365 @ 54°30' South

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.