Antarctica 2018-19

So this winter I headed down with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to Rothera research station as a vehicle operator, for 6 months between October and March. The lesser known of the large BAS stations, it is situated on the western edge of the British Antarctic claim. It has capacity for up to 170 personnel and unlike Halley, it is built conventionally on rock and melts out over summer, reaching a height of around +5C. The season starts with clearing the snow that has built up over winter, in most cases to quite a depth.



In terms of equipment there was nothing particularly exotic; A pair of JCB loading shovels, a 13t excavator and a pair of Massey 4370s were mainly used. (and plenty of shovels and pickaxes..)




The snow is dumped into the sea over the edge of the wharf. Early on in the season this felt rather hairy as the sea bed drops away rather quickly if you were to go over the edge!
By December we had most of the station cleared, just in time for relief by RRS Ernest Shackleton. The ship brought fuel, spare parts, dry goods and frozen food, and the first of the equipment for this year's wharf redevelopment project, which involves the complete dismantlement of the current wharf and building one capable of accommodating the new RRS Sir David Attenborough.


It wasn't all work though! There was plenty of skiing to be had, and the 5 chefs always strived to make dinner interesting!





Just at the end of relief I was posted out to Sky Blu for a few weeks. This is a small camp with a blue ice runway staffed by 3 people; a field guide, a mechanic and an operator. Our job is to refuel passing planes and serve as a sort of depot for cargo going out to, and coming back from, the 'Deep Field' (remote science camps). The blue ice runway allows BAS's largest plane, the Dash-7, to land safely and deliver fuel from Rothera. It can deliver 14 drums of fuel at a time. One can only imagine the cost per barrel at this point is into the thousands.

The workhorse of the BAS flying programme is the Twin Otter, a sturdy bush plane known by many as the land rover of the sky. They are fitted with hydraulically operated wheel-skis, allowing them to land on wheels at Rothera and Sky Blu, and on skis when in the middle of nowhere. On these flights they only have one pilot, meaning that the passenger gets the privilege of sitting up front and even flying the plane!



That takes us up to about Christmas, I will follow up later with more photos from the rest of the season.

Zippy768 said:

What a great adventure . So few people will ever set foot on the Antarctic.
So the machines that are there when you arrived, had they been there all winter?

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Over winter the wheeled machinery gets put away in the hangar, and the bulldozer does the majority of the work, mostly dragging around a fuel bowser for all the separate generators and heating systems.

Zippy768 said:

How did you come across the opportunity?
I presume getting there was a long journey?

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I first heard about it a few years ago, and I applied last spring while avoiding my dissertation. The openings are released around January and the applications are reasonably competitive. However it appears that they still have openings for a wintering operator and mechanic. https://www.bas.ac.uk/jobs/vacancies/

The journey was a commercial set of flights to Santiago via Sao Paolo, then down to Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile. From there the Dash 7 took us on a 4 hour flight to Rothera, so it was fairly swift and you usually get a day or two to wander around in Punta.

topless_matt said:

@Charles Quick i don’t suppose you were there with a guy called cam, he is a kiwi and was down there last year.

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Yeah I was down there with him

While out at Sky Blu, I managed to travel a bit further into the field. A very quick visit to Beamish, a hot water drilling site, marked my furthest South at 79 degrees. Sadly I was only there for half an hour as we swapped pilots and planes and headed back, never getting a chance to play with the Pistenbully.



I also went out to Mt Suggs as an extra pair of hands to recover a seismometer installed a few years ago by the Americans. This job turned out to be rather larger than expected as the battery box had iced in, the 6ft deep buried cable was sheathed in white (!) lagging for 3 meters before plunging down to about 12ft to the seismometer itself, which was encased in an oversize dome. We regretted not bringing enough chocolate.



The snow had to be hauled out in two stages. You can just see the top of the dome at this point.


'The Pleasuredome'


The advantage of having a dedicated field guide at Sky Blu is that on quiet days you have the opportunity to climb the surrounding mountains. I summited all 6 nearby peaks, including the highest, Mt Carrara. A somewhat technical ridge climb with patches of blue ice and a fantastic mini descent halfway up. Crampons and linked travel were required.



Anyway, back to Rothera. By this point the DS Wisconsin, a charter vessel, had nearly completed its unloading of all the construction equipment needed for the wharf project. This included two 300t Liebherr cranes, a pair of 50t long reach excavators, several smaller excavators, dump trucks, rock crusher and several tonnes of explosives.



At this point things had started to dry out and the planes would kick up a lot of dust on the runway, so one of our main jobs was to wet it with seawater. The base was teeming with wildlife by this point.



The elephant seals were distinctly less dignified out of water though, and are easily the worst smelling animals I have ever known.



The most prominent icebergs around Rothera Point were given names. Archberg in particular was a hot topic of conversation in the dining room, as it continued to defy expectation and avoid collapsing. Very occasionally a loud report could be heard across base as huge chunks fell off nearby 'bergs.



The team from BAM were making good progress taking apart the old wharf.



Let's see if I can string this out for another post or two. Thanks for reading

I am going to Halley this year. It's a shorter season which fits better with the farm, and it feels more like 'proper Antarctica' than Rothera. The weather is much more brutal and the temperatures are more agreeable (Anything above 0 is a miserable temperature down there as the snow turns to wet slush).

The medical is fairly simple, there's a page about the process with example forms here. You'll want to look at forms 3 and 7. The criteria for a summer deployment are little less strict than if you were to go away for a winter, for example they were happy to let me through even though I had a heart condition as a child.