Pressure Ridges, Helium Transfers

Yesterday evening Juan, Laura, Lorenzo, Tristan, and I took a tour of the pressure ridges down by Scott Base. This is where the sea ice collides with the permanent ice shelf and forms mini ice mountains. It’s a pretty impressive sight, even from afar as we drive past it on the way to LDB. I was excited to see it up close. There were also a group of seals (with pups!) sunning themselves outside the ridges.

Back at work, the big news was that our full allotment of liquid helium arrived, which meant we could start to fully cool the detectors. Matt, Mark, Elio, and Nick heroically very stayed late to finish the transfers (Elio was especially heroic, coming in at the normal time this morning). Otherwise, Juan finished mylarizing his scoop, Lorenzo opened up the star cameras, calibration devices were being set up, and code continued to be coded.

Update: added a few pictures of me, lifted from Tristan’s flickr stream. They are labeled in the manner he uses (ie none at all).

2 comments to Pressure Ridges, Helium Transfers

  • Douglas Matthews

    Why are most of the flags green while the one by the nursing pup is red?

  • Steve Benton

    As far as I can tell, red and green flags have the same meaning: “It’s okay to walk/drive/be here”. For most of the tour, the flags alternated, so I bet they were put in that way, but the pattern was lost during maintenance.

    There are other flags with different meanings: Black (DANGER!), Blue (Fuel Pipeline), Yellow (You can pee here). So, I’m going to go with Matt’s theory that whoever developed the flag code was red-green colour blind.

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