Heavy winds pour across the ice sheet, engulfing the research station in a dense haze of wind-blown particles. In the observatory, an instrument fails--its bleak messages appear on my computer. Jason and Yuki volunteer to accompany me for the half-kilometer walk, and we strike out along the flag line, raising our faces into the wind to search for the outline of the building. We tinker with the instrument, to no avail, then beat our way back down the flag line. In an hour, with the conditions worsening, we call off work for the day, and stay within the main, adjacent buildings: our Green House berthing and the Big House kitchen.
We watch an afternoon movie, catch sleep, and clean up our bunkrooms. Around windows and doors, fine snow infiltrates through invisible gaps, sculpting feathers, tubes, and impressive snow piles inside the building itself. Each foray outside entails shoveling out the door frame and scraping the hinges with a putty knife, so that the door can be closed and latched again. The snow builds higher and higher, packed firm against the door, until stepping outside is more akin to climbing onto a table.
The Big House is elevated 15 feet above the surface, up a long, open set of stairs, and the whole structure is exposed to the full blast of the wind. The building creaks and sways in the gusts, like a gable-roofed ship, pitching on a broad, pale sea. We are eating dinner. Steak sandwiches, heavy on the onions, as that's the only vegetable that remains, and some sort of fried patty, resurrected from last night's instant potato mash. In the gusts, the flags hanging from the ceiling sway in delicate arcs, and our seats shift gently under our bodies. On the counter, a near-empty jar of pickled beets, now just deep purple blood, trembles with each gust.
After two days, the storm begins to abate, and conditions are merely windy. We find the back door of the Green House fully packed with snow: the door opens inward to reveal its perfect impression in a snowdrift. Guy uncovers the track loader, and moves volumes of snow away from the windows and entrances. And as the blowing snow begins to drop and the sun becomes visible, the fine ice crystals above us create spectacular optical phenomena: a brilliant sun halo at 22° and a weaker halo at 46°, iridescent sundogs to either side, a faint horizontal parhelic circle passing through the sun and its sundogs, an upper tangent arc bending upwards from the inner halo, and even the start of a circumzenith arc, its iridescent curve nearly overhead. It is quite a contrast from the deadened white environment of the past days.
Since February, we've been a crew of six. Tracking and assisting with each other's work, rotating evening meal duties, sharing free time, and handling ourselves self-reliantly. Though it's still bitter cold (–64° F last week), we see twilight at midnight, and summer is just around the corner. In the warmer working season, camp will transform completely. Our population will expand, as summer personnel arrive to repair facilities, handle cargo and operate equipment. Science groups will also arrive to maintain and upgrade their equipment, and to conduct research projects during the relatively short summer season. We'll have a series of LC-130 cargo planes flying in to deliver food, science equipment, mechanical parts and lots of humans. Thankfully, the aircraft will also disappear with our big shipping palettes of trash and broken machinery. The first wave of incoming crew--a medic, a cook, an extra camp hand, a group of carpenters--will fly in on a retrofitted DC-3. That flight was scheduled to land on our ice runway as early as yesterday, but with yet-stronger wind in the forecast we're not expecting them for a few days.
