A random South Pole day

Well, I'm going to try to give this whole "blogging thing" another go.  In 2014 I had created a blog to discuss my winter at Palmer Station, Antarctica as a grantee from Dr. H. William Detrich, III's laboratory at Northeastern University.  Unfortunately, I grew bored with the blogging experience and quit writing.  This year, while wintering at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as a contractor, I am hoping to make blogging a more consistent activity in my life.  We are a few months into the winter, and I am finding communicating with friends and family back home to be severely difficult;  our internet is reliant upon a satellite connection, and one of our better satellites has been brought down for maintenance for the past month.

Photo of the RF Building at the South Pole by Hunter Davis, our sous chef

So here we are.  The other motivation, I admit, to returning to the blog is that my coworkers (Brett Baddorf and Steve Ashton) have insisted upon me resurrecting my old blog.  I refuse to go so far as to commit a biblical act, but this can be a happy in between.  They are curious to see if my writing is still as sarcastic and, so I like to think, at times funny.  Likely not much has changed as I have had the same personality for the most part since I was a child, but we'll let those two be the deciders.

Photos will be difficult to upload due to the slow speed of our upload link, but I will try my best.  I should also warn that I have not been taking nearly as many photos as I should have.  Most photos that I post will be photos that were taken by other personnel on station, such as the one above that was taken by our sous chef Hunter.  I will also add the disclaimer now that most of these photos are not quite what the environment looks like with the naked eye.  DSLR cameras are capable of absorbing much more light than our retinas and thus can capture all of the colors in the auroras and even the star clusters in the milky way.  When auroras are outside, they are green;  they do occasionally have red pigments in them; and they do dance just like in the videos on YouTube.  The milky way is also strongly present, and we are capable of seeing the different colors emitted by the various stars and planets in our night sky.

I suppose that should be all for now with this post.  Life at the Pole isn't always the most interesting so many blog posts will be boring reads.  They'll serve as hilarious reads for me in the future I'm sure, just as those Palmer 2014 posts are.  So, my dear friends and family (and Steve and Brett), please email me or message me on Facebook some suggestions for future posts.  Perhaps I'll be motivated enough to actually follow through this time around!