Welcome to the Icefin Field Season 2019-2020!  We’ve got an ambitious season ahead, involving two related Icefin projects: a continuation of the work from last season for B-041-NASA funded RISE UP project (PI Schmidt) in collaboration with Antarctica New Zealand’s Ross Ice Shelf Programme & Antarctic Ice Dynamics programs (Pis Hulbe & Horgan), and C-444 International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration Thwaites-Melt project (ITGC MELT, PIs Nicholls & Holland), funded through a collaboration between the UK NERC and the US NSF.  We’re thrilled to be down here with two Icefin vehicles this year, prepping for dual grounding zone deployments in the December-January time frame at Kamb Ice Stream (B041) and Thwaites Glacier (C444).  We’ll be updating you regularly on our progress from the field, at least as long as our access to emails allows!

Week 1 & 2: Oct 10 – Oct 27 2019

After much travelling and a few delays, the Icefin team is almost completely reunited down in McMurdo! Our first scouting team
composed of Ben Hurwitz, Andy Mullen, and Enrica Quartini arrived in McMurdo on Thursday 10/10, followed by Dan Dichek, Justin Lawrence, Britney Schmidt, and Peter Washam on 10/12, and finally Anthony Spears, following a rare boomerang flight on 10/20.

The first week was busy with training, team planning meetings, and sorting out equipment, including receiving a sleek new set of sturdy,
custom-made wooden boxes that were built for us by the Carp Shop over the winter to carry ICE03 modules to the sea ice — they’ll make a great second set next to the ICE02 ones! Our allocated Pisten Bully has been loaded with survival bags and drilling and rigging equipment and we also staged equipment on our sleds and more
equipment at the ice transition, ready to go. As of early last week, FS&T finished flagging a safe sea ice route to our main operations site (see Fig. 2) for the early season and the Fish Hut (our base of operations out on the ice — basically a rectangular wooden trailer-sized structure on skis with a hole in the bottom to access the ice and ocean — is out at the site and will be set with its dive hole tomorrow. We should have great pictures from that!

We’ve had some challenges with cargo. However, the Science Cargo team worked hard to address those, and luckily ICE03 traveled with the team (we continue to support Delta with our checked bag fees —33 this year!) on 10/10 and has since been successfully brought up and tested. We’ve completed a hybrid approach to ballasting the vehicle in the Crary lab test tank since we didn’t yet have our launch and recovery system (Fig. 4). Basically, Icefin is too long to fit in the 10’ tank here in the Crary lab. So, we created “stump-fin” by using a thruster module from ICE02 (which is shorter than the main electronics) and then added weight to it to match the displacement in water of the electronics.

This allowed us to do some first-order trimming of the vehicle prior to any dives to reduce the amount of work needed to get it floating properly. And sure enough, post-tank ballasting the vehicle trim was dead on and we were able to easily tweak it during our first dive and the Dive Jetty on Thursday (Fig. 5). The team worked extremely well and we were able to safely operate ICE03, conduct a series of engineering tests, and even get some footage of a fun encounter with a jelly fish along the way (Fig. 7)!

So really things are ramping up quickly and we are on a good and fast trajectory to becoming operational! The rest of our cargo arrived last week in time for the ANZ traverse to the Kamb Ice Stream camp. We’ve had meetings and contact with all of the work centers here at MCM that help our group: Mechanical Equipment Center (MEC), Field Safety & Training (FST), Berg Field Center (BFC, or basically the REI of MCM), Science Cargo, Fixed Wing (aircraft that will be flying us out to the field), and of course the Crary lab who always do such a great job helping out the science crew. We’ve had our first CTD cast and sampling run as well, so science is up and going!

Some other fun things have been going on as well. We played together as a trivia team last week (we didn’t win…go figure that a bunch of robot aficionados wouldn’t do all that well on the pop culture segments). We’ve attended science lectures on Seals and Penguins and Sea Spiders. Andy gave a fantastic science lecture to a full audience last Wednesday called “Adventures with Underwater Microscopes from the Tropics to the Poles.” Peter will be giving one this week on his Greenland work. Later in the season, we’ll give the main Sunday science lecture. We were honored to be picked as the featured science group in the station meeting last week, presented to the contractors and work centers by Dr. Karla Heidelberg, the main NSF representative on station.

Last Monday night, the team enjoyed participating in a conference call with the International Space Station. Almost everyone on station gathered in the Galley to have a chance to see the Earth from space in real time as astronaut Dr. Jessica Meir, a former student with the penguin biology group B-197 here on station, gave us a tour of the ISS and shared some of the views from the ISS glass dome. This week, we’re looking forward to getting ICE02 in the water and starting science operations!

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This year the field team for Icefin consists of:
Britney Schmidt, Matt Meister, Dan Dichek, Anthony Spears, Justin Lawrence, Ben Hurwitz, Andy Mullen, Peter Washam, and Enrica Quartini.

RISE UP: https://live-schmidt-astro-cornell.pantheonsite.io/project-rise-up/
MELT: https://live-schmidt-astro-cornell.pantheonsite.io/thwaites-melt/
ITGC: https://thwaitesglacier.org
RISP: https://www.instagram.com/the_ross_ice_shelf_programme/

For more updates, pictures, and videos, find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @icefinrobot

When I flew to the Ice in ’17, we flew to 3791 km in the classic style: a military C-17, flown by the New York Air National Guard EDIT: US Air Force (The NY-ANG flies the LC-130s), loaded to the gills with people and gear from Christchurch (CHC) in about five hours. These are the early-season workhorses of the CHC-MCM (McMurdo) flight, shuttling over the Southern Ocean multiple times a week for three months. The best part about the flight was when the pilots let people come up in twos to the cockpit and look out over the ice. It was, in a word, incredible, especially since the only other windows were a few small portholes.

It was tragic when, a few days later, I went looking in my phone for them photos only to discover they were complete missing, never to be found.

This time, the trip was more complicated. With two projects (the familiar B-041 from the past two years, and a new C-444 for the Thwaites project) with two funding sources (NASA and NSF, respectively), and a wedding (congrats to Matt and Amy!), we ended up with a number of different flights into Christchurch. Some of us got a few hours in Melbourne to kill, in which we sampled the fabulous coffee culture and the pretty great street art.

Turns out, CHC also has some pretty mean street art.

Enrica (our new field manager), myself, and Andy were designated as the “Scouts”, acting as the advance team to settle in, setup labs, shake hands, and hunt down all our stuff, so we took the first flight, on the 9th.

And this flight, it turns out, was the once-a-season Boeing 757 trip.

Run by the Royal New Zealand Air Force, the flight is on a standard passenger jet, complete with beverage carts, real seats, and (*gasp*) windows! It’s not often you get an opportunity to watch your approach into MCM, coming in over the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, looking out over the ice floes and mountains, the Dry Valleys, and the finally seeing Mt. Erebus loom in the distance, flying by Arrival Heights and right off the station itself before looping wide and landing on the ice. It made the C-17 seem pedestrian, and was, in a word, incredible.

It was tragic when, a few days later, I went looking in my phone for them photos only to discover they were complete missing, never to be found.

Yes, for the second time, none of my photos came out. I got a window seat and everything! I’m still bitter, ten days later.

Ah well. I’m here, aren’t I? Safe and sound.

(Above gallery photos were all taken by Andy Mullen.)

In the last photo above, you can see:

• Hut Point (peninsula on the left),
• where the Ice Pier will go for the boat dock in February (bay of ice on the left)
• our dorms (four container-shaped buildings to the right of the bay of ice that are “stacked” like stairs),
• the galley (blue building the the middle),
• Crary labs (the weirdly-shaped building slightly forward and right of the blue building) (our lab is in the lowest and right-most part of Crary – hi!),
• Observation Hill [Ob Hill] (peak on the right),
• Scott base (the NZ base, right above/behind Ob Hill on the edge of the island),
• the windmills (towards the back on the right, look like three sticks)
• Happy Camper area (beyond the windmills, where we do our overnight trainings with USAP)
• Mt. Erebus (not shown, but off to the left)

It’s now been nearly two weeks on Ice for us, and much has been accomplished. There have been some shipping glitches, but these are getting resolved as we move into field mode here. The Thwaites vehicle (creatively named ICE03) was checked through the CHC from ATL on Delta (an advantage of Icefin is that it’s commercially fly-able anywhere in the world), and then flew on our Ice flight, so we got that up and running again in a few days upon arrival with only minor hiccups. Around this bring-up, we’ve been going through the requisite trainings and briefings that are standard upon arrival here, waiting for the go-ahead to get out on the sea ice.

Speaking of sea ice, it’s a very dynamic year in the McMurdo Sound. There were a few big winter storms (apparently it was an interesting winter) that blew out a lot of the young sea ice as it was forming, and there was less snow cover to protect the young ice. Due to these and other factors, the sea ice is quite thin this year – up until this week, it was only averaging around 110 cm (this past week was cold and clear, which allowed it to thicken to 130 cm). While it is thicker than a lot of Arctic sea ice and can hold up thousands of pounds without difficulty, it is still much thinner than usual – typically, the ice is 3-4 meters thick at this time! This makes it easier for us to deploy, since we have to drill through less, but it also means the sea ice season will be shorter, which makes the shipping concerns even more concerning.

To further increase the pressure, there were two delays to the flight schedule this season already, once in Winfly (the first post-winter passenger flight, taken in mid-August) due to weather, and then once this past week. The more recent one was especially unfortunate for us – the C-17’s windshield cracked during approach, causing it to boomerang (i.e. return to CHC) with both our software engineer, Anthony, and our other vehicle, ICE02, on board. These delays have also cascaded into short-staffing early on in many of the workcenters on base, meaning that, coupled with the unusual sea ice, the routes our to our site just got flagged on Monday, and our fishhut won’t get dragged on until mid-week.

But these are the sort of things that happen during an Antarctic field season. We didn’t expect these exact things to trouble us, but you can safely bet that very little will go according to plan. And that’s okay. We’re adaptable and resourceful, looking for ways to become more streamlined and efficient in the face of difficulties. This is was makes a good field team, and it’s what makes for a good season. Adversity isn’t something to fear; it should be embraced and dealt with summarily.

Though I won’t lie; it’s been an interesting start to what’s sure to a busy and challenging field season.