to dentist school for one week only. Here you can see Jimbo, the carpenter scraping away tartar like a pro.

Mid Winter

Mid Winter marks the half way point in the long dark night that is the Antarctic winter. Scott and Shackleton celebrated it, and we keep the tradition alive...

Midwinters day was special.

It started with beakfast in bed: tea and a veggie sausage sandwich delivered by the base commander.

Then a late mid morning ski, followed by the customary naked run around the building we live in. Next, I wrapped the present I'd been making for the carpenter, put it under the tree (yes, a Christmas tree in June) and put on my posh frock ready for...

Mid Winter Meal 21st June 2007

Canapes

Chilled glass of Champagne

Thyme peppered beef fillet on a mini rosemary Yorkshire with horseradish cream
Pear ratatouille on a tomatoe & basil bruchetta
Seared salmon nicoise
Tarragon & mushroom baked cream tartlets


Amuse Bouche

Honey roasted butternut squash shot with panfried porcini mushrooms

Prestige Menu

Cappuccino of white beans with charred smoked bacon

Duo of trout & mjonkfish fillets with bearnaise emulsion & an asparagus, green bean & shallot salad (without the fish for veggies like me)

Marinated barbecue noisetes of lamb, canon of beef on a bed of onion puree served with griddled vegetables, fondant potatoes & a raspberry balsamic port jus

or
Risotto verde with olive oil pesto & parmesan crisps

Quenelle of melon sorbet

Caramelised compote of pineapple with coconut tuile biscuit

Strawberry tart tatin

Selection of the finest "frozen" cheeses

Fresh filter coffee and chocolates



Ant hard at work preparing a feast fit for royalty despite no food deliveries since the start of the year. Incredible.

The midwinter presents, revealed at last. For the last weeks and months, we've all been secretly slaving away in the workshops, and trying to conceal our creations from the eventual recipient (not so easy when, your making for the carpenter). It was great to finally see what everyone had been working on, and the results were really impressive. They included a working steam engine, an antarctic shaped cheeseboard, candlesticks, a chess board, an antarctica picture frame, a huge knitted blanket, sculptures, paintings, poems and puzzles. Best of all was my present from fellow metbabe Kirsty, a beautifully presented kit for the construction fo a full scale brass model of Halley, perfect to the finest detail (I'll put pictures up when I've built it!).


The presents under the tree. Christmas decortations in june feels surprisingly normal amidst the darkness and the snow.


Here you can see the box and some of the pieces for my Halley model, and behind it, the zoetrope (a kind of animation toy) that I built for Jimbo.


The Mid Winter holidays are the only time of the year when everyone on base gets time off work together. We had a packed program of events including...


A Biathalon (I won the women's category, somewhat helped by being the only woman taking part). We don't have guns on base so instead of skiing and shooting, we did skiing and throwing snowballs at cans.

A murder mystery


Crazy golf


and carol singing.

We wish you a merry midwinter,
we wish you a merry midwinter,
we wish you a merry midwinter and a happy new sun


Even with the sun at it's lowest point below the horizon at thsi time of year , it's not all darkness and gloom.This photo was taken just a couple of days after midwinter as the horizon glowed with every colour of the rainbow to remind us the sun was on it's way back.


Thanks to Dave and Tom for more great photos.

Merry Midwinter!

Lots has been going on lately, in the run up to this week's midwinter festivities. The week kicked off on Friday night with an office party on the Simpson platform (the building where I work). There was Christmas music, merriment and games a plenty. I'll write a lot more at the end of the week, after I've finished frantically touching up my midwinter present, writing for the midwinter magazine, and forcing festivity upon all those that cross my path.

The Base Commander Turns 50

Pete, our Base Commander, turned 50 a week ago. He had an explorers themed party and the met team of myself, Kirsty, Dave and Tom got roped up together for the night.

Staying roped up all evening meant doing everything together. Here we all are helping Kirsty with the washing up, and below, Dave waits in the corridor whilst me and Kirsty are in the loo.

It's dark outside

Me, Deano, Sune Jimbo and Tom (taking the photo) putting skidoos to sleep for the winter months. They're kept on a sledge to stop them getting buried and wrapped up under tarpaulins to stop them filling up with snow.

Our morning hour of painfully bright light 20cm form our faces, to 'reset our body clocks in the absence of natural light'. Thankfully it's only for two weeks at a time, in the name of medical research.

Bad Hair Day

The fact that it's almost summer time back home somehow makes the dark and exteme cold of the Antarctic winter feel all the more imposing. Still, there has to be something good to be said about temperatures further below zero than they'll ever get above it in Britain (global warming included). And this is it... in minus 40 and below all you have to do is go outside, dip your hair in a bucket of warm water, tip your head upside down, hold it there for 20 seconds, then stand up and hey presto, you've got a hairdo that would take a several tubs of wax and hours in front of the mirror to create back home. Hmmm. Maybe that's clutching at straws, but it was fun anyway.

The Light Fantastic

Last night's aurora extravaganza. The whole sky lit up and rippled with colour. I just lay on my back on the snow and laughed out loud.

Thanks to Tom for these first three photos.

Fireworks night came early this year. What with Christmas celebrations planned form June, we thought why not celebrate Guy Fawkes on the ninth of May. Sune, our field assistant, showed us how to set off the flares, should we ever need to signal for help out in the field. A great birthday treat!

Thanks to Richard for this lovely picture. I has the telescope pointed at Jupiter. You could see three moons, and just about make out the red spot. Then, as you stepped back from the telescope to let someone else have a look, you could turn and marvel at the sparkling AUrora over the southern horizon. This is early evening last night. Little did we know what these little lights would grow into (the top two photos)!

E.R.? Holby City? No, it's Halley Bay

Yesterday I stuck a needle into someones vain, and injected them! I was very scared (not as scared as them) but they only nearly fainted afterwards, so it all turned out ok. It's not that hard, this medicine lark! 5 years at medical school, nah, I feel my training with 5 series of scrubs and ER has prepared me well. Here's me trying not to kill ALex, under the watchful eye of Richard, the Doc. Cheers to Pete (Base Commander) for the photo.

Cheesey Birthday, mmmm

My cheese-tastic Birthday cake and card (thanks to Richard and Dean)

I had a cheese and wine night to celebrate with the slightly challenging fancy dress theme of cheese and wine to match. In the back of the photo you can see Sune as the devil (that's what cheese is to him) attacking Richard who came as a blue nun (after that classy variety of wine). Then there's Neil as the cheese board, Dean as a (slightly scary looking) French maid, Pete as a box of wine, me as Heidi (Swiss, like the cheese! yes, there were some slightly tenuous links), Mark as Edam and Dave in his welsh top as Caerphilly (and generally looking very cheesey), showing off his now extremely impressive mullet. Sitting in front are Jules the farmer trying to keep Kirsty, his prize cow, under control, Alex as a slice of La Vache qui Rit, and Jim as Friar Tuck.

Cheese and Wine!

There were cheesey nibbles to start with, a cheese tasting blindfold challenge, Monty Python's cheese shop game, cheese fondue, a cheese sculpture competition (see below) and the finest cheese boards on the continent.

During the cheese tasting, we tried feeding a clove of garlic to the blindfolded Doc, but he realised just before biting into it (although he thought we were trying to feed him a rubber, that's how fresh our garlic is!) and passed on to Andy Mac, our trusty generator mechanic, who happily gobbled it up.

The cheese sculpting competition prize winning entries: A skiddoo (Alpine cheese model) complete with driver, Battersea cheese station, The leaning tower of cheesa, Cheese henge and sponge bob cheese pants.

Later on, dosed up on that tasty yellow beef, it got cheesey on the dance floor.

2 blogs for the price of 1

I've not been very good at writing much about what goes on here day to day on this blog, so...I've started a second. 'The Inside Story' is made up entirely of extracts from my diary. Hopefully it'll give you a bit more of feel for my life down here. Follow the link to read more...

Getting Darker...

Next week the sun will disappear below the horizon and stay away until August. Here's a glimpse of the run up to the longest night of my life:

More Stunning Aurora. Longer darker nights and lots of clear skies lately, have meant perfect aurora observing conditions. Lat night's show featured hyperactive green snakes shaking their way across the sky, shooting out spikes of yellow light, and some spooky bits where the aurora was making the tops of clouds glow green on the horizon.

I had to ski out to one of the experiments a couple of kilometres from the base, for a bit of routine maintenance at -37C. It's a weird sensations feeling your eyelashes and nosehairs start to freeze. It's quite tricky working at these temperatures too. You can't take your gloves off for long, and touching anything metal is a bad idea. Every now and then I had to do a load of star jumps to regain the feeling in my fingers and toes. It stings like crazy when they start to warm up, but it's a good feeling really, it tells you they're not frostbitten!


Sometimes we have to practice rescue scenarios, as we're our own emergency services down here. Last week we had a go at rescueing poor simon here from the tunnels, where he'd fallen and broken his pelvis (noone seemed that concerned about the fact that he had also lost his head, hands and feet). I was a first aider and stretcher handler (in yellow below). It was a tricky business manouvering the stretcher through all the nooks and crannies of the tunnels buried under about 20m of snow, but we got him out in record time. Here's the triumphant rescue team, and Simon, looking a bit worse for wear:


MeltTank, everyone's favourite way to start the day. At 9am every morning, a team of 3 or 4, bursting with energy and enthusiasm (especially on a Sunday), head out to shovel snow for half an hour. It can be a bit of a mission, but it certainly wakes you up. Nowadays, it's dark in the morning (and most of the rest of the time), so it's floddlit shovelling. Below: me, going for it (trying to make up for those extra 30 seconds in the shower!).

Winter Team 2007

Brrrr!


We hit minus 40 for the first time on Saturday afternoon. This morning it was up to minus 44, 69 degrees colder than London.

Inside, however, life goes on as normal, as you can see in the pictures below...

An underground ice cave, buried beneath several metres of snow since its creation in 2004, was undercovered on Friday night. Lo and behold, what did I find down there but a can of Newcastle's finest. Made me smile.

Techno Techno

DJ Tom's techno rave birthday party, complete with glow sticks and strobe lights.

A Glimpse of the Aurora

Thanks to Tom for the photo, nice effort.

Extreme BBQ

Last night, our wonderful chef Ant, got the Barbie blazing in temperatures of -30 and below! By the time you ate them, sausages were semi-frozen on the outside, but still hot in the middle. The beer turned slushy after about five minutes and you had to be careful your lips didn't stick to the can, as Deano discoverd, much to our amusement. An extreme BBQ even Brian would be proud of!

SUNDOGS & DIAMOND DUST

Today we had some really cool meteorological phenomena, even the non weather people were getting excited. Diamond dust fell from the sky: little tiny ice crystals that sparkle in the sunlight. The ice crystals bent the sunlight so that we saw these amazing colourful 'sundogs' that look like bits of a rainbow, to the side of the sun. There was also a pillar from the sun to the ground, where the sun was being reflected from the flat surfaces of the crystals. At the same time, icy fog lurked in the distance, adding to the effect. Overall, it was pretty.

In the opposite direction, a nearly full moon shone just above a pinkish horizon. One more thing...I saw some amazing aurora the other night. It lit up a whole band across the sky, wiggling and flashing green, red and purple lights. I'll try and post some Aurora photos soon!

Pretty Clouds

My Antarctic hero pose,
a chance to show off my gorgeous leopard skin mittens:

Iit's not completely flat here at Halley, the wind shapes the snow surface into pretty ridges and bumps called sastrugi, which are also good for jumps when kiting. here's a photo looking down at the snow on a moderately windy day. The met speak for what you see is 'drifting snow', when the wind picks up the loose powder and it whistles it across the surface. When it gets a bit windier it looks more like the picture below, 'blowing snow', and all you can see around you is white, white, white...


Here's me struggling with a gale force ballon launch, Alex's hat blew away whilst he was taking this photo!