Meet Sue Sue the Seal

Here's BP and Sue Sue the Seal (a new addition and birthday gift) at the South Pole a few weeks ago.

Happy Birthday, Charis

Six years ago, Charis, you were born into our lives. You have been a great gift to us and I'm glad I'm your Dad. I miss you today, but as I look at these pictures, I'm smiling as I think of you. I love you!

I feel sick

I heard about this today and feel queasy. And angry. Bible bullets have never been right.





From ABC News:
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has 'Always' Added New Testament References
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-military-weapons-inscribed-secret-jesus-bible-codes/story?id=9575794&page=2

From the NY Times:
Firm to Remove Bible References From Gun Sights
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/22guns.html

Thoughts of Tevya

This weather information gets updated every few hours for us. We can access it on the computer or through the television. Since I've been here, the time for Sunrise and Sunset has been listed as "N/A." For the first time this week, I noticed the next Sunrise and Sunset times are posted! It's nice to know the world keeps spinning.

An open letter to my kids

Hi girls!

I really miss you guys. I like being your Dad and I’m sorry I can’t be with you now to hug you and hold you. You two continue to amaze me with how smart and kind you are. Your mother and I very blessed that God trusted us with you two.

I wanted to write a bit about the people I'm meeting here and the job I'm doing to maybe explain why I'm not home now. Your mom and I teach you that God loves you. Well, a lot of people in the world don’t hear that and don’t know that. Sometimes people think they have to do something different for God to love them. We know that’s not true. In my work, I can help people meet the God who loves them no matter what.

And down here in Antarctica, there are all kinds of people. Since I can’t be with you now, I thought you might be interested in learning a bit about the people here and the work they are doing. Most everything America is doing in Antarctica is about science. You know I used to be a science teacher, and I know that you two enjoyed some of the museums and books about science, so I think you might like this. You may not understand it all now, but when I get home, I'd love to tell you more.

Last week, I met Johan who has been working on Antarctica for at least 13 years, mostly learning more about Earth's atmosphere. We know our planet is changing, but we don’t all agree about why. Johan is convinced that we people are making some changes here faster than Earth has ever changed and he’s worried about what we’re doing. For example, we started measuring the amount of one certain gas (carbon) in the atmosphere when Grandma and Grandpa were your age and that level has been steadily increasing. One of the ways this is happening is the smoke out of our cars. To make sure their measurements are correct, there are different scientists working on this and they are using different techniques. One group has been using the exact same type of bottle for about 60 years, and some of those bottles are that old! Johan let me hold one.
Here's some heavier science stuff: Some people think a carbon level we can live with might be 350 parts per million (that’s a way we measure the amount of one thing when it’s mixed up with a bunch of other things) and when I was talking with Johan, he read the current meter and we were up over 384 ppm (we haven’t been below 350 ppm for over 20 years).
We’re pretty sure this will have an impact on our planet – probably the temperature, possibly other things as well – but folk are still debating that. I’ll be honest that I don’t know all about the science, but it seems we are changing the air on Earth and that's not good. I hope we aren’t messing up this planet up for you guys too bad. From down here in Antarctica and from the other places of the world I’ve seen, this is a beautiful world, a gift from God, and we need to take good care of it.

Speaking of that, will you guys go camping with me when I get back?

I first wrote this letter to you in my journal, so I'm going to keep copying it more or less as I wrote. At the time, I was sitting inside one of our LC-130 “Hercules” aircraft – the ones we see flying around our house – getting ready to go to the South Pole Station. The flight I'm on today, as you can see from the picture below, is pretty empty. The South Pole Station needs fuel to run all winter long, so one of the reasons we fly down there is to bring them gas. We load up as full as we can from McMurdo, fly to the Pole, and then offload as much gas as we possibly can before turning around to fly back to McMurdo. They put me on the plane as well since I'm going for the day, but it was pretty empty.

This flight is pretty exciting for me, so I want to tell you about that. You probably remember that I went to the South Pole last week. It’s about 800 miles away from McMurdo, where I’m usually working, and takes about three hours on one of these planes. We have skiis on the plane as well as wheels, so we can use whichever one we need (today it’s skiis).
The South Pole is a pretty unique place, as you might imagine. Less than 250 people live at the station now, but about 70 of them are part of building a new science project which they'll finish up next year. In their winter months, about 30 people live here, mostly to keep it running until the other 200 come back. The current station was dedicated two years ago, it’s the third station the US has had here. (The first one is now covered in snow and the second we dismantled to ship off the continent.) There's a picture of it here.

People here get along real well with each other and are pretty friendly. There’s no keys on the doors and they trust each other a lot. They have to: they are pretty brave to live out here at the bottom of the Earth. It takes about two months to drive here so the main transport they have are the planes. They get visitors regularly, some for a few hours, some for a few days. When chaplains come to visit, some of them really like seeing us and some of them could care less, but I’ve discovered most everybody likes to have someone to talk to who takes an interest in their lives and their work.

When I went up to the Pole last week, it was pretty foggy, so we had to delay our flight by several hours. That meant that the evening worship service I’d planned had to be pushed back later which I thought was fine. But what I didn’t realize is that some people had to go to work or had to go to bed and so they missed church. A guy named Bob emailed me when I got back to McMurdo that he’d missed the service and hadn’t had communion in six months and really missed it. I asked around and within a few days, I had permission to go back to bring communion to Bob. So that's why I got to go back.



I’m carrying with me something pretty special called the Erebus Chalice. It’s at least a 100 years old and there are a couple different stories about how it got down here. It's got a connection to one of the early explorers here (it might even have been on his ship when he sailed here). About 25 years ago, it was donated to the chapel here in McMurdo and dedicated to Robert Falcon Scott, an explorer who died here in 1912 on his way back from the South Pole. Each summer, we bring it to the chapel and at the end of the season someone brings it back to the Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, where it stays all winter. This chalice is pretty famous and while I’m the chaplain, I’m in charge of it. I talked to the pastor in New Zealand that watches over it in the winter and we both agreed that it's famous and valuable and pretty, but it's also supposed to be used, not just looked at. So, I’m taking it with me to the South Pole to celebrate communion. Someone who came to church took my picture with it.

I think I'm most excited about this trip for two reasons:

1. I’m going to the South Pole! I will be standing at the bottom of this amazing planet, at the axis where we spin around. My mind still can’t totally grasp that.

2. I’m going through all this - six hours of flying, six hours on the ground, the elevation change - so I can bring a visible reminder of God’s invisible grace to someone who needs that reminder. Psalm 139 has a great image of God being everywhere, that there is no place we can go to escape God’s presence: as far as planet Earth goes, I get to be a part of reminding people of that.

Something else about the South Pole that’s pretty amazing: The water we drink at the Pole is made by melting ice from a deep well. The well is so deep that the ice fell to the Earth about 2,000 years ago as rain or snow. So, the water we drink and flush and shower in at the Pole (well, not shower, they are allowed two 2-minute showers a week there!) was rain when Jesus walked the planet. Incredible, huh?

So anyway, I wanted to tell you about some other really cool people I’ve met here. Yesterday in church was a lot of fun. I think I surprised some of the people – I made them talk and help out a lot in the service. Some of them had planned to do something, and some of the other folk who have gotten to know me a bit know that I want them to help out. For the sermon, I asked a lot of questions and expected people to answer: they were kinda quiet at first, but eventually caught on. Danny was a lot of help: he’s leaving Thursday but I’ve known him since I got here. He’s a real kind man, a “salt of the earth” person as your Grandma Marvel (and Jesus) would say. He’s an electrician and I’ve seen him smile so much I’ve wondered if maybe electricity is that much fun? Frederick played his violin which was cool. I don’t think he used to go to church much, maybe not at all, and he’s still learning a lot about God and Jesus, but he can really play his violin; yesterday at the bottom of the planet, we were treated to Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring as a gift that he played to God. It was pretty amazing. Gabe prayed for us in church – his parents were missionaries and he’s been to seminary. He’s also a skilled radio technician and is here working with the radios that contact the planes when they want to land or take off. He’ll be the official leader of the chapel over this winter after we all leave, so it’s good to have him helping out so people get to know him. He’s a guy on a very fruitful journey. I’m glad I’ve met him.

After church I met a whole bunch of other people. Chris has traveled all over the world recording nature sounds. He said he used to record music but when he started listening more to the sounds of nature he got tired of music. He’s recording sounds for a new BBC program that I think will be called “Frozen Planet.” He also helped make “Planet Earth” and “Blue Planet.” We talked about New York a bit – he’s been up our way recording bird song and lecturing at Cornell. He let me listen to what he was working on: orca songs!

In that same room of the science lab, I met up again with Jack and Bill. I got to know them when I flew down here – we were on the same plane – but they took off soon after we arrived in McMurdo and spent a couple weeks in tents in a place called the Dry Valleys. There’s not much snow in the Dry Valleys and I’ve heard that some scientists work there to examine what it might be like to visit Mars! I had breakfast with Bill on Saturday when they’d returned and he invited me up to see their project. When I got up there, I learned they are actually working on a couple different things. Their big project is a three-year study of wind patterns and dust in the air here. We are still exploring Antarctica and so all different kinds of scientists are down here working on stuff and cooperating with each other to learn even more. They have been measuring how the wind blows down here and also how the rocks have been formed. While walking around setting up their wind contraptions over the years, they noticed that some rocks here had familiar patterns to them. Some are flat and some look like squashed three-sided pyramid. But most people, including them, think that they've been laying there for thousands of years and they wonder why they haven't been blown to sand over that time. So they collected some of these and when I got there, they were scanning them into 3-D images they could rotate and move on the computer. As with the other project, they are very excited and curious. It made me think a lot of you two: you guys ask us questions a lot and want to know about things around you. These scientists were the same. They reminded me of little kids who never really grew up – well they are bigger and smarter than when they were kids - but they are as curious and interested in the world as you are.

I also met Roy last week who listens to satellites. Actually, he controls the receiving dishes that listen to satellites. Some satellites are on an orbit around Earth that passes the South Pole regularly, so his job is to listen to them and collect the things they are seeing. Each satellite pass lasts about 10-15 minutes and with the eight satellites he’s watching now, the dish is busy about once an hour. This is Roy’s second time here and he’s having more fun now because he’s made some great friends. One of his friends got a little hurt a few weeks ago and she doesn’t really want to tell her boss because she wants to keep impressing him so she can come back next year. I went and asked the doctor here about it and he looked kinda sad and said that happens sometimes. She’s in a tough spot, and I hope she’ll be ok.

Sunday night I went to a lecture about penguins and seals. The scientist was explaining how these animals are changing where they swim and where they go hunting for food. His theory – and he had some pretty convincing evidence – is that the Earth is getting warmer and it’s changing these animals’ patterns.

As I said before, I wrote this on the airplane. I went up to the flight deck and talked with some guys I know and learned something really cool. For the first hour that we flew, we were over the Ross Sea which is frozen solid so we call it the Ross Ice Shelf. We are now getting close to where that ends and the continent begins (we call the “transition.”) McMurdo, where I live now, is actually on an island formed by still-active volcanoes in the Ross Sea. The water for the sea comes from the Beardmore Glacier which is one of the largest glaciers in the world. It covers the south pole which is over 9,000 feet high and flows down to the ocean. Of course, glaciers move really slowly, you can't see them move. I just learned that a piece of ice that starts at the south pole can travel the Beardmore Glacier out into the Ross Sea near where I live at McMurdo. But to give you an idea of how fast glaciers move, it would take that piece of snow about 10,000 years to travel those 800 miles.

Well, that's all I'm going to write for now. There are some pictures below of me at the South Pole (both of them). I miss you guys a lot and look forward to seeing you in about a month!

Daddy

Welcome USNS Paul Buck

One of the five tanker ships our government owns pulled into McMurdo today. It's another gorgeous day so people were already in a good mood, but the ship is today's talk of the town. The Swedish-flagged icebreaker Oden led the way.




The tanker holds about 8 million gallons of fuel, but I guess they still need this sign:

Wildlife

Took a walk in the gorgeous clear day and thought I'd share some of the scenery:

This is Mt Discovery, named by the early explorers.

This is the picure I took of Hut Point and the water that has melted near it. A moment earlier, I'd seen a whale breach and spout. Someone else who had a better view (and had their camera out BEFORE the whale breached) took this picture:

This is as close as I've gotten to a seal (he's the blob in the middle).

Except when they let me fly, this is as close as I'll get to Mt Discovery.

My colleague

One of the joys of this position is the great, close relationship I've had with the New Zealand Catholic Priest who I've worked with since I arrived. He's leaving tomorrow and finally, today, got to particiate in a very meaningful ceremony nearby. New Zealand has had a long and close relationship with Antarctica, primarily because it's a great port to leave from for exploration down here. Thirty years ago last November, a tourist plane that came down here (they would fly out and around the continent so sightseers could snap pictures). The plane got off course and crashed into Mt Erebus, the tallest mountain here and the southernmost active volcano on the planet. Phillip got to make the trip today by helicopter to dedicate the site and a TVNZ crew happened to be there for the event. Here's the link to their story (which I haven't seen since our internet connection doesn't support streaming video well).

Greetings from the South Pole

Looking for work?

I learned today that Raytheon, who holds the contract with NSF to run most of the work down here, is starting to hire for next year. If you are looking for work and want your expenses paid to Antarctica, go to www.rayjobs.com/rpsc

This thought just scampered through my brain when I was replying to someone's email:

I'm settling in and really enjoying this, discovering that I like doing the chaplain thing a bit more than the pastor thing because I've got more opportunities to talk with more people about faith. Odd, huh? I think it has a lot to do with expectations: If I say "I'm a pastor" to someone, that seems to carry with it an expectation that I'm promoting myself or my particular institution or my faith ("Come to my church"). If I say "I'm the chaplain" that leaves the door open for most any kind of discussion about their spirituality and their faith ("Who is God to you?").

Phillip and I started putting these up around the station the other day and have had many chuckles.

Worship

Here I am leading worship in the southernmost chapel on the planet. We opened with a song that makes reference to north, south, east and west, which struck some people as a bit odd: compasses don't really work so well down here, since most everything is north!

Welcome Oden!

Each year, McMurdo is supplied with food, tons of scientific equipment, and fuel delivered by a cargo vessel and tanker. The tanker is the first to arrive, I think, in a week or so; the cargo vessel will be in around the end of January. Of course, the sea here is frozen - in much of the Ross Sea an Ice Shelf hundreds of meters deep allows our planes to land. Closer to shore, the ice melts a bit by this time of year - which is good for the ships trying to make it in. The first ship through is an Icebreaker, this year it's the Oden out of Sweden. We've been able to see her getting closer for a couple days and yesterday she pulled up next to our dock. Oden will continue to work her way back and forth along the channel she's cut for the other ships that will arrive later this month.

Anything new here is nice, and the arrival of the Icebreaker means we are that much closer to the vessel getting here. Also, in years past, more wildlife sometimes comes in with the icebreaker: penguins and seals can get closer to us and therefore whales sometimes come in for supper. Today is a gorgeous and clear day here, so many folk are loitering on their way to work or between jobs to look for wildlife and watch the Oden.

The picture above is the Oden with Vince's Cross off Hut Point in the foreground. The Royal Society mountain range is in the back, partly obscured by the clouds we had yesterday.

A Sunday afternoon stroll...

After worship on Sunday, I got out to see some of the sights. Here's some pictures from inside Scott's Discovery Hut (click here or here for more information about the hut and the 1902 expedition that built it). It was used and re-stocked for at least three expeditions.

A short walk further up to Hut Point and the cross memorializing the death of George Vince, a sailor who died making the walk from the hut to the SS Discovery in 1902, Scott's ship moored in the ice nearby. It was cold and windy up there.

This is the Adelie penguin I saw looking over hut point. I think he was showing off for us; he hopped out of the water, waddled around, squawked a few times, and dove back in.

Later in the day, I joined a group that drove out to see four Emperor penguins. This shot includes the active volcano Mt Erebus in the background.

Week One

It's been a busy, cold, snowy week at the other end of the globe.





I arrived on station just over a week ago and it seems a blur already. My first two days were a weekend and because of the New Year, this was the last two-day weekend for the season. Saturday was the annual IceStock music festival - what great fun! I got a bit spoiled on the weather as it turns out: Saturday was sunny and well above freezing. When I stepped out of the dorm on Sunday morning I immediately had to turn around and go back to add a layer of clothing - since last Saturday, weather has been a bit more typically cold for around here. The departing chaplain retained all worship responsibilities last Sunday so I had the day to meet people.





Monday is the "military day" for me. I wear my uniform for a weekly meeting and end up visiting with the other military folk down here. Last week, I rode out to the flight line and visited the different shops out at "Pegasus." There are three different runways that can be used down here, an ice runway that is open early in the season until the ice is too warm to safely accomodate the airplanes - within a month or so of it shutting down, an ice breaker comes in to clear a channel for the two other ships that port here (more on that later). Another runway is an old airstrip thats not open this year as a cost-saving measure. Williams Field, usually called "Willy Field" is named for a sailor Richard Williams whose tractor dropped into the Ross Sea in 1956. (I'm told divers have been down to the wreck and he's still gripping the steering wheel pretty tight.) I think that the Navy used Willy Field as their primary airstrip and so when a plane crashed nearby in the 50s or 60s, they towed it several miles away onto the floating glacier because it's considered bad luck to have to look at a crashed plane every time you come in for a landing. Well, the plane they towed away was called "Pegasus" and the place they happened to leave it turned out to be an ideal location, with just a little shoveling, to land a C-17. And so the third, and now only open, landing strip down here is called Pegasus in honor of the wreckage you can easily see from the runway.





Much of the rest of the week was spent waiting. My Roman Catholic counterpart flew to the South Pole in what was supposed to be an overnight trip on Monday. He came back late Thursday. The chaplain I'm replacing was supposed to fly out on Tuesday. He left Friday. The weather here has been too windy and too snowy to fly safely, so the flight crews have had some waiting and time off. I see them in the cafeteria in flight suits looking at the clock waiting for the next update - will it be a three-hour delay? a 24-hour weather cancellation?





But even though they have a lot of waiting, most of the other activities here don't slow down at all. I met Dick this week, an IT guy down here for his first season, who shared with me his theory that I'm beginning to think might have some truth in it: when the planes leave New Zealand, they fly through a space warp and we actually travel to a different planet. If I were going to imagine a colony on the moon or Mars, I'd start with McMurdo as a model. We generate our own power, desalinate our own water, treat our own waste, drive and maintain trucks and tractors almost as old as my parents (sorry Mom and Dad) and are completely dependant on the incoming flights for food, supplies, medicine, the works. This place is constantly humming with the work that needs to happen to keep McMurdo open. I got to tour the waste treatment plant with Kurt from Cleveland (layed off last summer and found this work), the water desalination plant with Paul (a retired high school teacher), and the power plant with Mike who answered a Craiglist ad for work. Dave showed me around the Vehicle Maintaince Facility, a place he's been working at for over 20 years. Nick and Sparky explained the exhasutive recycling and trash programs at work here (we sort our trash into EIGHT different bins, and bus our dishes in the galley into four different stations, Uncle Kent!). I heard from someone there are more than 100 support people for each scientist down here.






And science runs this place. I've met folk who drill deep into the ice to get air samples from thousands of years ago. SCUBA divers who swim beneath the ice and return with fish, starfish, sea spiders, anenome, and more. A team from the University of Kansas out here with an unmanned aerial vehicle to scan the ice for cracks and crevasses. Guys who send balloons into space from here to orbit the earth. Folk whose telescopes look deep into the heavens calculating the exact moment of the Big Bang. Hardy researchers whose three-year project is to capture the dust here with possible applications to space settlements on Mars. At the South Pole, there's a team looking at neutrons or neutrinos or something of the sort that have passed all the way through the Earth. The active volcano here is so unique, only one other on Earth erupts in the same way - and ironically its safer to come here to study it than to risk getting involved in Africa's civil wars.





My time is spent getting to know these people. Hearing their stories. Listening to their passions and heartbreaks. Many have family back home they miss dearly but are here for work they can't find back in the states. Some have been trying to get here for years and years - one woman said she'd applied nine times for a job here. Some are kinda lost, not sure how they ended up here. Someone's organizing a stage version of the Princess Bride. Some drink their paychecks away. Some come to get away from something in the "real world." Some come to find something they've lost or heard about. It's tender work, holding these stories.

Even though it's cold and snowy, Antarctica is officially considered a desert because of how little precipitation it gets (a lot of the snow here doesn't fall from the sky as much as it get's blown over from another part of the continent). People come to the desert for many reasons.

Well, the constant daylight means it's easy to lose track of time. It's late here, though the windows don't tell me that, and I get to preach and lead worship tomorrow for the first time in several months. After that, I plan to visit Scott's Hut and hopefully tomorrow night take a trip out to see the four penguins that have settled near Pegasus and begun to molt. A full day.

IceStock 2010

McMurdo hosts an annual "IceStock" music festival. Who thought I'd get good - well, at least loud - local music down here? Did 2010 bring a Dancing Robot invasion to the rest of the planet, or just down here?

Antarctica

New Year's Day, 2010
A C-17 to Pegasus White Ice Runway and a bus ride on "Ivan the TerraBus" to McMurdo Station.