365 @ 54°30' South: 2015-05-10

Saturday, 16 May 2015

May 14: The front gate

Our station is surrounded by a wooden fence, complete with farm gate on the track to the Isthmus, designed to keep out the four tonne Beachmasters, the male elephant seals, which will arrive in spring. For now it hangs open, as most of the seals on station are small enough to squeeze through the gaps anyway.
It is not that we don't want visitors, it is just that they lean up against the warm buildings......and four tonne is a lot of seal!

The Macquarie Island front gate. Photo: Jacque Comery

The map on the front gate. Photo: Jacque Comery

Elephant seal detail on the front gate. Photo: Jacque Comery

Fur seal detail on the front gate. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 13: Plumbers workshop

Doors and windows are a favourite subject of mine, and the light on the workshop today caught my attention.

Macquarie Island Plumbers Workshop. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 12: Cheeky visitor returns

With brisk winds blasting station today, this cheeky fur seal decided to take shelter amongst our buildings.

Fur seal sleeping on the doormat of the Sparky's workshop. Photo: Jacque Comery

Fur seal in the tussock. Photo: Jacque Comery

Guarding the entrance to the Hass House accommodation block. Photo: Jacque Comery

Back to sleep. Photo: Jacque Comery

Wednesday, 13 May 2015

May 11: Yep! This is my home...

Jac and the aurora at Garden Cove outside the house. Photo: Justin Chambers

Cumpston's Cottage - My house. Photo: Justin Chambers

The ground floor is my office (with the deck) and my bedroom is to the right. The rooms above belong to that of the Doc and Chef. The small building on the right is the Seismic hut which has some tremor detecting equipment inside, and is coincidentally the path to the tsunami evacuation route up the hill.

I may need to be forcibly removed from this island in 11 months. Squatters rights!!

HUGE shout out to Justin "J2" Chambers for sharing with me his awesome pics (and the house!) so that I too may share them.

Tuesday, 12 May 2015

May 10: Another morning at Sandy Bay

Morning yoga? Photo: Jacque Comery

Young elephant seal wallowing in Finch Creek. Photo: Jacque Comery

Penguin rockpool. Photo: Jacque Comery

Morning stroll. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 9: Sandy Bay King Penguins

The King Penguin colony at Sandy Bay is about a 3 hour walk from Station over the plateau, or about 5 hours around the coast. The coast route is slower on account of moving across rougher terrain, rocks and through the Poa wallows. By the time I arrived at the colony I was already a little chilly, and discovered I had left my spare batteries behind, so just got a few quick pics in.
The King Penguin chicks are huge compared to the size of their parents. Their big brown fluffy feather coats give them an adorable appearance, and they waddle around the colony seemingly quite oblivious to dangers all around. They are especially vulnerable to being taken by the Giant Petrels and Skuas who lurk in and around the colony awaiting an opportunity to pluck a chick from the group. When a chick gets dragged off it creates quite a kerfuffle, but none of the adults really comes to the chicks aid.
The old hut pictured was used by the penguin researchers in times past. These days the island is slowly reclaiming it.

Penguin chicks at old Sandy Bay hut. Photo: Jacque Comery

Southern Giant Petrel making a meal of a chick. Photo: Jacque Comery

Sandy Bay. Photo: Jacque Comery

Picked clean. Photo: Jacque Comery

King penguins and chicks. Photo: Jacque Comery

Monday, 11 May 2015

May 8: The little things

Lichen on wooden wall. Photo: Jacque Comery

With seals, penguins, amazing views and auroras everywhere it is easy to overlook the beautiful little things here too. Life clings to everything here, with all it's might I should add, to avoid being blown away. This lichen is growing on the sides of the wooden slab building that serves as our mechanical workshop.

Lichen on the workshop wall. Photo: Jacque Comery

Wall of the mechanical workshop. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 7: Everyone's a little grumpy this morning...

Elephant seals. West side of Isthmus. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 6: A morning in the ARPANSA Lab

Whenever people hear that you work for the Antarctic Division, they assume that you are a scientist, or an explorer!?! Well that has frequently been my experience. I am neither, with my job as station leader being mostly to manage the facilities and the team of people here. The exception to this however is the few times a month when I fill in at the ARPANSA lab - and wear the lab coat!

Nerd out alert. I'll keep it non-technical.

"ARPANSA??", you say? So did I, when I found out that I was volunteered for the role.

Australia is a signatory to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. To monitor potential nuclear testing activity there is a network of stations all over the world, measuring seismic, sound and air quality.

This network picked up and mapped the plume from the recent Fukishima melt down.

At Macca we have an air monitoring station. This is important as we have quite clean air down here, and there are not many inhabited land masses this far south on which to locate such a facility.

So we complete a daily filter change and measurements for ARPANSA.

Each day at 0900hrs, we take a filter paper which has filtered the air for 24 hours. We crush it into a small disk with a hydraulic crusher, then we put it into a decay cabinet for 24 hours to let much of the background radiation decay off. After this the filter disk is then placed into the detector for another 24 hours where it is tested to see if any radiation is detected that is likely to indicate a nuclear test. The results get sent to the international organisation in Vienna.

Starting up the air filter after filter change over. Photo: Jacque Comery

Removing the quality control source from the detector. Photo: Jacque Comery

Loading the filter press. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 5: Flipper

Juvenile elephant seal flipper. Photo: Jacque Comery

May 4: Art vs science

Campbell-Stokes recorder. Photo: Jacque Comery

This elegant looking glass sphere is our Station Campbell-Stokes sunlight recorder. The sunlight is focused by the glass spherical lens onto a card mounted behind the sphere. The number of hours of sunlight is measured by the length of the slot burned into the card. Needless to say that our cards are pretty much intact! A rather beautiful piece of scientific equipment.