Krissie's Blog - 12

Oct 18, 08:35 PM

Let’s talk water. Antarctica holds 70% of the world’s fresh water. We at the South Pole walk on our water every day. How do we turn our ground into a usable resource? The Rodriguez well or Rodwell.

It’s a small building situated near the BIF and Summer Camp – well, its enclosure is anyway.

The idea is to melt a hole in the ice, maintain enough continuous melting for the meltwater to pool, and then draw up water for use. To create the first portion of the Rodwell, an electrically heated weight melts a hole through the firn layer (a layer of new snow/ice), creating a narrow tube about a foot wide.

The Rodwell uses waste heat from the power plant to heat water. About 250 ft down , just past the firn layer, they switch to a type of hot water drill to create a cavity. The water begins to pool at the bottom. The water pool is called seed water, because once enough water is created, it is recirculated over and over again, allowing the well to become self-sustaining. This means that we are melting enough water for station use and also creating more water in the well at the same time, as opposed to drilling a well that is only emptied. A nozzle is lowered down to above the water’s surface. It continuously sprays 90°-100°F water, and this creates ripples on the surface, preventing the water from freezing.

Here’s a picture of some nozzles.

Here’s a picture of the entrance tube.

Since warm water is continuously being pumped in, more and more ice is melted, creating a reservoir. A pump is lowered down the tube, and the water makes it way upward through a hose. (This is a picture I found on the Shared drive, so I’m not sure what the 1994 fire it mentions is about. We are using a newer well than this one, anyway.)

Through the years, a parabolic shape forms, and the well gets wider and deeper. About 500 ft down, it takes too much energy to draw and re-circulate the water. The well is then spent. A new well is started about 100 yds away, and sewage is pumped into the old well. A well’s life span is about 7 active years. Our current well was started on 12/21/01. 7.2 million gallons of water was consumed between January 2003 and January 2009, with 2.9 million gallons still in the reservoir. A third Rodwell has already been built by Summer Camp, but it’s not being used yet.

If you look at the first graphic again, you’ll see years next to different depths in the ice. Sixty meters down, the ice is from around 1500 A.D. One hundred meters down the ice is from 1000 A.D. Right now our water is from about 500 A.D. Once the water is pumped up, it is sent to the power plant. There soda ash and chlorine are added to it to adjust the pH to neutralize it and to purify it in case there are impurities, respectively. Untreated the water is so pure that it leeches chemicals from piping and from the human body too. And that’s how we get water.

So I’ve been away for a while. Part of that is that it took a lot of time to research the Rodwell, and part of it is just South Pole winter exhaustion. A lot has happened since I last checked in. Four more people finished the Race to McMurdo – three of them at the same time…on the same treadmill.

We had the WORLD PREMIERE screening of the movie Whiteout. IT Tripp was able to talk Warner Bros. into letting us watch it first, on Sept. 6. It was a hoot of a time. A lot of Indy film projects down here revolved around the trailer or the making of the trailer. The NSF denied us a video teleconference with Kate Beckinsale and Co. We were very sad. We’re not sure why we weren’t allowed, though; we loved the movie. It’s quite surreal to see your own life (minus the murderings) up on the big screen. Needless to say, whenever a person’s film counterpart did something on screen, either we or he/she had to comment on it. We also commented on the general Hollywoodization of The South Pole. Imagine Mystery Science Theater 3000 with 43 people, instead of 3. It was definitely a highlight of the season. If you did see the movie, one thing that does really happen down here is putting ice core chunks in drinks. In the movie I think they call it “million-year-old ice.” Mmm, not quite that old. I guess when there is an excess of ice cores left around after drilling, we are allowed to have them? Here’s a picture of 1500 year old ice in my Dr Pepper.

September on the whole was crazy windy. There were three days in a row that we broke wind records. Each morning I would hire Jeremy to shovel for me. The worst things we saw those three days were snow up to the door handle of the man door (no camera present)…

1.5 feet of snow INSIDE the BIF office…

and 3-4 ft of snow on the deck in front of the balloon doors.

We called in NOAA Marc for reinforcement shoveling that last morning. 48 mph winds will get you every time. On a normal week in the winter, there’s maybe six inches of snow at the edge of the deck. After this storm, there was a 5 ft high wall at the edge of the deck and 8 ft walls behind the doors. It has been quite a chore for the heavy equipment operator to remove the walls of snow. Right now there’s still a two foot step up to the snow. This picture was taken on September 13. You can see that the sky was bright enough for us to see outside, even 9 days before sunrise.

That’s another thing that happened: sunrise – celebrated with another formal meal and an open mic night. Earlier that day we also replanted the Antarctic Treaty flags around the Ceremonial Pole. I planted the Texas…er…Chilean flag third from the end. These are brand new flags. I’ve mentioned before that the flags from last year are hanging up in the galley. After the past few all-hands meetings, they have been raffled off. The British, French, Australian, and New Zealand flags were all given to the employees from those countries, thus were not raffled. Coincidentally Jeremy planted the new Argentinean flag and then won the old one. It’s the blue and white one on the far right. What a prize! Jeremy looks a little funny because there is a person kneeling near him, holding an insulated video camera box, but you can’t see that person very well. (Photo by Lee Parker)

We were sad to see the auroras disappear and the Milky Way fade away, but I think we were all happy for what sunrise portends: the next adventure. There’s an attitudinal conflict of interest right now. It’s a time full of rushing to finish end of season reports, last minute job tasks before the summer people return, travel plans, job searching, and Station reopening. Combine that with restlessness of being here for a year (for several of us), eagerness to leave, and the gradual mental and physical wearing down from deadly cold, constant darkness or constant light, a diet of frozen food, and isolation. It’s like a blowtorch firing on molasses. It’s crazy to think that my replacement could be here tomorrow. Their flight boomeranged (had to turn around mid-flight due to bad weather) today, but it will try again tomorrow. I am ready to go, but I sure will miss this place.

The next blog will be about how we all help out around the Station.

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