Polar Passport

Talking to Schools in PNG

I am tour guiding in the far north again, and have a spare day before the ship sails. Summer seems to have ended here (though the Sun won't set for another ten days yet), and it has been bucketing snow all morning.

Recently I was in Papua New Guinea again, making more measurements of how the tectonic plates are moving.

I stayed about 4 or 5 days in each location I visited, and while the instruments were running I usually visited the local school, to explain the work. In PNG everybody knows about earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis from personal experience, and I think it's important to explain how these things are related, and why geologists think their country is so exciting and interesting.

As well as talking about my work, the teachers and students had lots of other science questions for me! World Environment Day had just happened, so we talked a lot about climate change, sea-level, pollution and sustainability. As PNG develops, it's important that the people and future leaders are well informed on these topics.

Here are some images of the trip:

The pupils of Amboin Primary School and their teacher, beside my GPS antenna. Amboin is a small village in the Sepik River region, very hot and humid.

Talking to about 300 pupils at the United Primary School in Mt Hagen. Mt Hagen is PNG's third largest city in the Highlands region, about 1700 m above sea-level, and has a very comfortable climate for me.

St Xavier's High School is on Kairuru Islands, near the town of Wewak on the north coast of PNG.

Explaining plate tectonics at St Xavier's High School. The rocks in the school grounds are 'pillow lavas', which formed at volcanoes on the bottom of the sea. This is how much of the Earth's crust is formed, but not many people have the chance to see it so easily as these students!

Bam is a small island off the north coast of PNG. It is the top of a volcano, sticking out from the sea. The island is about 3 km wide, and has one village. Here are some students of the primary school, with the island's leader, Greg Kibai.

The Sepik River

After working for a week close to the coast around Wewak, we moved further inland.

With my colleague Sylvester, from the University of Technology in Lae, we set up a station in Maprik, an agricultural town in the foothills of the coastal ranges, on the edge of the Sepik plain. Important crops here are vanilla and cocoa, but the markets are not very good: a few years ago when the crops in Madagascar were failing, vanilla was bought here for 850 Kina per kilogram, and the town grew rich (one PNG Kina is currently about 40 Australian cents). Now it’s down below 5 Kina, and many plantations are being neglected.

I wanted to get to Ambunti, on the Sepik River, which has no road access. I had planned to get a small plane, operated by the Mission Aviation Fellowship, who support hundreds of small villages in PNG that have a grass airstrip and no other access apart from several days walk on a jungle track. But MAF were having their annual pilots’ meeting last week, so I left Sylvester in Maprik, and took a PMV truck down the dusty road to Pagwi, on the bank of the Sepik River. There I found a motor canoe going the 50 km upstream to Ambunti, and joined a few other people going the same way.

The motor canoe is a dugout canoe, made from a single tree trunk, like traditional river canoes here. But unlike those, which are double-ended, it has a transom at the stern where an outboard motor if mounted. It’s about 10 m long, about 1 m wide at the stern and tapering forwards, and the hull A 30 hp motor took 12 passengers and cargo upstream at 20 km/h, so the journey took about 2.5 hours, and I arrived at dusk in Ambunti.

The Sepik is the largest river in PNG. After it leaves the mountains, it winds slowly more than 1100 km to the sea. It’s what earth scientists call a ‘meandering river’. It is so ‘flat’ that gravity doesn’t pull it straight downhill. Instead it winds from side to side in large bends, which grow wider and wider until they are cut off, leaving the old channel as a ‘ox-bow’ lake on the plain beside the river. There are more than 1000 of these lakes alongside the river’s path.

There is very little development along the whole of the Sepik Rver. There is no mining or forestry activity and there are no major towns, so the river and the catchment are still in their natural condition.

After setting up my GPS equipment in Ambunti, I had time for a look around. At the top of the nearest hill, I visited a new telecommunications tower. It would be almost impossible to lay telephone cables through the jungle and swamp, so radio towers are the best solution. In a town with no road access and only a grass airstrip, fuel is expensive, so this transmitter is solar powered. My GPS gear uses one portable 35 watt panel to charge that batteries, so I was very impressed by 144 panels, each producing 75 watts!

At the end of my stay in Ambunti, MAF were flying again, and a single-engine Cessna 206 took me back to Wewak in 45 minutes, compared to the outward journey of about 5 hours in trucks and 2.5 hours in a canoe.

lukim yu,

dan

PNG - Land of the Unexpected

This is an official tourism slogan here, and it's perfect! The locals love it, and pull it out cheerfully and sarcastically at every opportunity.

We had a good drive today out to the west of Wewak, to a village called But. The road is rougher than I had expected, with several stream crossings and one big washout where the locals were busy with road works. We got there after a couple of hours - it's a lovely spot, with a beautiful beach and a Japanese WWII memorial. Our survey marker is on the lawn between the church and the police office, a safe location with good sky exposure for the GPS satellites.

Normally the village is tiny and quiet, but this week the beachfront is a mass of tents and shelters, with several hundred people in the village for the Momase Catholic Youth Forum. They've built a temporary stage, and a shelter about 30 x 30 m to give the audience shade... which is right on top of the mark, of course. There's really no practical way we could have checked this beforehand - the village has no phone, not even a short-wave radio.

The forum will be there until Sunday, so we've abandoned trying to measure it for the moment.

Tomorrow we'll go back to the east to recover the equipment from Angoram and Tring; it should be routine, but this is the land of the unexpected!

lukim yu,

Dan

A Day in a PMV

It's been a busy few days.

On Friday we installed one GPS receiver at Wewak airport, and arranged batteries and transport for the other sites.

The equipment here is quite similar to what we were installing in Antarctica: a GPS receiver and antenna, powered by batteries and a solar panel. But here the antenna is on a tripod, not bolted to the ground like in Antarctica, because it only has to stand a few days, and because we are measuring the horizontal movement of the earth, and not the vertical (it's hard to measure the height of a tripod accurately enough to measure vertical positions). And we don't need to transfer the data
by satellite here - we just download it from the receiver every day or two.

On Saturday we made a trip along the inland road east from Wewak about 120 km, to the town of Angoram, on the Sepik River. We installed two more sets of equipment on the way, in Angoram and the village of Tring, both on survey markers that have been measured several times in previous years. We leave the equipment in a small tent to shelter it from the Sun and rain, and ask the local people to take care of it until we come back again.

The sites are left to make measurements for four days, but today we went back to check them. When we don't have all the gear to carry (each site weighs about 80 kg in total), we don't need to have our own vehicle. I prefer to travel by PMV, or 'Private Motor Vehicle', which are the private transport services operating all over Papua New Guinea. They vary from small vans in the towns, to trucks in the countryside, and 4WD vehicles for the mountain areas with rough roads and river crossings. It's a good way to travel and talk with the local people, and see where they are going and what they're doing.

Today our PMV had bad luck, with several flat tyres to be changed and fixed along the way, but we checked both sites, which were operating normally. Due to the travel delays, we got back to Wewak after dark, but the apologetic driver dropped us at our door. And it was nice coming back through the hills at dusk - the road deserted compared to daytime, the smokey smell of cooking and the glow of small fires in the jungle across across the valley, at huts invisible in the darkness.

Better luck next time,

Dan

Landing Bluff

I'm extra happy this week - I've successfully finished all the planned field work. We had to wait a week for clear weather, but on Sunday afternoon we left Davis with two helicopters, heading for Landing Bluff, about 200 km to the southwest.

We needed two helicopters for safety - it's too far to quickly send help from Davis if something went wrong - but my equipment could easily fit into one, so there were a few extra seats. That meant we could take some passengers - three 'tradies' who've been working at Davis station all summer, and deserved a chance to see some more antarctic scenery.

Around Davis, the sea ice has been gone for several weeks, but further along the coast it is more protected in sheltered bays and among the islands and floating glaciers.

The work was fairly simple, and went as planned: changing batteries and checking the instruments at another GPS installation. Landing Bluff is a small but beautiful hill, with a lovely view.

In the picture you can see the frozen sea below and the glaciers in the distance. The equipment is right on top of the hill, and at the right is one of the 'Squirrel' helicopters. There's a Russian summer base nearby, and you can also see where they've left messages written on the ground with small white stones.

Flying back to Davis the weather was cloudy over the coast, but clear out over the sea to the west. The sun was shining on the calm water studded with icebergs, and virga from the dark clouds over us was silhouetted against the light background.

In three weeks, the 'Aurora Australis' will return to Davis to take us back to Hobart. I have a few jobs to do before then: organise and process some GPS data, pack and consign my cargo, and help out around the station wherever I can. I also hope to get out for a bit of recreational walking in the Vestfold Hills.

I'll have plenty of access to the internet while I'm on station, so if you have questions about the blog, now is the time to ask! To ask a question, just click the "comments" link below.

Back at base,

Dan

The Tent

For me, one of the most important symbols of Antarctica is the "Polar Pyramid" tent. The design has hardly changed in 100 years - a double skin for warmth, a strong pyramid shape with a pole at each corner, and a circular tube door that can be tied shut. They are proven as strong, safe and reasonably comfortable in the worst conditions, and are used by almost every country conducting research expeditions in Antarctica.

I just added up all the days I've spent in these tents over the years, and it comes to 36 weeks in total! So I feel right at home when I crawl inside and get into my sleeping bag.

The reason it's such a powerful symbol to me, is that the tent allows people to enter this enormous wilderness and survive. Smaller than a station or a hut, it provides only the minimum necessary shelter and comfort, and has no impact on the landscape.

Inside a tent, you still feel the cold, and hear the sounds of Antarctica. Its small size highlights the contrast between the vast inhospitable environment and the tiny human presence.

Imagine a flight from Davis Station to our most recent campsite, in the Grove Mountains: after taking off from the ice runway, you fly south towards a flat white horizon, leaving behind the coast, liquid water, and the life in the sea and the heated buildings.

For two hours you pass over nothing but ice and snow, blown into drifts that show the prevailing wind direction, but otherwise featureless and untracked.

Finally the mountains appear over the horizon, specks of black between the white disc below and the blue dome of the sky.

When you reach the mountains, it's a fairytale landscape: smooth rock faces hundreds of metres high, ice-carved spires forcing the glaciers to divert around them. And even though the Sun is shining, it's -15°C and the continuous wind that blows across the ice is funnelling between the mountains and blowing clouds of drifting snow 20 m into the air. You see nothing living.

But there, on a sheltered patch of snow beside one of the smaller mountains, there is a tent: a small angular speck, cheerful red and yellow in this world of white ice, blue sky and dark rock. And inside is a spark of life: two people in sleeping bags, warmth, food and friendship. The contrast is awe-inspiring - we can live and work here, but we are aliens here just as much as we are on the Moon.

A quick word about our trip to the Grove Mountains: after a delay at Davis due to bad weather, the planned trip was reduced to two people, Alex and me, leaving behind Nick and two other who were hoping to join us to help with the work and enjoy the spectacular mountains. A pity they couldn't all come, but we always have to adapt to the weather...

We had a couple of days hard work; Alex maintaining a GPS site, and I removing a seismic installation, both of which were last visited two years ago.

It's a spectacular place to work, surrounded by a magical landscape of steep mountains and ice, but it was also the coldest and windiest place we've been this summer, and I used my warm down jacket and thicker 'winter' sleeping bag for the first time.

After working late nights to get the jobs finished, the weather got worse and we had to wait another day before the CASA could fly from Davis to bring us home. We used it catch up on our sleep - Alex went out once to check his GPS site, but I actually stayed in my sleeping bag for 36 hours!

Alex is also writing a blog about his time in Antarctica, which includes some nice pictures of the Grove Mountains.

Goodnight from back at Davis,

The biggest glacier in the world!

Once again, we're back at Davis after some days 'in the field'.

Technically, I would be able to write an entry for the blog while we are out there, but it would be complicated: my laptop doesn't work very well in the cold, so I have to get it warm in my sleeping bag, and connect it to a bigger battery. Then I have to use a satellite telephone to send the email; the connection is too slow to send pictures, and sometimes drops out suddenly. And we're usually pretty tired - working outdoors all day and living in tents takes a lot of time and energy.

So really, it's just easier to wait 'til I get back to base, where I can use a computer in comfort, indoors, and have a good internet connection. Sometimes I have used email to communicate with my colleagues in Australia while in the field, but mostly we talk on the satellite telephone, or use it to send SMS messages.

It's hard to describe how big Antarctica is, and how empty: the place we were working last week is about 750 km from Davis, that's about the same as from Melbourne to Newcastle, in Australia!

You can download a map of this area from the AAD (pdf, 3.6 MB). Davis is at the top right of the map, and we were at Wilson Bluff, almost the furthest south bit of rock in this region, at 74.3 S, 66.8 E.

There were three of us on this trip: Nick and I were joined by Alex, who works with Nick at Geoscience Australia. They were going to Wilson Bluff to do maintenance on another GPS station, and I had a new job: to service a seismic station installed there several years ago by Anya, a colleague at the ANU. Her instrument has a sensor in the ground recording earthquakes from all over the world, which she uses to study the rocks underneath Antarctica.

It's always exciting to arrive at an instrument site: to see whether it's still working, and what effect the storms of the previous winters have had.

At Wilson Bluff, we got a nasty surprise: both sites were crippled. Their solar panels had been blown over, a wind generator had broken off its mast, cables were snapped and instrument cases filled with ice.

Oh dear... we had a couple of days hard work to repair everything, and when we left, both sites were working again, and made stronger than before. We hope they will survive the next winter!

Clearly, the weather can be pretty bad at Wilson Bluff, but we were lucky: one day with a bit of wind and snow, but mostly fine and sunny. Quite comfortable for living in tents, even though the temperature was 5 to 10 degrees below freezing. And we had time to go for a couple of walks in the evening, to enjoy this magnificent place. It's beautiful, but harsh and barren: we didn't see any plants or animals while we were there, just one tiny square centimetre of lichen.

After three days at Wilson Bluff, a CASA plane came and took us about 100 km to another site, called Dalton Corner.

A funny name for a mountain, but if you look on the map, you'll see that it's at the southern end of the Mawson Escarpment, a north-south chain of mountains about 100 km long. On their east side, the ice flows right up to the Mawson Escarpment, but on the west side, it's a spectacular long line of cliffs about 1000 m high.

At Dalton Corner, we have another GPS site, which we had to service. Here, the news was all good! We had lost contact with the instrument two years ago, so we didn't know if it was working or not, but when we arrived it was running exactly as it should be. I checked the data it had stored, and found that it had worked beautifully, turned itself off in the winter to save power, and on again in the spring when the sun returned, for the last two years, without anybody checking it!

Fantastic - it's a very nice feeling when equipment works correctly! So it wasn't much work to collect the data, upgrade some of the instruments, and replace the batteries with new ones.

After finishing our work here, a CASA came to give us the most marvellous ride home, northwards along the Mawson Escarpment, above the Lambert Glacier. This is the largest glacier in the world, about 80 km wide and 500 km long, an enormous river of ice, slowly draining 35 cubic km of the Antarctic ice sheet into the sea every year.

When you fly over it, it doesn't seem to be something that can move, but it creeps along at one or two metres per day, and where it turns corners or stretches over buried mountains the surface breaks into vast crevasse fields, gaping chasms big enough to drop a house into. Some areas are smooth snow; others are covered by streams of meltwater. It's all beautiful.

We had one more job to do before going back to base: the CASA stopped to refuel at Beaver Lake, and Alex, Nick and I raced up a hill to another GPS site, about 4.5 km away. At this one, we only had to remove all the instruments - it's not going to be used for another couple of years.

Three hours later we were back at the plane, pretty tired from a hard fast walk! Then a couple more hours flight, along the coast in gorgeous low evening sunlight.

Happy Australia Day,

Dan

Enderby Land

I spent the last few days far from here; camping at Mt Riiser-Larsen, in Enderby Land, about 1000 km west of Davis.

We flew there in the CASA planes; after leaving Davis we headed across the sea. It was wonderful to look down on the patterns of ice in the water, made by winds and currents.

After two and a half hours of flying, we arrived at another Australian base, Mawson, to refuel and pick up a couple of passengers. It's a beautiful place: the station is built on a rock perched between the ice sheet and the sea, and the plane landed near the Framnes Mountains, jagged ridges of rock poking through the ice.

From there, we flew west for two more hours, over hundreds of kilometres of smooth ice sheet, enormous glaciers flowing into the frozen sea, barren islands of rock surrounded by ice or ocean, and sharp mountain ranges extending to the horizon. Antarctica is wild and beautiful almost everywhere you look at it, but from an aeroplane you can appreciate how enormous and bleak it is...magnificent!

We landed on a frozen lake, unloaded our equipment, and looked for a place to camp. One of the CASA's stayed with us, while the other flew further along the coast to the Japanese station, Syowa, where one of our colleagues had some work to do. We used a sled to carry our tents and food to the shore of the lake, while the pilots, Dan (not me!) and Troy, tied the plane to the ice, in case there was a storm while we were there. We also had an AAD field officer with us, Mick from Mawson.

We put up our tents on the snow not far from the plane, with a great view of Mt Riiser-Larsen on the other side of the lake, and made a place among the rocks to use as a kitchen - usually it's not too cold to eat outside, and the view is much nicer than inside a tent!

Like at the Bunger Hills, our job here was to install a GPS receiver, to measure how the land of Antarctica is moving. Nick and I did that together over the next two days.

While we were working, the other guys did a couple of long walks, and came back in the evening to cook dinner.

Cooking can take a long time in Antarctica, when you have to melt you water from snow, and cook on a small camping stove, so having Mick, Dan and Troy to help us meant that Nick and I could work several more hours each day. It makes a big difference to how much we can do - thanks guys!

The GPS system has an antenna which is bolted to the rock, and protected by a plastic dome so it doesn't get covered in snow in the winter. Solar panels provide the electricity, and all the batteries and instruments are inside an insulated box, to keep warm. Every day, a computer in the box uses a satellite telephone to send the GPS data back to Australia. It was working perfectly when we left... I hope it stays that way for the next few years!

Yesterday, our work was finished and we flew all the way back to Davis, stopping again at Mawson to drop Mick back there and refuel the plane. Late yesterday evening we were back at base, heated up leftovers from dinner, and had a good shower! It seems like a very short trip, but we worked hard all the time, and did everything we planned to.

This summer's field work is going well!

Already preparing for the next field trip,

Dan